The Institute of English Studies

Over the past month or so, I’ve been mulling over Marion Thain’s brilliantly suggestive essay on the nature and future of English as a discipline, which has helped me to notice things that otherwise might have passed me by…

In the early morning I run through Beckenham Place Park which is cut in two by the trainline to Victoria. Half-empty carriages click-clack past carrying the remaining few commuters into the city. I have missed reading books in the Victorian manner…

Looking back on the last four years of research leading up to the submission of my PhD thesis in June and the viva in September, the question that kept recurring was – why am I doing this? PhDs are hard work, and the going gets tough along the way as various seemingly...

My research often explores activist responses to ongoing social problems. During my Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the IES I have worked on a monograph on women’s role in consumer activism in the UK and USA between 1885 and 1920. These initiatives, part...

I got my start in English studies in early modern textual editing, but over the last two years have transitioned into postwar (queer) literature. As I’ve explored how queer fiction was published, marketed, and sold in an era that criminalised homosexuality and had a...

Working from home is a significant theme in my research – though not as we have got to know it in 2020. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘home work’ generally betokened the exploitative labour practices known as ‘sweating’. Home workers were...

The best moments of my Post Doc? Collaborating with brilliant minds by co-authoring pieces or co-teaching courses together. Hardest moments? Probably collaborating! Especially on journal articles; it can be a long, drawn-out process, which requires a lot of...

It has been a tough, surreal year for all of us. Covid-19 has changed the way we study, work and communicate. My doctoral research is on an 18th century print collection in Malta. I had planned to catalogue all 4,500 prints in my first year of part-time study, but,...

Marion Thain’s blog is about “public questions of English cultural identities”: she asks if we, as a discipline (named, after all, for a national identity) “have a particular opportunity to contribute, collectively, distinctive resources and expertise to this debate”?...