We are proud of our thriving research culture. Our work addresses a wide variety of topics, ranging from Old Norse and Medieval Literature to Game Studies, Digital Humanities and Creative writing. Explore our interactive research map to see our spread across topics and periods.
You can also visit our individual academics research pages, where you will find details of their publications and of the PhD topics that they are able to supervise.
Our department regularly hosts international conferences, workshops, and public lecture series. Typically, in any one year we organise or co-organise around 80 different events.
Our department hosts one of the longest-running online postgraduate journals in literary studies, Postgraduate English, which is edited by two PhD students each year.
For updates about what is happening in the department, including events, workshops and conferences, you can also visit and follow our LinkedIn channel.
Our academics produce numerous books and articles each year, covering a range of topics within English and engaging across disciplines. Here are some recent book publications. For full details of all our outputs, many of which are available open access, browse our institutional repository.
Claire Warwick et al. (eds.), Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations (UCL Press, 2025)
Katharina Herold-Zanker, Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920: 'The Indispensable East' (Oxford University Press, 2025)
Rachel White, Elizabethan Occult Poetics: Exploring Practice and Knowledge in English Poetry (Liverpool University Press, 2025)
Dr Katie Muth on how analysing thousands of low level linguistic features can help to define patterns and even identify authorship in novels.
Dr Naomi Booth, Department of English Studies, delivers a presentation entitled ‘Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold’ for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities’ 2021 Research Celebration.
Dr Louisa Uchum Egbunike, Department of English Studies, delivers a presentation entitled ‘Legacies of Biafra’ for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities’ 2021 Research Celebration.
Dr Alistair Brown is using 21st century technology such as virtual reality to transform how people can experience classic literature, such as Shakespeare.
Researchers from Records of Early English Drama-North East give an insight into their project and what this tells us about the earliest records of performance and musical heritage in North East England.
Our ‘Spotlight On’ series showcases the world-leading work of our academics. Dr Alistair Brown is using 21st century technology to transform how people can experience classic literature.
The academic staff of the Department of English Studies at Durham University are continually making significant contributions to the field of literary studies, exploring texts from the medieval period to post-modern and contemporary fiction. Below we list their recent works, exploring themes such as dreams and liminal cognition, death in the long nineteenth century, AI and special collections, and Neo-Victorian Decadence, that reflect our commitment to research-led academic excellence.
Discover the Faculty of Arts and Humanities' new Transformative Humanities framework which brings together distinctive approaches to humanities research and education within the academy and across a wide range of partners and communities.
/filters:quality(70)/prod01/prodbucket01/media/durham-university/departments-/english-studies/77520%5B1%5D-1989X659.jpg)