English Research

Research areas and REF 2021

Northumbria’s English research is focused around three main areas of activity: Literature, Language and Linguistics, and Creative Writing. Our interests range from the regional to the transnational and from the early modern to the contemporary, and we draw on research methods that include the archival and historical, theoretical and conceptual, and the creative. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), English at Northumbria came 21st in the UK (out of 92) for Research Power. For quality, 90% of our research publications were judged as world leading and internationally excellent. We were also recognised for our strong research culture, and we’re proud to pursue research recognised as having wide-ranging positive impacts beyond academia, evaluated as outstanding in REF 2021.

Our research groups

Research in English is supported by a lively culture of interdisciplinary research groups: American Studies; Creative Writing; Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies; English Language and Linguistics; Environmental Humanities; Gendered Subjects; Humanities and Education; Medicine, Health and Wellbeing; Medieval and Early Modern Cultures; and Scholarly Editing and Print Culture. Through our research groups we share work in progress, build links with our national and international networks, and engage with external partners and public audiences.

Funding successes and projects

Our research is successful in attracting external funding from a wide range of funders including Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Academy, ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Wellcome Trust. Current and recent collaborative projects include the Leverhulme-funded Writing Doctors project (2018-2022) and the AHRC-funded projects Liberating Histories and Ephemera and writing about war in Britain, 1914 to the present (both 2021-2024). Current and recent fellowships include the AHRC-funded Learning through the Art Gallery Innovation Fellowship (2019-2022), the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes and Accent Discrimination in England (2020-2021), a British Academy Innovation Fellowship Women in the Book Trades (2022-2023) and a Wolfson Professorship on The Parish Revolution: Parochial Origins of Global Conservatism (2022-2025). We also currently host early career fellows funded by the AHRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Wellcome Trust.

Partnerships and postgraduate research

We work closely with a variety of external partners and collaborators, such as New Writing North, Live Theatre, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Shandy Hall, and the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle, and these collaborations provide opportunities for our postgraduates too.

We have a large and lively postgraduate research community who are fully integrated into the life of the department, and run a variety of reading groups, events and symposia. We welcome applications for doctoral study in all areas and periods of literary studies, in creative writing, and in language and linguistics. For further information on any aspect of research in English, please contact Dr Ann-Marie Einhaus.