Research Areas

Research Groupings

Contemporary Literature

This research group works to expand the study of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century fiction and poetry. Our research interests and expertise are focused particularly around questions of contemporary literature and its relationship with political issues and transnational contexts, including the comparative study of contemporary Anglophone literatures; engaging with living writers; building relationships with publishing; establishing links with the PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) network and raising questions of literary and political freedom; exploring distinctions between “genre” and “literary” fiction; and developing the interdisciplinary study of literature and political philosophy.

The Nineteenth Century

This research group aims to undertake and promote significant research in the wide field of nineteenth-century studies. Our interests range across literary genres and forms, with particular research highlights in Victorian poetry, popular fiction, travel writing, and theatre, while our outlook is also interdisciplinary. We find the relationships between literature and science, the visual arts and history in this period to be resonant disciplinary intersections.

Surrey Morphology Group

The research of the SMG combines the investigation of grammatical categories in a broad sample of languages with the use of explicit formal and statistical frameworks for the expression of typological and theoretical generalizations. The SMG has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, among others. The SMG has been consistently highly rated for its research, notably in the Research Assessment Exercises.