Postgraduate research in english
The staff comprises a group of energetic scholars sharing a range of complementary interests in literary, cultural and communication studies, creative writing, linguistics (morphology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics), gender, queer and women’s studies and post-colonial studies.
PhD
Programme
We welcome applications from students who would like to conduct research in any of our research areas.
www.surrey.ac.uk/english
Entry Standards
Suitably qualified graduates in literature, cultural and communication studies, language and linguistics, and creative writing are invited to apply for our doctoral research programme. Students are initially registered for a PhD with probationary status and, subject to satisfactory progress, are subsequently confirmed as having PhD status. Non-native speakers of English are normally required to have IELTS 6.5 or above (or equivalent), with a minimum of 7.0 in writing.
Funding
Applicants should enquire about opportunities for funding in their letters of enquiry.
Fees
UK/EU students - £3,825
Overseas students 2011/12 entrants onwards - £11,550
Overseas students pre 2011/12 entrants - £11,025
Find out more about our fees and funding policies.
English research overview
Research
Staff research expertise is listed below. Details of selected publications can be found online.
- Early modern literature, English baroque, the ‘long’ nineteenth century (Romantic and Victorian), modernism, the neo-Victorian novel, contemporary fiction, comparative literature, British Asian fiction, North American, Russian, German, French literature and culture
- Intercultural relations, post-colonial studies (India and Africa, reception studies), women’s writing and criticism, gender and queer studies, representations of modern Greece in British writing, travel literature/tourism studies, creative writing
- Urbanism, utopian fiction, visual culture in World War II, psychogeography, popular culture, conceptual history of the prehistoric world, theatre (nineteenth and twentieth century) and cinema studies, spiritual writing
- Watts Gallery, connections between the literary and the visual, psychoanalysis, humour studies, literary ‘middlebrow’, trauma narratives, the periodical press, readership studies
- Morphology (especially network morphology), computational linguistics, ontologies for linguistics, typology, oceanic languages, morphosyntactic features, colour terms, the Slavonic language family, especially Russian
- Sociopragmatics, pragmatic variation with particular reference to institutional talk, politeness across cultures, cross-cultural and intercultural communication, sociolinguistics, interaction analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics
Research environment
Postgraduate research (PGR) students work in a collegial environment; staff and PGR students occupy offices situated next to each other. Students benefit from all of our resources for research. We aim to create teaching opportunities for doctoral students. Weekly student and staff-led events and day schools ensure that you receive subject-specific research training. You are encouraged to organise PGR conferences and participate in international conferences organised by the staff; we provide financial support to enable PhD students to give papers at conferences and to seek to publish these. Funding is available for essential research trips and specialised research training.
English research groups
Cultures in Contact Group
CICG aims to promote the research of scholars in an environment which is flexible enough to foster innovation and new ideas, but where there are significant points of overlap to guarantee meaningful interaction. In particular CICG seeks to identify new sites of intersection and convergence within literature, communication and creative writing. As a group we participate in interdisciplinary research at national and international levels. The group locates its research in a number of ‘zones’ including: creativity; humour; intercultural communication; post-colonial and translation studies; comparative literature; cultural transmission across period, genre and space. The methodological approaches incorporated are: post-colonial theory; new historicism; feminism; Bakhtin; Foucault; psychoanalytic theory; ethno methodology; cultural geography.
www.surrey.ac.uk/english/research/literatureforum
Surrey Morphology Group
The Surrey Morphology Group aims to promote the use of formal and statistical methods in natural language typology; to develop a typologically informed, formally explicit framework for the expression of theories of natural language morphology; and to study the relations which hold between grammatical categories in a broad sample of languages. Current projects include work on the Alor-Pantar languages, a non-Austronesian group of languages spoken in eastern Indonesia, an investigation into periphrasis, where syntax and morphology overlap, as well as work on the Nakh- Daghestanian language Archi.
We currently hold a large European Research Council grant to investigate morphological complexity. Morphological systems introduce an extra layer of structure in between meaning and its expression. This layer may operate at cross-purposes to functional distinctions, attaining in some languages an astonishing degree of complexity. Such apparently arbitrary distinctions in form (inflection classes, irregularity and similar phenomena) are the particular focus of this project. They are a key resource for understanding mental processes, as they represent an unconscious and yet highly structured autonomous system.
www.surrey.ac.uk/english/smg
Apply for postgraduate research in english
PhD Programme
Applicants need to submit a completed research proposal before a decision regarding admission is made.
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