Centre for English Literature and Language
These pages are designed to help researchers, potential PhD students and others interested in the work of the Literary Studies group find out more about its members and activities. (Note: For information about teaching, please visit our separate pages on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes in English.)
Literary Studies at Salford engages with English language literatures written in all major periods from the Medieval to the present day. We have particular strengths in popular print media, Holocaust poetry, literature and science, women’s writing, Irish studies and creative writing.
Our research is carried out in eight clusters:
- Poetry and Poetics
- The History and Language of Print Culture
- Creative Writing, Performance & Innovation
- Memory Studies
- Gender Studies
- Popular and Visual Culture
- Periodicals
- Literature, Culture and Science
- Long Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture
What makes literary research distinctive at Salford is our commitment to marrying mono-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and to that end we have particularly strong research links with colleagues in the Centre for Communication, Cultural and Media Studies (CCM). Of our eight research clusters, four are mono-disciplinary in focus (Poetry and Poetics, The History and Language of Print Culture, the Long Nineteenth Century and Creative Writing, Performance & Innovation) and four interdisciplinary in focus (Memory Studies, Gender Studies, Literature, Culture and Science, and Popular and Visual Culture).
Literary Studies staff were returned to the last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) with the University's English Language and Literature submission (UoA 57). The results showed that 90% of the work of researchers in the Centre for Literary Studies was deemed to be of international standing, with 10% being graded at the highest possible level of 4*.
Literary research at Salford especially benefits from its proximity to key research libraries and other archives, including the Working Class Movement Library, the Imperial War Museum North, the Manchester Jewish Museum, the John Rylands Library, Chetham's Library and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The University of Salford Library complements these facilities, subscribing to a full range of English Literature and Language academic journals and electronic databases, including JSTOR, Early English Books Online (EEBO), Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstracts, Literature Online (LION), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the MLA. Archive material is housed here dating from 1559 to the present day, including special collections of papers and manuscript material on Walter Greenwood (1903-74), Stanley Houghton (1881-1913) and Arthur Hopcraft (1932-2004).