Postgraduate Members
Recent PhD and DFA Graduates
- Dr Francis Butterworth-Parr, Thesis title: "Machphrasis: Video games as metaphor in contemporary literary culture"
- Dr Taylor Driggers, Thesis title: “Faith, fairies, and floozies: deconstructing God, sex, and gender in fantasy”
- Dr Elizabeth Dulemba, Thesis title: "Tricksters, Witches, and Warriors: a Feminist Experiment in Rewriting a Patriarchal Narrative in Children’s Fantasy Literature"
- Dr Gabriel Elvery, Thesis title: "The Digital Fantastic: Theorising the Role of Hesitation in Experiences of Fantasy in Video Games"
- Dr Emma French, Thesis title: "‘How Do You Want to Do This?’: Dungeons & Dragons as transformative fantasy"
- Dr Sally Gales, Thesis title: "iNSiDE, a Novel, and Dead Spaces: An Invitation to See the Forgotten, a Series of Essays"
- Dr Penelope Holdaway, Thesis title: "An exploration of Tolkien's changing visions of Faërie through his non-Middle-earth poetry"
- Dr Lucinda Holdsworth, Thesis title: "The use and abuse of Lucifer in contemporary literary culture"
- Dr Shelby Judge, Thesis title: "Contemporary feminist adaptations of Greek myth"
- Dr Alice Langley, Thesis title: "The Stone Mothers: Magical Realism
and the Physical Manifestation of Grief" - Dr Oliver Langmead, Thesis title: "Writing at Earth Magnitude: Calypso and Terranauts"
- Dr Heidi A. Lawrence, Thesis title: "Continuums of fantasy, reality, and kinship: an ecopsychological reading of Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s and adolescent fiction"
- Dr Mariana Rios Maldonado, Thesis title: "Ethics, Femininity and the Encounter with the Other in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth Narratives"
- Dr Luke Shelton, Thesis title: “‘Small Hands Do Them Because They Must’: examining the reception of The Lord of the Rings among young readers”
- Dr Kristine Ainsworth Swank, Thesis title: "The creative uses of Irish literature in works by J.R.R. Tolkien"
- Dr Andy Tytler, Thesis title: "The Dragon in the Mirror, a novel, with Stepping Through the Mirror, a critical reflection on writing and revising a feminist portal-quest fantasy"
- Grace Worm, Thesis title: "Female Fantasy: Identity Politics and Society in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall Universe"
Current PhD and DFA Students working on fantasy/the fantastic:
- Maria Arvaniti: "Otherworlds on Stage: Theatre and Fantasy"
- Grace Borland Sinclair: "Feminist Fabulations: The Speculative Fiction of Scottish Women Writers 1860-1980"
- Sarah Bresnahan: "Coded Lands: Anthropocentric Functions of Video Game Environments"
- Tom Emanuel: "The Tale We’ve Fallen Into: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Fandom, and the Post-Christian Quest for Meaning"
- Georgina Gale: "Gothic Realities: The Symbiotic Nature of Gothic Fiction and Late-Victorian Journalism"
- Rebecca Gault: "World-building Sapphic Dynamics in Contemporary Fantasy Fiction"
- Lynn Genevieve: Creative writing project on centring on radical birth practices.
- Azalea Binti Ahmad Kushairi: "Eco-aesthetics of Birds, Flowers, Others: A Freudian Analysis of Human Ecological Adaptations in Folkloric Tales of the Austronesian Regions"
- Rachel Lewis: "Magic, Medicine, Metamorphosis: Representations of Medicine in the Victorian Fairy Tale"
- Christopher Lynch: "Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork and the Development of Urban Fantasy from the 1980s to the Present"
- Emily Markham: "War and Contemporary Fantasy"
- Liz Macwhirter: Creative Writing project. Website: https://ljmacwhirter.com/
- Clare Moore: "Tolkien’s Representations of Disability in Middle-earth"
- Mercury Natis: "J. R. R. Tolkien and Queer Theory/History"
- Joseph Paolantonacci: "Queer Time in The Witcher franchise"
- Amber Pasternack: "Dark Souls: A Contemporary Postmodern Fantasy"
- Eleanor Patterson: "An Endless Spectrum: Going Beyond the Gender Binary in the Sandman Universe"
- Abigail Pinsent: "Toxicity and Transformation: Reading the Material Bodies of Fantasy"
-
Luise Rössel: "End Without Hope? – ‘Post-modern fantasy’ and the millennial Change: re-writing truth(s), undercutting hierarchies and the narrative void in secularized Christian cultures"
- Will Sherwood: "'I sit beside the fire and think': J.R.R. Tolkien, British Romanticism, and their Cultural Legacies"
- Sam Tegtmeyer: "Opening a Canon of Maggots: Tradition, Innovation, and the Ideologies of Fantasy"
- Lea Warren: "(Re)Imagining Gondal: The Impulse of Fantastic Subcreation, Roleplay, and Collaborative Creation in Emily Brontë’s Gondal Archive"
- Hollie Willis: "Representations of Funerary Rites in Post-1990 Fantasy Literature"