English - Structured
As part of the doctoral training available on the Structured PhD programme, students avail themselves of a range of interdisciplinary taught modules. The wide menu of available options include modules that:
-are discipline-specific in that they augment the student’s existing knowledge in their specialist area
-are dissertation-specific in that they supply core skills which are essential to completion of the research project, e.g., additional language skills
-acknowledge a student’s professional development, e.g., presentation of a paper at an international conference
-enhance a student’s employability through generic training, e.g., careers workshops, computer literacy.
Entry requirements
The minimum qualification necessary to be considered for admission to the PhD programme is a high honours, primary degree (or equivalent international qualification), or 'other such evidence as will satisfy the Head of Department and the Faculty of his/her fitness' (University of Galway Calendar). It is more usual, however, for successful applicants to have already gained a Master's degree.
Application dates
PHDS-ENG Important: apply by mid-July for September entry
Applications are made online via the NUI Galway Postgraduate Applications System.
Duration
The duration of research is usually four years.
Research
Areas of interest
Dr. Rebecca A. Barr: Literature of the 'long' eighteenth century; masculinity and literature; printing and print culture; the novel: contemporary poetry and visual culture.
Dr Victoria Brownlee: 16th and 17th-century English literature; religious and devotional writings; the early modern Bible and reformed exegesis.
Prof. Daniel Carey: early modern travel writing; literature and colonialism; early modern literature and philosophy; John Locke; seventeenth-century literature and science; eighteenth-century fiction, esp. Defoe; the Enlightenment and postcolonial theory.
Dr. Cliodhna Carney: Chaucer; medieval aesthetics; medieval literary theory; Spenser.
Dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan: Women's writing in early modern Ireland; Renaissance manuscript culture.
Dr Sorcha Gunne: Gender studies and feminism, contemporary world literature, globalization and development, literary and cultural theory, postcolonial writing, popular fiction, South African and Irish writing.
Dr. John Kenny: Creative Writing and Practice; the works of John McGahern; the works of John Banville; contemporary Irish fiction; contemporary world fiction; literary journalism.
Dr. Frances McCormack: Old and Middle English literature: in particular the works of Chaucer, religious and devotional literature, and heresy.
Mr Mike McCormack: Fiction writing; short stories, novellas, and longer forms.
Ms Bernadette O'Sullivan: Journalism studies.
Dr Justin Tonra: Digital Humanities, Literature and technology, Quantitative approaches to literature, Book History, Textual Studies, Scholarly Editing, Literature of the Romantic period
Dr. Muireann O Cinnéide: Victorian Literature; women's writing; politics and literature; colonial & post-colonial writing, particularly travel writing.
Dr. Andrew Ó Baoill: Journalism studies; political economy of media; technology and culture.
Dr Adrian Paterson: Modernism; fin de siècle, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature; literature and the arts, especially music; orality, print, performance, technology, including radio broadcasting; Irish poetry in English; the works of W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce.
Prof. Lionel Pilkington: Irish theatre history; Irish cultural politics and cultural history; Southern Irish Unionism and Irish Protestantism; J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory; colonialism and cultural theory.
Dr. Richard Pearson: Nineteenth-century literature; print culture and the literary marketplace in the nineteenth-century; archaeology and anthropology in fiction; the writings of W.M.Thackeray and Charles Dickens; William Morris and the arts and crafts movement; digital humanities.
Dr. Lindsay Ann Reid: Tudor and Jacobean Literature; Middle English Literature; Classical Mythology; Ovidianism; Adaptation, Intertextuality, and Reception Sudies; Periodisation; Book History and Early Print Culture
Prof. Sean Ryder: 19th century Irish culture; the work of Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan; digital humanities; critical editing; film studies.
Dr. Elizabeth Tilley: 19th century Gothic literature and history of the novel; 19th century serials, Irish publishing history and periodical production; book history; links between art and literature.