Staff Research

Professor Peter Barta: post-colonial studies; comparative literature; gender studies; English, Russian and Central European culture

Dr Dunstan Brown (Surrey Morphology Group): Russian and Slavonic linguistics (syntax and morphology); typology; theoretical morphology; network morphology; computational linguistics

Dr Marina Chumakina (Surrey Morphology Group): Nakh-Daghestanian languages; morphology; morphology-syntax interaction; typology

Professor Grevilla Corbett (Surrey Morphology Group): typology, particularly the typology of the morphosyntactic features (gender, number, person, case); inflectional morphology and its complexity; Network Morphology; description of Russian, especially Russian morphology; the Slavonic language family

Dr Kate Houlden: Caribbean literature, Postcolonial literature, Gender and sexuality studies, Contemporary literature.

Professor Justin Edwards: travel writing; postcolonial literature; the gothic

Dr Churnjeet Mahn: British travel writing about Greece in the Victorian period;Queer Theory; transnational studies.  

Dr Rosina Marquez Reiter: interactional pragmatics; face management; institutional interaction; intercultural communication for business purposes

Dr Eva Ogiermann: pragmatics; politeness theories; intercultural communication; conversation analysis; language contact

Dr Beth Palmer: Victorian fiction; the periodical press; nineteenth-century popular culture; the nineteenth and twentieth-century theatre; readership; the Neo-Victorian novel; women's writing; contemporary fiction; postcolonial writing

Dr Gregory Tate: literature and science; nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry; contemporary American fiction; detective fiction; Holocaust writing; the graphic novel; American cinema

Hilary Underwood: Victorian art, particularly G. F. Watts and the Pre-Raphaelite circle and their literary links; Victorian art institutions and the exhibition system; the image of the artist and the writer

Dr Paul Vlitos: eating, anxiety and the novel 1880-1914; food and identity in postcolonial fiction in English; creative writing and narrative theory

Professor Diane Watt: gender and sexuality; queer theory; feminism; women’s writing; medieval and early modern writing 

Professor Marion Wynne-Davies: early modern literature; women's writing from the Medieval period to the present; Margaret Atwood

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.