English Literature research projects

Dr Andrew Maunder was a member of the Everyday Lives in War centre, one of five First World War engagement centres funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He co-ordinated the World War I Theatre Project which revived some of the lost plays of 1914-18 via professional theatre productions at different locations across the country, but also gave students an opportunity not only to learn about the process of researching, staging and performing war-time drama, but gives them an insight into many of the forgotten concerns of the Home Front. Andrew’s specialism within the Centre was the history of war-time theatre and popular entertainment more generally. His work in this field is wide ranging, covering plays and revues from 1914-18, modern re-tellings, as well as other forms of war-time writing: fiction, short stories and poetry. The project has been extended, and Andrew is now engaged in reviving lost plays from the period before and after WW1, transforming our understanding of British theatre in the early twentieth century. He has produced  several critically acclaimed productions for the Finborough Theatre in London: But It Still Goes On by Robert Graves in August 2018; Distinguished Villa by Kate O'Brien in September 2022; and a triple bill of Makeshifts and Realities by Gertrude Robins, and Honour Thy Father by H. M. Harwood, forthcoming in September 2023.

Read more about Andrew’s work on First World War Theatre here.

Dr Sam George convenes the Open Graves, Open Minds project, which began in 2010 by unearthing depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, then embraced werewolves (and representations of wolves and wild children), fairies, and other supernatural beings and their worlds. The Project extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, and the magical, emphasising that sense of Gothic as enchantment rather than simply horror. Through this, OGOM is articulating an ethical Gothic, cultivating moral agency and creating empathy for the marginalised, monstrous or othered, including the disenchanted natural world.

Read more about the Open Graves, Open Minds project.

If human time is measured in seconds and minutes, hours and years, then deep time deals with hundreds of thousands of years, with the millions and the billions. Helen Gordon is producing a series of works engaging with the concept of Deep Time – sometimes referred to as geological time. Exploring methods of representing deep time processes both in fiction and nonfiction, she considers what it means to be human in the context of both a deep past stretching back beyond the birth of our planet, and a deep future, where the choices we make today will continue to affect the Earth long after we are gone. Her works for this project include a novel-in-progress and two pieces of creative nonfiction, Notes From Deep Time (Profile), and, forthcoming, a book about meteorites and the communities that form around them.

Dr Rowland Hughes has edited a new edition of the novel Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton, by Magdalen King-Hall (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2016). First published in 1944, it’s a historical novel set in late-seventeenth-century England. It tells the story of Barbara Skelton, a well-born young woman trapped in a loveless marriage, who finds escape from the tedium of her life by leading a double life as a highway robber. King-Hall's novel was quickly adapted into the classic British film The Wicked Lady, produced by Gainsborough Studios in 1945, starring Margaret Lockwood, Patricia Roc and James Mason.

In his critical introduction to this new edition, Rowland relates the novel to the legend of Katherine Ferrers, who reputedly terrorised the highways of the county of Hertfordshire during the 1650s, and to the popularity of women's historical fiction in the 1940s. He explains the success of both novel and film by considering how a story of female empowerment, sexual promiscuity and cross-dressing spoke powerfully to a contemporary audience just emerging from the Second World War.

Through direct engagement and interviews with faith leaders, ministers and the media, Dr Penny Pritchard is facilitating a wider conversation concerning the changing cultural role of faith in the twenty-first century. Her aim is to contribute to the improved training offered by different faiths to clergy and other celebrants of funeral rites in their liaison with the media.

This project examines the challenges faced by multi-faith celebrants of high-profile funerals marked by trauma and heightened media scrutiny, both in representing their faith and the character of the deceased. When violent or traumatic death captures the public's attention, a presiding minister or priest can be called at a moment’s notice to act as spokesperson, not only for their faith, but on behalf of a much wider community – of many faiths or none at all - to meet the public demands of global broadcasting and social media.

In this context, the media inevitably broadcasts partial or heavily-edited versions of sermons and funeral rites offered in commemoration of the dead; in the face of violent or newsworthy death, are clergy sufficiently prepared to articulate their faith's calls for tolerance and peace to a global audience primed for hatred and division?

The ‘lyric poem’ comes from the Ancient Greek, and was developed by Aristotle as a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings. Designed to be spoken out loud in the first person, the lyric is an address to an absent other: often a lover or a friend, or someone for whom this intimate communication is intended to be kept secret, despite the public nature of the published poem. With these definitions in mind, what is the difference between a lyric poem, one of the most venerated historical examples of literature across centuries, and the voice-mail or the voice-note? To what extent can these casual expressions be captured in these media be properly categorised as a lyric? How can everyday expressions take on the forms and meanings of poetic address?

Contemporary lyric poets like Eileen Myles, Ben Lerner, and Peter Gizzi have taken up these questions and asked how lyrical and poetic address might be changed, reframed, or understood as technologies of communication develop. In our own moment, as we were forced to communicate using variations of voice-notes during the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr Matthew Holman asks what is at stake when the boundaries between the poetic and the everyday are blurred.