English - Structured

As part of the doctoral training available on the Structured PhD programme, students avail themselves of a range of interdisciplinary taught modules. The wide menu of available options include modules that:



-are discipline-specific in that they augment the student’s existing knowledge in their specialist area

-are dissertation-specific in that they supply core skills which are essential to completion of the research project, e.g., additional language skills

-acknowledge a student’s professional development, e.g., presentation of a paper at an international conference

-enhance a student’s employability through generic training, e.g., careers workshops, computer literacy.

The minimum qualification necessary to be considered for admission to the PhD programme is a high honours, primary degree (or equivalent international qualification), or 'other such evidence as will satisfy the Head of Department and the Faculty of his/her fitness' (University of Galway Calendar). It is more usual, however, for successful applicants to have already gained a Master's degree.

PHDS-ENG Important: apply by mid-July for September entry



Applications are made online via the NUI Galway Postgraduate Applications System.

The duration of research is usually four years.

Areas of interest


Dr. Rebecca A. Barr: Literature of the 'long' eighteenth century; masculinity and literature; printing and print culture; the novel: contemporary poetry and visual culture.


Dr Victoria Brownlee: 16th and 17th-century English literature; religious and devotional writings; the early modern Bible and reformed exegesis.


Prof. Daniel Carey: early modern travel writing; literature and colonialism; early modern literature and philosophy; John Locke; seventeenth-century literature and science; eighteenth-century fiction, esp. Defoe; the Enlightenment and postcolonial theory.


Dr. Cliodhna Carney: Chaucer; medieval aesthetics; medieval literary theory; Spenser.


Dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan: Women's writing in early modern Ireland; Renaissance manuscript culture.


Dr Sorcha Gunne: Gender studies and feminism, contemporary world literature, globalization and development, literary and cultural theory, postcolonial writing, popular fiction, South African and Irish writing.


Dr. John Kenny: Creative Writing and Practice; the works of John McGahern; the works of John Banville; contemporary Irish fiction; contemporary world fiction; literary journalism.


Dr. Frances McCormack: Old and Middle English literature: in particular the works of Chaucer, religious and devotional literature, and heresy.


Mr Mike McCormack: Fiction writing; short stories, novellas, and longer forms.


Ms Bernadette O'Sullivan: Journalism studies.


Dr Justin Tonra: Digital Humanities, Literature and technology, Quantitative approaches to literature, Book History, Textual Studies, Scholarly Editing, Literature of the Romantic period


Dr. Muireann O Cinnéide: Victorian Literature; women's writing; politics and literature; colonial & post-colonial writing, particularly travel writing.


Dr. Andrew Ó Baoill: Journalism studies; political economy of media; technology and culture.


Dr Adrian Paterson: Modernism; fin de siècle, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature; literature and the arts, especially music; orality, print, performance, technology, including radio broadcasting; Irish poetry in English; the works of W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce.


Prof. Lionel Pilkington: Irish theatre history; Irish cultural politics and cultural history; Southern Irish Unionism and Irish Protestantism; J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory; colonialism and cultural theory.


Dr. Richard Pearson: Nineteenth-century literature; print culture and the literary marketplace in the nineteenth-century; archaeology and anthropology in fiction; the writings of W.M.Thackeray and Charles Dickens; William Morris and the arts and crafts movement; digital humanities.


Dr. Lindsay Ann Reid: Tudor and Jacobean Literature; Middle English Literature; Classical Mythology; Ovidianism; Adaptation, Intertextuality, and Reception Sudies; Periodisation; Book History and Early Print Culture


Prof. Sean Ryder: 19th century Irish culture; the work of Thomas Moore and James Clarence Mangan; digital humanities; critical editing; film studies.


Dr. Elizabeth Tilley: 19th century Gothic literature and history of the novel; 19th century serials, Irish publishing history and periodical production; book history; links between art and literature.