Postgraduate Prospectus

Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies | www.essex.ac.uk/lifts
Staff and their research interests
Sanja Bahun, BA Belgrade, MA PhD
Rutgers, New Jersey (Lecturer)
International modernism; comparative
literature and film; theory of comparative
arts; psychoanalytic and critical theory;
women’s and gender studies
Leon Burnett, BA Wales, MA PhD Essex
(Reader)
Comparative literature; modern European
poetry; literary translation; myths and
legends; Russian literature 1820-1940
Shohini Chaudhuri, BA Oxford, MA PhD
London (Senior Lecturer)
Film theory; world cinema; contemporary
writing; cultural theory and psychoanalysis
Clare Finburgh, BA Manchester,
MA Toulouse, PhD UCL (Lecturer)
French modern drama and literature;
postcolonial theory and drama; dramatic
and performance theory; the plays, novels
and political writings of Jean Genet
Maria Cristina Fumagalli, BA Milan, PhD
Sheffield (Senior Lecturer)
Caribbean literature; contemporary
poetry; postcolonial writing; women
writing; literary and filmic rewritings
and adaptations
Jeffrey Geiger, BA Cornell, MA PhD
California (Senior Lecturer)
Documentary film; ethnographic writing
and film; third or emerging cinemas; US
literature since 1945; constructs of race
and gender; travel writing
John Gillies, BA MA New England, MPhil
Oxford, PhD ANU (Professor)
Shakespeare, renaissance drama and
cultural poetics, with emphasis to poetics
of space and place; performance issues
in relation to Shakespeare and
renaissance drama
Richard Gray, MA PhD Cambridge
(Professor)
Literature and history of the American
South; American prose and poetry of the
last two centuries; fiction of William
Faulkner
John Haynes, BA PhD Manchester
(Lecturer)
Soviet cinema; international film; history
of political film; documentary film-making
Peter Hulme, BA Leeds, PhD Essex
(Professor and Head of Department)
Travel writing; the relationships between
literature and colonialism; Caribbean
history and literature; postcolonial theory
Elizabeth Kuti, BA Oxford, PhD Dublin
(Lecturer)
Playwriting; theatre and drama, especially
of the eighteenth century
Jonathan Lichtenstein, BA Leeds
(Senior Lecturer)
Creative writing, especially for the theatre;
tragedy and psychoanalysis
Karin Littau, BA Trent, MA PhD Warwick
(Senior Lecturer)
Twentieth-century English and European
literature; film studies with a particular
interest in the relation between film
and literature; literary theory;
translation studies
Adrian May, BA Essex, MA Cardiff, PhD
Essex (Lecturer)
Creative writing, especially with mythic,
song lyric, local, folkloric or traditional
influences; exploring positive views of
tradition; fiction of DH Lawrence and
Stevie Smith
Susan Oliver, BA Essex, PhD Cambridge
(Lecturer)
Romanticism; Scottish Literature;
transatlantic studies; eighteenth
and nineteenth-century literature;
nature writing and ecocriticism
Research study
We have more than 70 PhD students
researching all areas of our work which
ensures a vibrant intellectual community.
You may wish to study at Essex because
you want to work with our successful
researchers: we are, for example, just
completing one major Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC) research project
called American Tropics: Towards a
Literary Geography, which has provided
scholarships for two students to work on
Caribbean literature, including paying for
research trips to the region.
162 | Postgraduate Prospectus 2012
Creative writing is a particular growth area.
We cater for all genres, with published
novelists, poets, and playwrights on our
teaching staff and a programme of visiting
writers to stimulate your imagination: Derek
Walcott, Tom Raworth, Richard Beard, Earl
Lovelace, and Madeleine Bunting have all
read at our Colchester Campus recently.
The titles of just a few books published by
our staff in 2010 and 2011 gives some
indication of the extent and range of our
research: American Documentary Film:
Projecting the Nation; Cuba’s Wild East:
Towards a Literary Geography of Oriente;
The Intimate and the Extimate: Violence
and Gender in the Globalized World;
Contemporary French Theatre and
Performance; After the Fall: American
Literature Since 9/11.
Research degrees
We welcome applications for research
study if you have a good first degree and,
preferably, an MA. We offer supervision for
PhD Literature•, PhD Creative Writing•, PhD
Theatre Studies•, PhD Film Studies•, MPhil•
and MA by Dissertation• in all the fields of
our staff research interest. Between us,
we offer a range of expertise in different
literatures and approaches to literature,
covering most aspects of early modern and
modern writing in English, plus a number of
other languages.