Programme overview

MPhil: a standalone, one-year (full-time) research degree. Students will undertake their own research project, concluding in the submission of a 25,000 word dissertation. Students may have the option to audit units from our taught Masters courses if they are relevant to their research.

Research in the Department of English brings the core values of our discipline - textual scholarship, critical and theoretical analysis, and contextual knowledge - to the dynamic and changing field of English literary studies. We cover the full chronological range, from the medieval to the contemporary period, with many colleagues engaged in interdisciplinary research.

We are proud of our expertise in medieval and early-modern literature, in Romantic and Victorian literature, in modernism, and in contemporary writing in English. The department is notable for its breadth of research in English poetry across the periods, and our range of specialist interests includes literary theory, the history of book, literature and science, literature and medicine, literature and the environment, digital humanities, women’s writing and gender studies, queer writing, postcolonial literature, Black British writing, 20th-century American literature, the Gothic tradition, and Welsh and Anglo-Welsh writing.

In these and other areas we foster doctoral research both within the department and in collaboration with other departments at Bristol and beyond, including in art history, medical sciences, philosophy, history, politics, drama, classics, theology and modern languages.

This research degree is also available via distance learning.

Careers

A large number of graduates from this programme develop careers in higher education or work on high-level research projects in the field of English literature; some graduates take up careers in freelance writing and editing.