English Literature and Language MPhil/PhD

Dr David Arnold

David Arnold trained as a Classicist before moving on to doctoral work on twentieth-century American poetry. His research and teaching interests lie in poetry, American literature, ecocriticism and narrative criticism. He has published articles on the literary improvisations of William Carlos Williams and a book on American poetry: Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal (Liverpool University Press, 2007). His recent work focuses on ecophenomenological readings of modernist writing, and Buddhist American Poetry.

David teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and has responsibility for modules in Literary Theory and American Writing. He also supervises doctoral research and is currently Director of Studies for a PhD on the poetry of Edward Thomas and Robert Frost. David is a member of both the British Association of American Studies and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He is also a member of the Green Voices Research Group.

Prof Nicoleta Cinpoes

Nicoleta Cinpoes joined the University of Worcester in 2007. She teaches Renaissance Literature, is International Exchanges Liaison for the School of Humanities and co-director of Worcester's Early Modern Research Group.

She has edited Doing Kyd: A Collection of Critical Essays on the Spanish Tragedy for Manchester University Press (2016) and is currently collaborating on a new Romanian translation of Shakespeare's complete works, writing introductions to Hamlet (2010), Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice and The Comedy of Errors.

Professor John Parham

John Parham's research lies in environmental humanities, notably Victorian literature and ecology and eco-media studies. He has written, edited and co-edited six books: Green Media and Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan: 2016); Literature and Sustainability: Exploratory Essays (co-edited with Adeline Johns-Putra and Louise Squire) (Manchester University Press, 2017); A Global History of Literature and the Environment (co-edited with Louise Westling) (Cambridge University Press, 2017); The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2021); a book on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination (Rodopi: 2010), and a further edited collection, The Environmental Tradition in English Literature (Ashgate: 2002). John has published articles on several Victorian writers (including Charles Dickens, William Morris, and Emile Zola), contemporary literature, green popular culture (looking at British and Australian punk, film, computer games, and digital climate fiction), and on teaching cultural studies and environmental studies. For 20 years, John was co-editor of the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (published by Taylor & Francis).

At the University, John is Professor of Environmental Humanities and course leader for the Arts and Humanities MRes programme. He teaches modules in green media, the new humanities and research methods. John also leads the university’s Green Voices Research Group who have held events, in Worcester, with the nature writers Caspar Henderson and Richard Kerridge, and the photographer David Plummer, as well as a conference on ‘Enchanted Environments’ at the University of Worcester Art House in 2020.

Prof Jean Webb

Jean Webb is Director of the International Forum for Research in Childrens Literature which provides a focus for literary, cultural and socio-historical scholarly enquiry into writing for children, internationally. She teaches a broad range of undergraduate modules on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, and is responsible for specialist modules in children's literature. She is also an experienced PhD supervisor and examiner.

Dr Lucy Arnold

Dr Lucy Arnold is a specialist in Contemporary literature, with particular research interests in contemporary gothic, narratives of haunting, contemporary women’s writing and psychoanalytic criticism. Her teaching experience spans a wide range of periods and genres but focusses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her published work to date has concerned the writing of Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel, with her monograph, Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades, published with Bloomsbury in 2019.

Professor Michael Bradshaw

Michael is the Head of School of Humanities, having previously worked at Edge Hill University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Bristol University and the University of Tokyo.

Michael is a specialist in Romanticism, especially poetry and drama of later Romantics. His published critical work includes authors such as: Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Clare, George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Walter Savage Landor, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley. 

He has also published on Romantic drama, ‘Romantic generations’, Romantic fragment poems, and the periodical press in the 1820s, as well as the contemporary author Alan Moore.

Dr Sharon Young

Dr Sharon Young is a  Fellow of the HEA and her teaching interests include, Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, women's poetry, and literary theory.

Sharon's research focuses mainly on women's poetry of the early modern period, Renaissance revenge tragedy and women's manuscript culture. Sharon has published on female poets and the critical debates of the early eighteenth century and Mary Leapor. She is the course leader for English Literature.

Dr Lefteris Kailoglou

Dr Lefteris Kailoglou is the Course Leader for English Language. He has been working at the University of Worcester since 2011, and previously taught at the University of Essex and University of Sussex. Lefteris has also been supervising a number of dissertations on sociolinguistic variation in Worcester as well as topics on language and identity. He has also been involved in the establishment of the Worcester dialect archive which is located within the Institute.The initial findings of the description of the local dialect of Worcestershire (but also Herefordshire) have now started becoming publicly available in conference papers and publications.

Dr Jack McGowan

Jack’s research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, and he specializes in the development of performance poetry in the UK since the mid-20th century, and the oral roots of poetry.

Jack is a performance poet with 10 years of experience on the UK spoken word scene and he writes for both performance and page publication.