World-Class Researchers

English at Queen’s is a major research centre for the study of English language, literature, and creative writing. Our world-leading research, with excellence across the breadth of the discipline from the earliest writings in English to the study and practice of contemporary poetry, is disseminated in award-winning poetry collections, major scholarly monographs, and critically acclaimed scriptwriting, prose fiction and non-fiction. Known for its real-world impact, our research helps shape the way we think about the possibilities of literature and language within and beyond the academy. As part of the School of Arts, English and Languages, we are proud of the interdisciplinarity of research as evidenced by multiple collaborative projects with colleagues in other disciplines at QUB and across the world and by the global perspective of our scholarship.

The international reputation of English at Queen’s is further attested to by the dynamic and growing graduate student population and the numerous activities and conferences they are responsible for organising, e.g. the Lifeboat poetry readings and publications and the Tangerine magazine for new writing. Every area of English studies is a vibrant presence, from Old English and Medieval to the Renaissance and from Eighteenth Century to Modern Irish, British and American literature, and Language, and this is reflected in the diversity of our conferences and major collaborative research projects which reflect upon and cut across these areas. With an international reputation for research innovation, our approaches and methods include: literary and historical criticism; science and literature, textual appropriation, poetry and poetics, archival scholarship, contemporary critical theory and the dynamic interface between creative and critical practice.

We are especially proud of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, a focal point for creativity in the UK and Ireland and recognised as an international centre of research excellence in the fields of poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction and screenwriting. The Seamus Heaney Centre is home to award-winning poets like Leontia Flynn, Nick Laird and Stephen Sexton, novelists and non-fiction writers like Garrett Carr and Glenn Patterson who have helped to refine Irish and Northern Irish literature in the twenty-first century and screenwriters and playwrights like Aislinn Clarke, Tim Loane, Jimmy McAleavey, and Michael West whose works have premiered on international television networks, in film festivals and on the stage in Belfast and Dublin. Recent prize-winners include Stephen Sexton who won the Forward Prize for the best first collection (2019) and an EM Forster Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020) and Aislinn Clarke received the 2019 Academy Gold Fellowship for Women sponsored by Swarovski for her screenwriting and film directing work.

Research Projects in English