Current research students

At York, we have have one of the largest and most diverse PhD communities in the UK, with over 80 registered research students.

Our students undertake wide-ranging research and many of our PhD graduates have transformed their research into monographs.

Current PhD students

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Bryony Aitchison	The Queer Gardens of Modernism	Dr Hannah Roche
Haleemah Alaydi	How to Become a Refugee: A Collection of Short Stories and Critical Commentary	Dr Claire Chambers Dr Juliana Mensah
Hannah Armstrong	'Sheaves from Sagaland': Ecomedievalism and the Norse North Atlantic in British Writing (1860-Present)	Professor Matthew Townend
Lauren Berghorst	‘Optimam partem elegit’: Mary Magdalene in Early Modern Literature and Art	Professor Helen Smith
Elise Bikker	Mind over Matter: The Body Machine in Fiction of the long Nineteenth Century	Professor Geoffrey Wall Dr Mary Fairclough
Hayley Braithwaite	Excavating the City: The Gothic Impulses of George W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London/The Mysteries of the Court of London	Dr Alison O'Byrne Dr Deborah Russell
Katie Crowther	Georgian Paper Traces: Women’s Stories, Ephemeral Texts and Hidden Objects	Dr Chloe Wigston Smith
Sarah Dara	Am I a Victim: Agency and Sex Trafficking Narratives in South Asian Literature	Dr JT Welsch Dr Juliana Mensah
Joshua D'Arcy	Weird Infrastructure: The Weird in the World Literary System	Dr Claire Westall Dr Bryan Radley
Rebecca Drake	The sea in Middle English romance and Old Norse-Icelandic fornaldarsögur	Dr Nicola McDonald Dr Matthew Townend
Catherine Edwards	Literary Covers: Secret writing in Cold War spy fiction and film	Professor Helen Smith Dr Bryan Radley
Ellen Gallimore	The Anglo-Saxon Church in the Nineteenth Century: Anglo-Saxon Religious Prose and Anglican and Anglo-Catholic Writings	Professor Matthew Townend Dr Emma Major
Dominic Gavin	Marvell and the Book of Nature. The reading and misreading of nature in seventeenth-century pastoral	Professor Kevin Killeen Dr Jane Raisch
Sauleha Kamal	Can Words Save the World? The Contemporary Pakistani Novel, Human Rights and the Global Literary Marketplace	Professor Claire Chambers
Francesca Killoran	Whores, Harlots, and Harlequins: Locating Female Sympathies in 1790s Prostitute Narratives	Dr Emma Major
Mengchen Lang	Rethinking the Literary Concept of Authorship Through Vladimir Nabokov and W. G. Sebald	Professor Richard Walsh
Hannah McAuliffe	'I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans': System in the work of William Blake	Professor Jon Mee
James Mortimer	Adapting Agatha: Gender, Sexuality and Nation in the Television Adaptions of Agatha Christie, 1976-2022	Dr Melissa Oliver Powell Br Bryan Radley
Diana Mudura	Echolalias; or Retrieving Lost Languages in J. M. Coetzee's Post-apartheid Writing	Professor David Attwell
Adriana Murad Konings	Literature of Suspicion: A Post-1945 Metaphysics	Dr Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Grace Murray	Imagining a Space for Science in Early Modern How-To Manuals	Professor Helen Smith
Charlotte Newcombe	Formal Forces: Mid-Seventeenth Century Women’s Poetry and Natural Philosophy	Professor Kevin Killeen Dr Namratha Rao
Elizabeth Potter	William Blake, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Marginalia	Professor Jon Mee
Jun Qiang	Place and Space in Edith Wharton's Fiction	Dr Victoria Coulson
Alice Rhodes	“Mechanic Art and Elocutionary Science”: Speech Production in British Literature, 1770s-1820s	Dr Mary Fairclough
Caroline Anjali Ritchie	Visionary mapping in the work of William Blake	Professor Jon Mee Dr Amy Concannon (Tate)
Zaynab Seedat	Writing the South Asian Muslim Terrorist: Politics, Religion and “Terror” Through a Postcolonial Lens	Dr Claire Chambers
Sam Sheppard	“The knowledge of good and evil”: Religion, War, and the Law in Dorothy Sayers’ Detective Fiction	Dr Bryan Radley
Zara Stubbs	Eating Bodies, Assembling Selves: Mystic Women, Transformation, and The Uncanny Gastronomic in Contemporary Literature	Dr Alice Hall Dr JT Welsch
Miya Treadwell	Art as Activism: Ava DuVernay, Black Narratives, and Netflix	Dr JT Welsch
Wiktoria Tunska	Community of Emotions: Brexit, Contemporary Literature, and Affect	Dr Alexandra Kingston-Reese
Anjali Vyas-Brannick	Theorising Biocitizenship, 1550-1700	Professor Helen Smith
Katrina Wong	Empathic Engagement with the Unreliable: A Case Study of Kazuo Ishiguro	Professor Richard Walsh
Xin Zhao	Rereading Exoticism: Race, Gender, and Intersectionality in Angela Carter	Dr Bryan Radley

Current MA by research students

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Michael Farley	The Representation, Parody and Mythologies of Richard Wagner in Novels by Günter Grass, Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter	Bryan Radley
Inga Piotrowska	Gestalt Psychology in the Modernist Künstlerromane of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf	Bryan Radley
Daniel Vince	The Working-Class Novel, Post-War Counterculture and Social Realism	Bryan Radley