We are one of the largest graduate communities in the UK (over 200 students and over 40 faculty) exploring ‘English’ in all its diversities, supporting a rich variety of MA taught programmes alongside a flourishing culture in doctoral and post-doctoral research.

With our international reputation for research on textual, performative, and linguistic subjects we remain at the forefront of thinking across critical paradigms, social contexts and historical periods.

Our postgraduate courses reflect the School’s commitment to fostering a trained critical imagination – one that grasps the importance of the analytic and the evocative, the poetic and the explanatory, the visual and the verbal.

Our students and faculty are known for their distinctive approach to questions of knowledge, and for their commitment to innovation and challenge in intellectual life. There are many opportunities throughout the academic year for students and faculty to discuss their research in different colloquia, reading groups and conferences supported by the School.

The School is also home to a number of active Research Centres including the Centre for Early Modern Studies, the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought, the Centre for Modernist Studies, the Centre for Visual Fields, the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, as well as long-established research seminars in American studies and in English language and linguistics.

Our postgraduate taught courses enable you to focus your interests on a particular historical area (eg early modern, modern and contemporary), a genre or thematic concept (eg sexual dissidence, literature and film). Our Masters courses in Critical Theory, Creative and Critical Writing, and Applied Linguistics emphasise the ways that theoretical models engage with the use of language, from practical everyday experience to the imaginative and philosophical. For those who wish a more broadly based literary Masters course, we offer a distinctive MA in English Studies.

An important feature of all of the School’s MA courses is how they build in interdisciplinary possibilities. Each course is organised to enable you to take one or two options from other courses if you wish. This lets you develop a bespoke direction to your study. Each course culminates in a dissertation and the school places particular emphasis on matching expertise among its faculty with supervision.

Full-time students will take four taught modules over the course of the Autumn and Spring terms, followed by the preparation and writing of a dissertation under supervision in the Summer. Courses are normally taught by weekly seminar. For part-time students, the same requirements are spread over two years, with one module taken in each of the successive Autumn and Spring terms, and with the preparation and writing of the dissertation extended over two Summer periods. Students can take up to two modules that are outside their named English programme.

With the exception of the MA in English Studies and the MA in Applied Linguistics each module is examined by a 5000-word term paper. The dissertation length is 15,000 words and it is submitted at the start of September.

The School hosts a number of the University’s Research Centres – the Centre for Early Modern Studies, the  Centre for Modernist Studies, the The Centre for Visual Fields, the  Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence – and long-established research seminars in American studies and English language and linguistics. There are further research centres – eg Centre for Literature and Philosophy – hosted by other schools in which all English MA students can readily participate. A feature of the School’s research environment is its weekly Colloquium throughout the term, bringing faculty and students together, often with visiting speakers.

The School also works with several external organisations, publishers and firms that are of particular interest to MA students. With the publisher Myriad, we run Quick Fictions events leading to publication, including the specifically developed iTunes app showcasing the best of student work. We have longstanding connections with Charleston, the home of the Bloomsbury Group in Sussex, and Petworth House, home to the Percys, one of the most significant families in early modern England. We organise an annual Avant-Garde Poetry Festival with the Nightingale Theatre in Brighton. In 2013, the School will host the Modernist Studies Association conference which will bring over 500 visiting scholars from around the world to Sussex.

The School of English offers doctoral supervision across a wide range of literary, performative and linguistic subjects leading to the award of a PhD or an MPhil. We have notable strengths in:

• early modern literature and culture
• modernism
• 20th-century and contemporary English and American writing
• critical and cultural theory
• film, text and image
• colonial and postcolonial writing
• drama and performance
• English language and linguistics
• critical and creative writing
• sexuality and sexual dissidence.

The University Library is rich in research collections, for example the Woolf Papers, the Kipling Papers and the Mass Observation Archive. The Sussex Research Hive is the Library’s designated area for researchers, open to all doctoral students and research staff. It provides private study areas, bookable meeting rooms and space for informal discussion and collaborative work.

In addition to the University facilities, the School offers designated study space for doctoral students, the Trask Library, and a bookable meeting room. It also has a comfortable social space, equipped for projections and for holding seminars or colloquia, as well as for meeting informally over coffee.

Recently, our doctoral students have run two major conferences, In-sight: Visualising Theory and Polyhistoricon: The Uses and Abuses of History in Early Modern Europe, and have established Excursions, an online journal and forum that encourages discussion across the arts and sciences. 

We offer a substantial number of studentships for UK/EU students supported by the AHRC and by the University. In addition, the School of English offers a number of doctoral bursaries for overseas students. Further information can be found on the University's funding database.