English Studies is a broad field that investigates the literature and cultures of the English-speaking world. It also focusses on the specific characteristics of the English language and its usage, as well as teaching and learning processes. Areas of focus also include the historical development of the English language and its present status as a global lingua franca.

Our spectrum of research topics is wide.

Staff members whose main field of interest is English literature conduct research in a variety of periods and genres using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including perspectives from the digital, medical and environmental humanities, alongside more traditional, close textual reading. Areas of particular expertise include the following: British and European Romanticism; modernism, coastal and queer ecologies; life writing; writing by women; twentieth-century poetry; nineteenth-century literature; contemporary fiction and poetry; Shakespeare and early modern drama, also in performance; science, literature and empire; and travel writing. We also have doctoral candidates working on a range of topics across the fields.

Staff members whose interest is in English language and linguistics conduct research in the core fields, such as English history, English grammar, morphology and word-formation, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, as well as studies of text and discourse. We have strong representation of both theoretical (generative) and cognitive linguistic approaches at our unit, and much of the research intersects with other disciplines and falls into fields such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and comparative linguistics. Our particular strengths include language processing, language embodiment and relativity, meaning variation, semantic relations, and multilingual cognition.

Research in applied linguistics, specifically focused on language teaching and learning, has strong representation at our unit. This includes work on the multilingual mental lexicon, language testing and assessment, language learners’ communication behaviors, teachers’ motivational practices and teacher identity development, English-medium instruction, content and language integrated learning, and the international classroom.

An area where staff members representing various research fields regularly collaborate is research in the field of scholarship of teaching and learning, in particular academic writing at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

The English Unit at LU has a long tradition in corpus linguistics and corpus-based research – the compilation of the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English (LLC-1) some 40 years ago is but one example of this – which has continued to present day. Many of our current staff members are experts in corpus methodologies and the new London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English (LLC-2) was launched in 2020. The use of both corpus and experimental methodologies is supported by the Humanities Lab, a university-wide research infrastructure, located at the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology.

For more information about our research, and about the doctoral thesis projects that we currently supervise, please visit the individual researchers’ websites on the English Unit main page or in the university’s research portal LUCRIS.