Language is the foundation for the investigations we undertake about our place in the world. The School pursues diverse intellectual directions to understand how language works. We employ creative and critical methods to probe imaginative literary writing across a wide cultural and historical range. We re-conceptualise the nature of dramatic performance. We explore the premises that account for linguistic phenomena. We investigate the intersections of the verbal and the visual in film and photography. We consider how theoretical ideas about gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and the relationship between language and reality challenge our perceptions of what and how we know.

Teaching and research

Our large group of nearly 50 faculty offers opportunities for study with some of the most innovative and exciting scholars in Britain working in a supportive and welcoming environment. English at Sussex has been an intellectual shaping force, with current and past faculty forming something of a 'who's who' of English studies of modern times. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise 95 per cent of the School's research was rated as internationally recognised.

Through our teaching we seek to develop independent, informed and questioning thinkers. In a world of increasing complexity, the School believes that a trained critical imagination - one that grasps the importance of the analytic and the evocative, the poetic and the explanatory - is vital to negotiate the intricacies of both self and society.

Head of School

Professor Tom Healy

School office

E: english@sussex.ac.uk