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PhD ENGLISH

Qualification : PHILOSOPHIAE DOCTOR DEGREE

Award Type and NFQ level : RESEARCH PH.D. (10)

CAO/MU Apply code : MHK02 (PT), MHK03 (FT)

CAO Points :

Candidates take 50 credits over three years. This is comprised of GSA1, GSA2, GSA3, EN841, EN842, EN851, EN852, EN861, EN862 plus at least one other module from the list of optional modules.

Closing date 
Research applications are generally accepted at any time

Commences
September (or other agreed time)

 

 

Applicants must have a recognised primary degree which is considered equivalent to Irish university primary degree level.

Minimum English language requirements:

Applicants for whom English is not their first language are required to demonstrate their proficiency in English in order to benefit fully from their course of study. For information about English language tests accepted and required scores, please see here. The requirements specified are applicable for both EU and International applicants.

Maynooth University's TOEFL code is 8850

Prof. Lauren Arrington 
Research interests include: twentieth-century British and Irish literature, modernism, drama, life writing, war writing, and imprisonment. 

Dr. Conrad Brunstrom 
Research interests focus on eighteenth century culture and literature, with particular attention to theories of rhetoric, and gender theory. 

Dr. Denis Condon 
Research interests include film in Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the interrelationships between popular theatre, tourism, and spectatorship; European cinema. 

Dr. Íde Corley 
Pan-African nationalism and political cultures especially the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Ken Saro-Wiwa, black internationalism, classic and contemporary Anglophone African fiction, black autobiography, Afropolitanism and the New African diaspora, contemporary Nigerian genre fiction, queer African writing, queer visual cultures in Africa. 

Dr. Michael G. Cronin 
Twentieth century and contemporary Irish fiction, Irish gay and lesbian/queer fiction, history of the bildungsroman and Irish writing, Realism and Irish writing; Catholicism and Irish writing. Irish Studies; Gender and Sexuality/Lesbian and Gay/Queer Studies, Marxist, Postcolonial and Feminist literary criticism. 

Dr. Oona Frawley 
Academic research interests include Irish literature and culture; memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism, postcolonialism, writings of New Zealand and Australia, Edmund Spenser. As a novelist and short story writer, I also supervise and am interested in supervising creative writing work, particularly in prose.  

Dr. Catherine Gander 
American literature and culture: modern and contemporary poetry and fiction, including Muriel Rukeyser, Frank O’Hara, Claudia Rankine, and Don DeLillo, radical literature and art, art, photography, and visual culture, the intersections between word and image, documentary/witness poetics and aesthetics, anticolonialism, embodiment, pragmatism. 

Prof. Colin Graham 
Research interests include: Irish visual culture, contemporary writing from Northern Ireland, Brexit and Ireland, nineteenth-century poetry. 

Dr. Conor McCarthy 
Interests include Edward Said, Edmund Burke and James Connolly.  Intellectuals as a social and political category or class, intellectual politics and activism.  Also, the history of criticism, especially Marxist criticism, in Ireland and elsewhere.   Methodologies and theories of intellectual history. Also the question of Palestine and the fiction of contemporary Palestine/Israel. 

Prof. Emer Nolan 
Irish and British nineteenth-century fiction; Thomas Moore; nineteenth-century Irish political writing, the Irish Literary Revival, modernism, James Joyce, Marxist, feminist and postcolonial literary and cultural theory, Irish women’s writing, contemporary Irish fiction.   

Dr. Stephen O’Neill 
Shakespeare studies, especially Shakespeare’s afterlives; contemporary Shakespeare adaptation studies and digital cultures; early modern literature, especially drama and theatre; early modern Ireland.  

Prof. Pat Palmer 
Early Modern Ireland, the writing of violence, conflict, and conquest, linguistic colonisation, Renaissance poetry, translation. 

Dr. Rita Sakr 
Migrant and refugee literature and film; postcolonialism, Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean studies, modern Arab (including diasporic) literature and film, modern Turkish and Kurdish literature in translation, literary and cultural geography, the city in literature and film, interdisciplinary approaches to human rights, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, post-conflict memory studies. 

Dr. Moynagh Sullivan 
Research interests include Irish postmodernism, gender theory and contemporary Irish women’s writing. 

Under construction

Online application only. To make an application please click here.                                                                                                                           

Please note: All research applicants should contact the respective department before applying to ensure their research proposal aligns with departmental interests and criteria.

To apply for your chosen postgraduate study at Maynooth University, please ensure you have the following documents to make an application:

  • Evidence of your primary degree
  • Academic transcripts
  • A copy of your passport
  • Proposed Thesis Title and Summary 
  • A personal statement   
  • An academic letter of recommendation
  • A professional letter of recommendation

Applicants for whom English is not their first language are required to demonstrate their proficiency in English in order to benefit fully from their course of study. For information about English language tests accepted and required scores, please see here. The requirements specified are applicable for both EU and International applicants. 

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