PhD projects and research successes
Read the example PhD thesis titles below to get an idea of the type of subjects our previous students have researched. Our alumni have successfully achieved research degrees in these areas, under the expert guidance of our lecturers and professors
Art History
- 2020
Bartlett, George (2020) What's in a name? Images of Christ inscribed with epithets in middle and late Byzantine art.
Richards, Beth Louise (2020) The East India Company’s engagement with Indian dress in England, c.1720-1800.
- 2019
Ari, Ahmet (2019) The biography and multivalence of sacred silver objects in the sixth-century Sion treasure.
Tilles, Rebecca (2019) George and Florence Blumenthal: a collecting partnership in The Gilded Cage, 1858-1941.
- 2018
-
Doubt, Emma (2018) Portraiture, material culture and photography in the Cherokee Nation's "first family", 1843-1907.
Heath, Elizabeth (2018) Sir George Scharf and the early National Portrait Gallery: reconstructing an intellectual and professional artistic world, 1857–1895.
Streeter, Penelope (2018) Symbolic jewels: the military sweetheart brooch in wartime Britain.
-
- 2017
-
Gong, Joshua (2017) The problematic origin of contemporary Chinese art: the New Concrete Image in the ’85 New Wave.
Hanna, Engy Eshak Yousef (2017) Women in Late Antique Egypt through Coptic artefacts: a social-context, art historical study of women’s representations in Late Antiquity.
Hydes, Carol Ann (2017) Italian mosaic art 1270 – 1529.
Robinson, Michele Nicole (2017) The material culture of children and childhood in Bologna, 1550-1600.
Twomey, Samantha Jane (2017) Decorative wrought iron in England, Wales and Scotland from 1660 to 1720: the Continental influences.
-
- 2016
Churchill, Neil (2016) Depictions of power in the imperial art of the early Macedonian Emperors: Basil I, Leo VI and Alexander.
Compton, Alice (2016) Waste of a nation: photography, abjection and crisis in Thatcher’s Britain.
Singhalampong, Eksuda (2016) From commissions to commemoration: the re-creation of King Chulalongkorn and his court, and the Thai monarchy through westernised art and Western art collection.
Stutchbury, Anne (2016) ‘At home’ in Standen: a study of the Beale family’s lived experience of their late-nineteenth century Arts and Crafts home, 1890-1914.
American Studies
- 2020
Joscelyne, Sophie (2020) American intellectuals and the concept of totalitarianism, 1960–2009.
- 2018
Dent, Russell John (2018) Emily Dickinson’s sexual persona.
Jalal Kamali, Sima (2018) The caged bird sings on: the political voice of Maya Angelou's autobiographical oeuvre.
Sarker, Md Masud (2018) US foreign policy toward India after 9/11.
- 2017
Page, Alexander Robert (2017) Resurrecting the democracy: the Democratic party during the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860–1884.
- 2016
Carin Peller-Semmens (2016), Unreconstructed: slavery and emancipation on Louisiana's Red River, 1820-1880.
Christophe Landry (2016), A Creole melting pot: the politics of language, race and identity in southwest Louisiana, 1918-45.Darryl Barthe (2016), Becoming American in Creole New Orleans: family, community, labor and schooling, 1896-1949.
English Language and Linguistics
- 2021
-
Sandow, Rhys (2021) Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis: variation, change, and social meaning.
Shaalan, Danya (2021) The association of second language learning motivation and target-like article production in English-major female Saudi students: a sociolinguistic approach.
Yagudaeva, Margarita (2021) Semantic stability within English idiomatic expressions.
-
- 2020
Khairuddin, Zurina (2020) Malaysian students’ negotiation of identity through spoken academic discourse.
- 2019
- 2018
MacDonald, Jonathan Robert (2018) Discourse features in deontic verb phrases as an indicator of Omani attitude towards academic authority.
Panhwar, Farida Yasmin Ali Nawaz (2018) Multilingualism in Sindh, Pakistan: the functions of code-switching used by educated, multilingual Sindhi women and the factors driving its use.
Taheri, Saeedeh (2018) Cognitive stylistics approach to cinematic characterization.
- 2017
-
Alessandrini Szorenyi, Caterina (2017) Critical analysis of the concept of art in contemporary art texts.
Aloufi, Aliaa (2017) The phonology of English loanwords in UHA.
-
- 2016
AlHedayani, Rukayah (2016) Antonymy in Modern Standard Arabic.
Kyriakou, Marianna (2016) Language attitudes and ethnic identity in a diglossic setting: the case of Greek-Cypriot students.
Reynolds, Alexandra (2016) English as a medium of academic identity: attitudes to using English for research and teaching at Nantes University.
English literature and creative writing
- 2021
- 2020
-
Abdelghany, Rehab Hosny Mohammed (2020) Negotiating mythic realism in selected New Zealand Māori and Nigerian novels.
Alobudi, Majed (2020) Evading orientalism? Re-evaluating Edward Said’s postcolonial theoretical positions and discourses.
Barratt, Harriet Beatrix (2020) Objects of illness: Winnicott, materiality, and the patient experience.
Chin, Gabriel Patrick Wei-Hao (2020) Feeling-things: an ethics of object-oriented ontology in the magic realism of Murakami Haruki and Don DeLillo.
Gurowich, Tim Cahill (2020) Reading incompletion: the fiction of David Foster Wallace.
Lecznar, Matthew Justin (2020) Biafran mediations: artistic legacies of the Nigeria-Biafra war.
Robinson, Eleanor (2020) Keeping in touch: photography and the supernatural 1839 – 1933.
Turner, Emily Jessica (2020) Patients’ creative work and ‘expressive possibilities’¹ in New moon, under the dome, and The Hydra, 1844-1918.
Wright, Natalie Francesca (2020) Pragmatic criticism: women and femininity in the inauguration of academic English studies in the U.K., 1900-1950
Beecroft, Julian Colin (2020) Isle of Dogs: Brexit, its causes and conditions: a creative and critical thesis.
Read, Matthew (2020) Trickster writer’s writing tricksters / Succeeding William.
-
- 2019
-
Bamford-Blake, Tom (2019) Base transgressions: legacies of Georges Bataille in queer and feminist experimental writing.
Careless, Eleanor Rose (2019) Serve your own sentences: incarceration in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn.
Edens, Leah (2019) A study of the deployment of the pastoral in amatory, utopian, and gothic fiction by three Eighteenth-Century female pastoralists: Eliza Haywood, Sarah Scott, and Ann Radcliffe.
Heffer, Byron (2019) Making modernism's monsters: atavistic bodies and the politics of declining life.
Kowalczyk, Tomasz David (2019) Edward Barton and Anglo-Ottoman relations, 1588-98.
Mennell, Nicole (2019) Shakespeare’s sovereign beasts: human-animal relations and political discourse in early modern drama.
Upton, Joe (2019) “A transitory step to someplace else”: the literature of first generation migrants from China to America
Buckell, Juliet (2019) Variations: transgender memoir, theory and fiction.
Raha, Natalia (2019) Queer capital: Marxism in queer theory and post-1950 poetics.
Vincent, Hannah (2019) Weaning as a creative and critical reading.
-
- 2018
-
Da Cunha Lewin, Katherine (2018) The reconnoiter inward: interiority and spatial aesthetics in the novels of Don DeLillo and J. M. Coetzee.
Danaher, Katie (2018) Mapping and re-mapping the city: representations of London in black British women’s writing.
Green, Alanna Lee (2018) Thomas MacGreevy: poetry, art, and nation.
Harper, Lana Marie (2018) The development of early English playhouses, 1560-1670.
Harris, Katharine (2018) The neo-historical aesthetic: mediations of historical narrative in post-postmodern fiction.
Kaushik, Ratika (2018) Homing diaspora/diasporizing home: locating South Asian diasporic literature and film. PhD in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures
Kruger, Katherine (2018) Child’s play, toys and pure games: revising the romantic child in Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and Don DeLillo.
Oliver, Jessica Eve (2018) ‘The raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the moratorium…’: digital interventions in twenty-first-century private and public lives.
Olsen, Chelsea (2018) Networking subversion: a feminist analysis of the modernist salon.
Rashid, Muhammad (2018) Philip Larkin and secularisation. PhD in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures
Terrell, Charlotte (2018) Critical enchantments: reading fictionality in the contemporary novel.
Warren, Treena Kay (2018) Negative traits: the uncanny, bizarre and horrific in nineteenth century photographs.
-
Bostock, Camilla (2018) Between letters : D.H. Lawrence, the nonhuman and the ‘life of writing’.
-
-
- 2017
-
Altman, Shanyn (2017) John Donne and martyrdom.
Baaqeel, Nuha (2017) The kaleidoscope of gendered memory in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Chaos of the senses and Memory in the flesh.
Carrick, Rosy Patience (2017) Vladimir Mayakovsky: the language of revolution. PhD in Critical Theory
Davies, Paul Fisher (2017) Making meanings with comics : a functional approach to graphic narrative. PhD in Literature, Film and Visual Culture
Gill, Laura Fox (2017) Peripheral vision: the Miltonic in Victorian painting, poetry, and prose, 1825–1901. PhD in Literature and Culture 1700-1900
Goddard, Louis (2017) J.H. Prynne in context, 1955–1975.
Haines, Katherine Jane (2017) Literary networks and the making of 21st century African literature in English: Kwani Trust, Farafina, Cassava Republic Press and the production of cultural memory. PhD in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures
Kazzazi, Seyedeh Anahit (2017) Performing science: new physics and contemporary British and American science plays.
Keeling, Charles Paul (2017) Cuvier in context: literature and science in the long nineteenth century.
Layzelle, Luke George (2017) Topologies of abandon: locating life in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. PhD in Literature and Philosophy
Mussi, Francesca (2017) Literary responses to the South African TRC: renegotiating ‘truth’, ‘trauma’ and ‘reconciliation’.
Reid, Katie (2017) Restless collection: Ivan Vladislavić and South African literary culture. PhD in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures
Rowland, Michael Anthony (2017) Shame and masculinity in the eighteenth century: politeness, creativity, affect.
Scanlan, Emma (2017) Ominous metaphors: the political poetics of native Hawaiian identity.
Shaw, Justine Avril (2017) 'The perfect hostess, he called her': reading phenomenology in modernist literature.
Ward, Kiron (2017) Fictional encyclopaedism in James Joyce, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Roberto Bolaño: towards a theory of literary totality.
Zia, Mariam (2017) Religious orientations, storytelling and the uncanny: a reading of The Adventures of Amir Hamza. PhD in Critical Theory
Georges, Richard William Ethan (2017) Charting the sea in Caribbean poetry: Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Dionne Brand, Alphaeus Norman, Verna Penn Moll, and Richard Georges.
-
- 2016
-
Greenshields, Jenny (2016) Nancy Cunard: collector, cosmopolitan. PhD in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures
Greenshields, Will (2016) Lacan: the topological turn.
Houlton, Thomas (2016) Using monuments.
Johnston, Patrick James (2016) Working with comics: labour, neoliberalism and alternative cartooning.
Kirk, Maria (2016) Performing consumption and consuming performance: a 17th century play collection. PhD in Early Modern Literature and Culture
Mehta, Divya (2016) Expressive states: the gendered nation as literary text and narrative. PhD in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures
Perysinakis, Reem Maria (2016) Shifting targets in Reformation allegory: five case studies, 1515-1575.
Rowlinson, Zachary James (2016) Dismantling the face in Thomas Pynchon’s fiction.
Sakoda, Maho (2016) George Eliot and Pre-Raphaelitism: literature, painting, sculpture and photography.
Shochat Bagon, Robin (2016) The vertigo of the beast: thinking animals in literature. PhD in Critical Theory
Smith, Warwick (2016) War and space in English fiction, 1940-1950.
St George, Philippa (2016) Heat and lust: desire and intimacy across the (post)colonial divide.
Uematsu, Nozomi (2016) Monstrous happiness: a comparative study of maternal and familial happiness in neoliberalism in Japanese and British women's writing in the 1980s. PhD in Sexual Dissidence
-
White, Kristian (2016) Undoing 'you': blindness and second sight in the second-person novel.
Wynter-Vincent, Naomi (2016) In the penumbra of Wilfred Bion: possibilities for literary criticism.
-
-
Film Studies
- 2021
Padilla Díaz, Elisa (2021) Bodies, taste and pleasures: the cinema of John Waters.
Trimmel, Theresa (2021) “Is this what feminism looks like?”: feminism, female authorship and the representation of women in contemporary US television.
- 2018
Smith, Adrian John (2018) The distribution and exploitation of popular European film in British cinemas, 1960 – 1975.
- 2016
Verano, Frank (2016) D.A. Pennebaker and the politics and aesthetics of mature-period direct cinema.
Withers, Emma Jane (2016) Virtual corporeality: narrative and spectacle in Hollywood VR cinema.
Media, Journalism and Cultural Studies
- 2021
-
Aliskan, Yilmaz (2021) Free and open hardware: a critical and thematic analysis of free and open hardware communities RepRap and Arduino.
Alkan, Nermin (2021) Turkish migrant women's everyday experiences of social media: the reproduction of gendered power relations within the conservative Muslim family.
-
- 2020
-
Harrison, Emma Elizabeth (2020) Activism, refusal, expertise: responses to digital ubiquity.
Zhou, Tianyang (2020) The politics of gay male media cultures in China.
-
- 2019
-
Braybrooke, Kaitlyn Marie (2019) Hacking the museum? Collections makerspaces and power in London cultural institutions
-
- 2018
-
Guida, Michael (2018) Birds, bombs, silence. Listening to nature during wartime and its aftermath in Britain, 1914-1945.
Nataraj, Paul G (2018) You sound like a broken record: a practice led interrogation of the ontological resonances of vinyl record culture.
Pelurson, Gaspard (2018) Queer quests: journeying through manifestations of queerness in video games.
Tavernor, Rachel M (2018) Communicating solidarity: the cultural politics and practices of humanitarian NGO campaigns.
-
- 2017
-
Alotaibi, Naif Mutlaq (2017) Online news: a study of ‘credibility’ in the context of the Saudi news media.
Beetar, Matthew David (2017) Transcontinental lives: intersections of homophobia and xenophobia in South Africa.
Cobb, Gemma Rose (2017) Critiquing the thin ideal in pro-anorexia online spaces. PhD in Gender Studies (Humanities)
Cutileiro Cerqueira Correia, Maria Leonor (2017) Learning from the campus: an ethnography on the convivial life of universities.
Hosseini, Mahrokhsadat (2017) Iranian women’s poetry from the Constitutional Revolution to the post-Revolution. PhD in Gender Studies (Humanities)
Plowman, Nicola Streeten (2017) A cultural history of feminist cartoons and comics in Britain from 1970 to 2010. PhD in Gender Studies (Humanities)
Schäfer, Corinna (2017) The German colonial settler press in Africa, 1898-1916: a web of identities, spaces and infrastructure.
Westling, Carina E I (2017) The making of postdigital experiential space: Punchdrunk Company 2011-2014.
-
- 2016
-
Chae, Suk Jin (2016) Negotiating precarious lives: young women, work, and ICTs in neoliberal South Korea.
D'Aiello, Alan (2016) Communicating in the local: digital communications technology use in Brighton's gay pub scene.
Foster, Ludovic (2016) Narratives of tomboy identity in fiction and film: exploring a hidden history. PhD in Gender Studies (Humanities)
Glasson, Russell (2016) The impact of digital technologies on reading, readers and the book.
Han, Ae Jin (2016) The aesthetics of cuteness in Korean pop music.
Johnston, Sarah (2016) ‘Won’t somebody think of the children?’ The discursive construction of ‘childhood’: marketing, expert knowledge and children’s talk.
Kant, Tanya (2016) Making it personal: web users and algorithmic personalisation.
Kawasaka, Kazuyoshi (2016) Between nationalisation and globalisation: male same-sex politics in post-war Japan. PhD in Gender Studies (Humanities)
Tang, Hai (2016) The politics of blogging in China.
Tsegah, Marian (2016) Making a difference: a study of the 'social marketing' campaign in awareness creation of gender based violence in Ghana. PhD in Gender Studies (Humanities)
-
Media Production and Filmmaking
- 2021
Amandi, Behnoosh (2021) British-Iranians at home in the UK.
Aslett, Judy (2021) Not talking in riddles: to what extent can the making and use of factual documentary change understanding and attitudes towards Female Genital Mutilation in The Gambia?
Fuentes Barron, Aide Violeta (2021) Creative interventions in digital borders: the coevolution of technologies and individuals in digital-physical space in Mexico City.
- 2020
Alkhateeb, Hasnaa (2020) Gates and gazes: a visual analysis of expatriate women in Saudi Arabian gated communities.
- 2019
Asquith, Daisy (2019) THIS IS NOT US: performance, relationships and shame in documentary filmmaking.
Fubara-Manuel, Irene (2019) Animating opacity: race, borders, and biometric surveillance.
Goatley, Wesley (2019) Critical data aesthetics: towards a critically reflexive practice of data aestheticisation.
Sobron, Fernando (2019) Re-evaluating creativity in documentary filmmaking, creative analysis and creative constraints.
- 2018
Grant, Ian John (2018) Shadows, touch and digital puppeteering: a media archaeological approach.
Saavedra Montes de Oca, Olga Lidia (2018) Opening other closets: a visual ethnography of gender roles and social change among transgender people and their families in Cuba.
- 2017
Dadgarnia, Alireza (2017) Film as home: accented film practice and the materiality of displaced lived experience.
Greig, Alan (2017) Interfaces of resistance in the image-machine of control.
- 2016
Modern languages and English language teaching
- 2020
Asma Asiri (Saudi Arabia) 2020, The rendition of “humour” in the Arabic translations of Mark Twain’s works.
- 2019
Theresa Clementson, 2019, Towards a transformative pedagogy for developing academic voice for non-native speakers of English as an academic language.
Abdulrahman Alsaedi, 2019, The use of metaphor at times of political and economic crises in Saudi newspapers.
- 2018
Hannah Stewart, 2018, British media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Loubna Gueche, 2018, Intercultural politeness: The case of first encounter interactions between postgraduate international students.
- 2016
Fatmah Alhazmi, 2016, Social media as a Liberating Virtual Space for Saudi Women.
Adam Stewart, 2016, Minimalism and Construction Grammar: Second Language Acquisition of Topics, Focus and Force.
Danya Shaalan, 2016, Saudi women’s personal theories of English language learning motivation: a case study of PNU students.
Music
- 2020
Bright, Daniel (2020) Sonic Ghosting: interrogating space/place/memory through multimodal sonic fracture.
Hasselgren, Ingeborg (2020) Cute affectivism: radical uses of the cuteness affect among activists and artists.
Watson, Joe (2020) Growing cybernetic ears: transduction and performativity in the analogue and digital what have you.
Westwood, Lee (2020) A moment of clarity: exploring the notions of 'blur' and 'focus' within the context of contemporary instrumental music.
- 2019
Escobar Mundaca, Alejandro Esteban (2019) Translating poetics: analysing the connections between Violeta Parra’s music, poetry and art.
Farrell, Gemma L (2019) Psychedelic style and embodiment in psytrance.
Polymeneas Liontiris, Athanasios (2019) IM-Medea: posthumansim and remediation in music theatre.
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
-
Vaios, Errikos (2016) Portfolio of compositions with commentary.
-
Philosophy
- 2020
-
Dragoun, Ivo (2020) Freedom, reason, and holding responsible.
-
- 2019
-
Ferguson, Chris (2019) The alienation of social institutions: a social ontological account.
Giannopoulou, Areti (2019) The economic realization of civic friendship theoretical underpinning and grass-roots praxis.
Kladiskakis, Dimitrios (2019) A dialogue on production, forgetfulness, and alienation: Heidegger and Marx on Weltentfremdung, modernity, and the impasses of mass society.
Lee, Jonny (2019) Mind, meaning and mechanism: the role of representation in explanations of cognition.
Lyritsas, Romanos (2019) Late capitalism and the imperative of authenticity: the governance of authenticity in the neoliberal era.
Şahverdi, Umut (2019) The transformation of state ideology in Turkey: from Kemalism to Islamism.
-
- 2018
-
Al-Saraf, Ethar (2018) A phenomenological ontology of freedom: obscuration and the light.
Cohen, Ezra Benjamin (2018) Reason in action: a realist account.
Duff, Koshka (2018) The criminal is political: real existing liberalism and the construction of the criminal.
Dunphy, Robert John (2018) Scepticism and presuppositionlessness: Hegel and the problem of beginning.
de Almeida, André Lúcio Santos (2018) Agent particularism: the ethics of human dignity.
Elliott, Alexander (2018) Solidarity born of crisis: the development of solidarity from the French Revolution until the present, with Émile Durkheim and Jürgen Habermas.
Menent, Melis (2018) Constitutional patriotism in Jürgen Habermas`s political thought.
Noutsou, Styliani (2018) A philosophy of home: a study on an alternative experience of domesticity.
-
- 2017
-
Downey, Adrian (2017) Radical sensorimotor enactivism.
Elsen, Jana (2017) On difference within the same: a reading of Martin Heidegger’s Was Heisst Denken?
Martinez, David (2017) Habermas’s project of social criticism: between normativity, institutions and practices.
Roberts, Alan (2017) Is this a joke? The philosophy of humour.
Ҫelik, Murat (2017) The ethics of reading: Ingarden, Iser, Ricoeur.
-
- 2016
-
Carter, Timothy Robert (2016) Self-comprehension and personhood: an examination of the normative basis of Hegel’s political philosophy.
Homburg, Phillip (2016) Walter Benjamin and 'materialism'.
Levy, Patrick Simon Moffett (2016) Phenomenology and sleep.
Martin, Noah Gabriel (2016) Husserl and Derrida - the origins of history.
O'Connell, Elaine Finbarr (2016) Emergent emotion.
Willemse, Arthur (2016) The motif of the Messianic: law, life, and writing in Agamben’s reading of Derrida.
-