Postgraduate study

The strength and breadth of the Department's research in English Literature were recognised in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise which judged it to be of international standing, in terms of its originality, significance and rigour, with 60% considered to be either 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent'; the research environment was rated as 'world-leading.' As a teaching department we were rated 'Excellent' in the latest HEFCE Teaching Quality Assessment and are the highest rated department overall, in the Times Good University Guide.

Taught degrees

We offer a Taught MA in English Literary Studies with a wide variety of modules, which can be moulded to fit various 'formal pathways'. We also contribute to interdisciplinary MA programmes taught by specialists at the Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Centre for 17th-Century Studies. 

Research

We provide a stimulating and supportive environment in which to undertake research. Our strong tradition of postgraduate study gives students the opportunity to work successfully towards an MA, MLitt or PhD under the supervision of academics who are experts in the following areas:

Medieval Literature, especially:

Drama, Old Norse, romance, Chaucer, Malory, History of Ideas, Gender 

Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Literature:

Sidney, the early-modern novel, the reception of classical texts, English Catholic writing

Eighteenth-Century Literature:

Women's writing and constructions of femininity, eighteenth-century fiction, sensibility, Frances Burney

Romantic Literature:

William Blake, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron, Walter Scott, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, women’s writing, romantic aesthetics, romantic dialogues and legacies

Victorian Literature:

Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, John Ruskin, George Gissing, H. G. Wells; writers and public speaking, fin-de-siècle writing, Victorian Gothic, screen adaptions and Victorian afterlives

Modern Literature:

W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, 1930s poetry, Edith Wharton, Samuel Beckett, Modernism, Thomas Pynchon, contemporary fiction and poetry

Literary Theory:

Postmodernism, deconstruction, ecocriticism, theories of authorship, literary aesthetics, gender, psychoanalysis, representations of the self, body and consciousness

We are also happy to supervise research in the following areas: American Literature, Irish Literature, Australian literature; history of the book and bibliography, genre studies, children’s literature; history of Ideas, literature and religion, literature and science, literature and medicine, literature and philosophy, literature and terrorism, utopian studies; reception, literary legacies, adaptations; comparative literature .

The Department has research links with scholars in several countries, including Australia, France, Japan, Poland, the Czech Republic, Canada and the United States. We also participate in the activities of interdisciplinary research centres within Durham University, such as the Centre for 17th-Century Studies, the Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre.