Research in the School of English
Research in the School of English covers a broad range of areas in literary, linguistic and drama studies. Work by members of the academic staff is grouped under the following headings. Please follow the links to find out more about each area:
- Descriptive Linguistics
- Romantic and Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory
- Creative Writing
- Renaissance and Restoration Drama
- Teaching and Learning in English
For information on staff research see the individual staff profiles.
For further information about how School of English staff contribute to the wider scholarly community, see Recognition for English Staff.
Descriptive Linguistics.
Colleagues in this grouping conduct research into corpus linguistics, lexicography, narrative studies and English in a postcolonial context. Professor Antoinette Renouf, one of the world’s leading corpus linguists, heads the Research and Development Unit for English Studies. She initiated the pioneering WebCorp project, now housed at Birmingham City University, and continues to develop innovative projects in corpus technology and to contribute to international debate about the potential and functionality of corpora. Andrew Kehoe and Matt Gee share responsibility for maintaining its systems and also have significant publication profiles in the area of automated linguistics.
Professor Howard Jackson, a leading authority on lexicography, continues to publish in this area and has recently seen his textbook on the subject translated into Japanese. Dr Ruth Page, author of a 2006 monograph on feminist narratology for Palgrave, is an invited contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, has numerous articles in international journals, and regularly gives papers at international conferences in the UK and USA. Dr Richard Ingham has published widely on the history of negation in English and French and co-ordinates a British Academy-funded European seminar on the subject. His work on Anglo-Norman is also widely known and he organised a seminar on the subject at Birmingham City University in 2007. Professor Mark Addis is a philosopher by training whose three book-length studies of Wittgenstein have commanded international recognition. His research primarily focuses upon Wittgenstein and related areas but also encompasses the philosophies of language, mind and religion. He is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of Wittgenstein's relationship to religious language and thought. Much of his current work is concerned with understanding the relationships between the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of expertise.
Colleagues in this grouping have enjoyed considerable success in attracting external funding from both the EPSRC and AHRC. Future priorities include the development of WebCorp as a classroom tool to serve the interest of different subject disciplines, and further work on hypertext and narrative.
Romantic and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Colleagues in this grouping publish at the highest level across the long C18th, from 1660 to 1830, with a particular interest in the problems of writing the literary and critical history of the period, and in its critical prose, poetry and prose fiction.
Professor Fiona Robertson, editor of a ground-breaking OUP anthology of women’s writing from the Romantic period, has written a major monograph for OUP on Romantic Writers and America, and was commissioned in 2003 to write volume 7 of the New Oxford English Literary History. Professor Robertson is a world figure in British Romantic Studies.
Professor Philip Smallwood has published widely on Pope and Johnson and is an authority on Augustan literature and criticism. He is the author of a series of substantial book-length studies, including, in 2003, Reconstructing Criticism: Pope's Essay on Criticism and the Logic of Definition, and in 2004, Johnson's Critical Presence: Image, History, Judgment. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, to volume 3 of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English and, on classical criticism, to the forthcoming 1660-1790 volume of The Oxford History of Classical Reception. Forthcoming work includes an essay on Shakespeare and Philosophy for the forthconing CUP collection on Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century, an essay on Johnson's criticism for the CUP series Johnson in Context, and the monograph Critical Occasions: Dryden, Pope, Johnson and the History of Criticism forthcoming with AMS Press. His co-edition, with Professor Greg Clingham, of the Cambridge University Press collection of new essays entitled Samuel Johnson After 300 Years was published in May 2009 and was reviewed by H.T. Jackson in the Times Literary Supplement (August 21st and 28th 2009), p. 13. Future projects include a volume provisionally entitled Ridiculous Critics: Satires on Critics and Criticism in the Eighteenth Century.
Professor David Roberts' OUP editions of Defoe and Chesterfield are widely cited by scholars; primarily a theatre specialist, his studies of Restoration theatre criticism and of post-1660 park scenes have been published in the world-ranking US journals Shakespeare Quarterly and ELH.
Dr Tony Howe has published several essays about Romantic poetry, and has recently edited the volume Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron (Liverpool University Press, 2008). He is currently finishing a monograph about Byron and is editing, along with Professor Michael O'Neill of Durham University, The Oxford Handbook of Shelley Studies, which will appear in 2010.
Colleagues in this grouping have a successful track record of obtaining external funding for projects from bodies including the AHRC, British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.
Twentieth-Century Literature and Theory.
Colleagues in this grouping are active in the areas of philosophy and criticism from the early 1700s to the present. Dr Anthony Mellors has published a major study of late modernist poetry and poetics for Manchester University Press and is a founding editor of the influential journal fragmente.
Professor Philip Smallwood brings to the grouping expertise not just in eighteenth-century literature, but in the history of criticism tout court; specifically, a major edition, The Philosophy of Enchantment (OUP, 2005, 2nd edn. 2007), co-prepared with David Boucher and Wendy James, of previously unpublished manuscripts by the British philosopher R.G.Collingwood. This continues an established concern evidenced by previously published work, such as Modern Critics in Practice (1990), with redefining critical priorities in the wake of modern critical theory. Professor Smallwood's essay on 'Collingwood's Autobiography as Literature' is forthcoming as part of a new OUP edition of the Autobiography.
Dr Sarah Wood publishes on the problems posed for feminist criticism by an emerging canon of science fiction written by women.
Professor David Roberts's work on the theory and practice of theatre criticism, published over a number of years in a series of international journal articles and supported by AHRB funding, contributes an added dimension to the grouping.
Dr Vicky Angelaki works in the field of critical theory and philosophy and their application to recent and contemporary theatre/performance. She publishes in these areas with a particular emphasis on phenomenology and theatre.
Creative Writing.
Birmingham City University fosters the teaching of creative writing at both undergraduate and postgraduate level by employing practising writers on fractional contracts which allow them time to publish. The School has a balance of expertise in the different genres, foremost among them Professor Jim Crace, the internationally acclaimed novelist whose work has been translated into 26 languages. Professor Crace, a Birmingham City University graduate, teaches both on BA and MA programmes, and continues to write novels of outstanding literary merit and interest.
Jackie Gay, well-known for her ground-breaking 2001 anthology, England Calling, co-edited with Julia Bell, has developed a name as a topographer of marginal psychologies in a series of fictional works for Tindal Street Press.
Dr Anthony Mellors, in addition to his important critical work on late modernist poetry and theory, is a noted poet, with publications in a variety of leading poetry journals.
Renaissance and Restoration Drama
Professor David Roberts has published and reviewed on Shakespearean theatre criticism for Shakespeare Quarterly, and his 1989 monograph on Restoration audiences continues to figure in scholarly debate about the period.
Teaching and Learning in English
It is a sign of the importance placed by the School on the relationship between research and teaching that individual colleagues have also made noted contributions to the literature and practice of pedagogy in English Studies.
Professor Howard Jackson’s Routledge textbooks, Grammar and Vocabulary (2002) and Lexicography (2002) are standard items on undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists worldwide; the latter appeared in a Japanese edition in 2004.
Professor Mark Addis obtained English Subject Centre funding in 2005 for a survey of contemporary fiction and philosophy in UK English Departments. He has written for the English Subject Centre newsletter on the teaching of philosophy in UK English departments.
Professor David Roberts's two publications for Kogan Page/Taylor and Francis, The Student's Guide to Writing Essays (1997) and (with Margaret Clewett) Careers Using English (1998) continue to figure in undergraduate reading lists and to inform further work such as the English Subject Centre report on graduate destinations.
Professor Philip Smallwood was an invited contributor to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education (2002), and is the author of essays on Johnson in context, and teaching Dryden, for forthcoming collections to be published, respectively, by CUP and PMLA. Along with Professor Fiona Robertson and Dr Ruth Page he has contributed to reference works or collections widely used by students.
Dr Ruth Page’s work on gender and narrative has fed into and used research arising from the design of electronic learning materials for BA and MA courses, while the software tools developed by Professor Antoinette Renouf and her team are used on corpus linguistics courses worldwide.
The John Lane Archive
The School acquired a complete copy of the John Lane Archive, thanks to a donation by the archive's former curator, Michael Rhodes. Lane published the work of many literary figures under the imprint of Bodley Head, and the archive offers a collection of manuscript material, autographed letters, readers reports, catalogues, and publisher's correspondence. This includes material by W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, E. Nesbit, Vita Sackville-West, and D.H. Lawrence. More information on the Archive and its Contents
The originals of the archive material are in the possession of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. No copying is permitted without permission, and users wishing to obtain copies or publish excerpts are directed to the Ransom Center. Readers are, however, cordially invited to inspect the archive at BCU (housed in Attwood Building in the care of the University Archivist, Stephen Homer, and his assistant Frances Pond) in pursuit of their research, and researchers in the late Victorian period, in publishing history, and in 20th-century literary modernism will find relevant material here.