Our Research
Welcome to Research in English & Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths
Our academic staff are fully active in scholarly research and creative writing in English studies (rated '5A' - indicating internationally recognised excellence - in the UK 2001 Research Assessment Exercise) and in European and Latin American studies (rated '4' in the 2001 RAE, indicating nationally recognised excellence). We contribute to international conferences and publish our work in leading scholarly journals and through major academic presses.
We have substantial research strengths in 20th-century literature and in the literatures of the Americas, within a range of staff expertise that includes the study of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Molière alongside contemporary linguistic and literary studies, and such interdisciplinary areas as literature & philosophy, literature & photography, and post-colonial studies.
More than 40 research students in English & Comparative Literature are working towards MPhil and PhD degrees on a wide range of topics. They benefit from the proximity of the British Library, the University of London Library and other research resources, and from membership of the University of London's School of Advanced Studies, and from regular departmental research seminars.
Research Programmes
For details of research specialisms in which our staff may provide supervision, see the alphabetical list of staff.
See also - Caribbean Centre and Caribbean Creoles
Staff research interests (English & Comparative Literature)
Caribbean literature; 18th-century historiography and early black writers; black feminisms.
Dr Joan Anim-Addo BEd MA PhD
Literature in England 1910-40; history of modern criticism; modern literature and the newspaper.
Professor Chris Baldick BA DPhil
Medieval English literature, especially Chaucer, gender, emotion, ethics.
Professor Alcuin Blamires BA MPhil
19th- and 20th-century American literature; literary theory; literature and photography.
Dr Caroline Blinder BA MA PhD
Joyce; modernism; contemporary fiction; fictional biography and autobiography; Dante; theory and practice of comparative literature; aspects of literary theory.
Dr Lucia Boldrini PhD Dottore in Ricerca
History of French theatre; 17th-century French court entertainments and large-scale public spectacles; 17th-century historiography.
Dr Marie-Claude Canova-Green BA MA PhD (Reader)
Modern American writing; critical theory; literature and philosophy; holocaust writing; psychoanalysis.
Dr Josh Cohen BA MA DPhil (Reader)
American literature since the 19th century; cultural memory and trauma; holocaust representation.
Dr Rick Crownshaw BA MA DPhil
Literature, the visual arts and Anglo-French cultural relations 1870-1920; literary Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle.
Dr Jane Desmarais BA MA PhD
Creative and life writing; contemporary poetry; children’s literature.
Maura Dooley BA PGCE
English literature and politics 1590-1750; Swift and the Scriblerian satirists; the early English novel; early English press to 1800.
Professor Alan Downie BA MLitt PhD
The modern French novel; Francophone Algerian literature. Professor Peter Dunwoodie MA PhD (Professor of French Literature) Reception of the classics in the 19th and 20th centuries; Victorian fiction and poetry; women’s writing.
Dr Isobel Hurst BA MPhil DPhil
Native American fiction; American literature since 1900; transatlantic studies, particularly the connection between Ireland and America; border studies and the American West.
Dr Padraig Kirwan BA MA PhD
Creative writing – particularly poetry and the novel, and the theatre. Stephen Knight BA German and Austrian literature since 1890; modernism and the avant-garde; literature and film; critical theory.
Dr Andreas Kramer MA DrPhil
18th-century German literature and the Enlightenment; German Expressionism; narratives of the Great War (English, French, and German).
Dr Frank Krause DrPhil
Early modern drama; poetry and prose (especially Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, Sidney); poetry and poetics; Renaissance rhetoric; the history of Shakespearean performance from 1600; literature and opera.
Professor Russ McDonald BA MA PhD
Literature and empire; postcolonial theory and novel; postcolonial life writing; the British novel post-1945; Palestinian culture.
Professor Bart Moore-Gilbert BA MA DPhil
Contemporary American and British fiction and poetry; memoir; journalism; translation; writing for the theatre; libretti.
Professor Blake Morrison BA MA PhD
Romantic and Victorian English literature, especially prose non-fiction; 19th-century aesthetics and history of ideas.
Dr Uttara Natarajan BSc BA MPhil DPhil
Laurence Sterne; 18th-century literature, especially prose fiction; narrative satire and the culture of sensibility; Menippean satire and anti-encyclopedism from the Renaissance to the postmodern.
Dr Tim Parnell BA PhD
Discourse and conversation analysis; sociolinguistics; language and gender; feminist linguistics; language and identity (especially gender, ethnicity, and social class).
Dr Pia Pichler MPhil PhD
Theoretical linguistics: grammatical structure, word structure, and the interface between word and sentence structure; language and the media.
Dr Geri Popova MA PhD
20th-century Spanish and Spanish American literature; European avant-garde writing, painting and cinema; comparative approaches to Surrealism (particularly French-Spanish).
Dr Jacqueline Rattray BA MA PhD
Shakespeare; Renaissance drama and poetry; the history of the book; subjects and objects in performance.
Dr Charlotte Scott BA MA PhD
British Romantic literature, especially drama and lyric poetry; modern receptions of classical texts; postcolonial drama.
Dr Michael Simpson BA MA PhD
Creative writing, with interests in the Anglo-American 18th century; the literary possibilities of economics; contemporary forms of religious feeling.
Francis Spufford BA MA
French studies and translation studies; modernism; imperialism and primitivism.
Dr Carole Sweeney BA MA DPhil
Samuel Beckett; Thomas Kinsella; modern and contemporary Irish and British literature; textual and visual studies; literary theory.
Dr Derval Tubridy BA MPhil PhD
Poetry and libretti; 20th-century English-language poetry; post-Freudian linguistic theory; creative writing studies.
Jack Underwood BA MA
Creative writing, particularly the novel and the short story.
Ardashir Vakil BA PGCE
Emeritus Professors of English
Professor Helen Carr BA PGCE MA PhD
Professor David Margolies BA BLitt PhD
Professor B J Sokol BSc MA MPhil PhD