Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies (CCLS)

The Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies was established in 2022 as a multidisciplinary Research Centre with expertise in the fields of literature, culture, gender and sexuality studies, and screen studies. The Centre supports the work of researchers in these fields, fostering connections with the university’s wider research cultures, building and sustaining external research networks and encouraging research projects with an impact beyond academia.

About the Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies

The Centre aims to develop an environment productive of high quality and impactful research and to promote the value of cultural and literary studies as an indispensable subject of enquiry designed to address the most challenging contemporary issues. Through public engagement, its members seek to promote the Centre’s work in advancing equality, inclusion and social mobility alongside the benefits of diversity in research.

We have established links with regional, national and international organisations including the Northampton Filmhouse and the British Film Institute, and with learned societies and associations such as the William Morris Society, the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association, and the Society of Cinema and Media Studies and its Horror Studies Special Interest Group.

We run regular public events such as the Annual John Clare Memorial Lecture and the recent International Conference on Working-class Women Writers.

Themes

The Centre currently has two main research themes and foci:

1. Representation and identity (including research into texts and audiences, especially in relation to gender, race, nation and class)
2. Cultural practice and the culture industries (including research into cultural forms and practices and practice-based research).

Our researchers have specialisms in modernism and celebrity culture, Cult TV studies, American popular fiction, London fiction, William Morris studies, gender studies, ecological criticism, the representation of race and class, trauma narratives, and contemporary women’s writing. We welcome applications for PhD study in any of these areas (see below ‘Study With Us’).

View the Centre on PURE