Postgraduate Prospectus

Literary and cultural research includes the general areas of 19th- and 20th-century American and Canadian fiction and poetry; post-colonial literatures and theory; race, gender and sexuality in literature and culture; regional and ethnic literary culture and the major movements of Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism. Particular areas of research specialism include: African-American painting and photography; slave and captivity narratives; 19th century print culture; the study of decades in American culture; Canadian literature; gay, lesbian and queer literature and theory; the culture, film and literature of the American South; contemporary American and postcolonial fiction; business and the workplace in American literature; and antebellum writing. Recent PhD topics include studies of: The Architecture of Shopping Malls; Rave Culture and Globalisation; The Vietnam War and American Popular Consciousness; Race, Rock `n` Roll and Blues Music; Female Hobos; The 1960s; Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X in International Context; Chinese and Chinese-American Literature; Barbara Kingsolver; Dionne Brand; Gwendolyn Brooks; Suburbia and Late 20th Century Fiction; American Regionalism and the City; and the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In US history the school’s strengths lie in the general areas of 18th, 19th- and 20th-century intellectual, social and political history. Particular research expertise lies in: the American Enlightenment; antebellum slavery and politics; the history of the South; post-1945 foreign policy, especially US relations with South East Asia and the Kennedy/Johnson administrations; neoconservatism; post-1945 intellectual history; race and the Civil Rights Movement; and Hispanic migrant communities. Recent PhD topics include: The American Party in the South; US and British Policies towards Israel; Britain, America and the Atomic Bomb; Ulysses S. Grant; the American Far Right; the Know Nothing Party; the American Left post-1970; and the John Birch Society.