Meet our PhD students
Our community of more than 250 PhD students brings together doctoral researchers from multiple disciplines in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) and beyond.
We've collated our student profiles into a single directory to showcase the range of topics studied.
The directory illustrates the often interdisciplinary nature of study at LLC. Supervisors and students are not always from the same subject area, and in some cases, supervisors are based at other schools or universities.
To make it easy to navigate, the page is organised alphabetically by name of PhD programme.
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Adam Dahmer | In development |
Wilson McLeod (Celtic and Scottish Studies) |
| Andrew Yu | The Scottish piping culture in former British colonies in the Far East | Gary West (Celtic and Scottish Studies) / William Lamb (Celtic and Scottish Studies) / Rob Dunbar (Celtic and Scottish Studies) |
| Dhanya Baird | In development | |
| Elizabeth Campbell | The Life and Work of John Morison, Iain Gobha na Hearadh, The Blacksmith of Harris | Rob Dunbar (Celtic and Scottish Studies) /
Anja Gunderloch (Celtic and Scottish Studies) |
| Emma Holmes | In development | |
| In development | Neill Martin (Celtic and Scottish Studies) | |
| Meg Hyland | The Musical Cultures of Itinerant Gutters in the British and Irish Fishing Industries, c. 1850 - c. 1975 | Will Lamb (Celtic and Scottish Studies) / Lori Watson (Celtic and Scottish Studies) |
| Ruth Salter | The Scottish Folk Revival and Marxist Cultural Theory | Gary West (Celtic and Scottish Studies) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Diandian Li | Rural-urban migrant strategies for coping with poverty | Daniel Hammond (Chinese) / Jay Wiggan (Social and Political Science) |
| Feng GUO | Narrating Western China during the War of Resistance (1931-1945) | Xuelei Huang (Chinese) |
| Kehan Ding | Buddhist Monastic Tea in Song-Yuan China: A Deconstruction of Chan-tea Culture | Joachim Gentz (Chinese) |
| Li Zhang | A Digital Chinese Nation: Military-Themed Internet Novels, Cultural Populism and Cyber Nationalism in the Xi Jinping Era | Christopher Rosenmeier (Chinese) / Natascha Gentz (Chinese) |
| Menglu Liu | Pluralism of Cultural Persona: Ouyang Yuqian’s Drama Entrepreneurship and Border-Crossing Practices | Xuelei Huang (Chinese) / Christopher Rosenmeier (Chinese) |
| Mingxiao Liu | The Experience of Cultural Re-adaptation of Chinese Returnee PhD Students from the UK | Daniel Hammond (Chinese) / Mark McLeister (Chinese) |
| Stephanie Cheuk Wong | Sanguo yanyi’s canonising process over centuries | Natascha Gentz (Chinese) |
| Ryan Choi | On the Writings of the Traitor Literati: Newspapers, Diaries, and Literary Periodicals in Hong Kong during Japanese Occupation, 1941-1945 | Christopher Rosenmeier (Chinese) / Aaron Moore (East Asian Relations) |
Can't find what you're looking for? Students undertaking PhD research with one or more supervisors based in Chinese can also be found under:
- Film Studies
- Translation Studies
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Alexandra Huang-Kokina | Musical Performativity in Early Twentieth-Century Piano Novels | Peter Dayan (French) / James Loxley (English Literature) |
| Anna Chiari | Silent Trauma: The Case of Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras |
Paul Crosthwaite (English Literature) / Susan Bainbrigge (French) |
| Fidan Cheikosman | The Significance of the Insignificant of the Everyday in Elif Shafak and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: A Study of Turkishness from a Cultural, Political, and Psychoanalytic Perspective | Fabien Arribert-Narce (French) /
Ines Aščerić-Todd (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) |
| Franco-Japanese Intermedial Encounters in Roland Barthes, Michel Butor and Dany Laferrière | Fabien Arribert-Narce (French) / Marion Schmid (French) | |
| The Self on Trial: Shame and Confession in the Autobiographical Writing of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard | Simon Cooke (English Literature) / Claire Boyle (French) | |
| Xingtong Zhou | In development | Fabien Arribert-Narce (French) / Marion Schmid (French) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Alex Penland | Antikythera / "Protagonist Lenses in the Songs of Achilles and Illium" | Jane Alexander (English Literature) |
| Art Allen | Fragments and poetic objects in the art of mourning |
Miriam Gamble (English Literature) |
| Elmira Elvazova | The Illusion of Presence in Articulation: Poetry's Reach Towards the Ineffable | Jane McKie (English Literature) |
| Kathleen Marshall | Narratives of loss (multiple perspective novels) Bill Clegg/Graham Swift | |
| Lexie Angelo | In development |
Jane Alexander (English Literature) / Jane McKie (English Literature) |
| Maria Schiza | Ekphrasis as Encounter, Practice, and Framework | Miriam Gamble (English Literature) / Miriam Gamble (English Literature) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| American Strategic Narratives of China's Belt and Road Initiative: Making Sense of the US Hegemony and its China Policy |
Youngmi Kim (Korean) / Aaron Moore (East Asian Relations) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Black Womanhood under the F. B. Eye: The Counterliterary Experience of Black Women Writers under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI | Keith Hughes (English Literature) / Celeste-Marie Bernier (English Literature) | |
| In development |
Benjamin Bateman (English Literature) / Carole Jones (English Literature) |
|
| Alice de Galzain | Rewriting the Life of an “Ultra-Radical”: Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852) | Andrew Taylor (English Literature) / Keith Hughes (English Literature) |
| Alisha Palmer | Abortion and Women's Writing 1900-1940 | Anouk Lang (English Literature) |
| Amy Waterson | In development | Robert Irvine (English Literature) / Anna Vaninskaya (English Literature) |
| Angus Sutherland | On the history of natural destruction | Simon Cooke (English Literature) |
| Anupama Shukla | Metaphors, Euphemisms, Stigma: Epilepsy in Literature | Katherine Inglis (English Literature) / Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (Russian) |
| Carolina Palacious Guerra | In development |
Keith Hughes (English Literature) / Celeste-Marie Bernier (English Literature) |
| Celeste Callen | A Journey to the Confines Of Time: A Study of Subjective Temporal Experience in Charles Dickens’ Fiction | Francis O'Gorman (English Literature) |
| Charley Matthews | The Queer Woman Reader in the Nineteenth Century | Katherine Inglis (English Literature) |
| Claudia Sterbini | Asexual Epidemics, Detectives and Spinsters: the construction of pathological asexuality in Victorian fiction | Katherine Inglis (English Literature) / Anna Vaninskaya (English Literature) |
| Dominic Richard | The Musical Register: The Role and Development of Leitmotifs in James Joyce |
Lee Spinks (English Literature) / Francis O'Gorman (English Literature) |
| Emily Vause | Making a Monster: Exploring the Relationship Between Parenting and the Nineteenth Century Literary Child | Jonathan Wild (English Literature) |
| Frances Rowbottom | William Faulkner's Uses of Myth |
Andrew Taylor (English Literature) |
| Heather Milligan | Creatures, Colonies, and the Collective: Unsettling Agency in Contemporary EcoGothic Fiction | Benjamin Bateman (English Literature) / David Farrier (English Literature) / Timothy Baker (Scottish and contemporary literature, University of Aberdeen) |
| Isabel Schueler | Roland Leighton: (Re-)Turning to Poetry after the Trauma of War | Jonathan Wild (English Literature) |
| Isabella Shields | The Brutality of Fact: Ethical Representation and the Praxis of Identification in Contemporary Women's Autotheory |
Paul Crosthwaite (English Literature) |
| June Laurenson | Space and Place in Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time' series |
Jonathan Wild (English Literature) / Francis O'Gorman (English Literature) |
| Kiefer Holland | “I out-live them”: The Creation of Out-Living Selves and Textual Layering in the Writing and Speeches of Six Nineteenth-Century African American Women | Celeste-Marie Bernier (English Literature) / Keith Hughes (English Literature) |
| Kunyu Tan | Economics and Ethics: Reconciling Self and Other in George Eliot’s Writings | Paul Crosthwaite (English Literature)/ Anna Vaninskaya (English Literature) |
| Lois Wilson | Biblical Myth and Affect Theory in Contemporary Speculative Fiction |
Carole Jones (English Literature) / Alison Jack (Divinity) |
| Matthew Lear | Gathering the Mess: Repurposed Poetics and Anthropocene Time | David Farrier (English Literature) / Michelle Keown (English Literature) |
| Rachel Chung | Re-Dressing Rape: Sexual Violence in All-Femme Shakespeare |
Suzanne Trill (English Literature) / Nicola McCartney (English Literature) |
| Gendered Spaces in Modern India |
Michelle Keown (English Literature) |
|
| Anglican Christianity and British Women Writers of the Mid-Nineteenth Century | Robert Irvine (English Literature) / Alison Jack (Divinity) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Judith Drake | The Case of Disability Theatre in Contemporary Scotland | Simon Malpas (English Literature) /
Eleoma Bodammer (German) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Ciara McKay | Faith and Feminism: Irene Dunne’s Stardom, 1930-52 | David Sorfa (Film Studies) /
Jolyon Mitchell (Divinity) |
| For an understanding of the representational dynamics of Indigenous languages in feature fiction films, in a globalised cinematographic landscape |
Charlotte Gleghorn (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) / Guy Puzey (Scandinavian Studies) / Charlotte Bosseaux (Translation Studies) |
|
| "El Perú no es Lima". Between Hispanic Neocolonialism and Ibero-American Transnationalism in Peruvian-Spanish Film Co-Productions | Charlotte Gleghorn (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) /
Jessica Gordon-Burroughs (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies |
|
| Qianzhi Shan | The Chinese Sixth Generation as a Type of New Wave Cinema: Influences, Reworkings, New Openings | Marion Schmid (French) |
| Sam Warnock | Deconstructing Cinema: The Films of Yoshida Kiju | Chris Perkins (Japanese) / Helen Parker (Japanese) |
| Contemporary Poetic Cinema through the Lens of Traditional Chinese Poetics | David Sorfa (Film Studies) /
Xuelei Huang (Chinese) |
Can't find who you're looking for? Students undertaking PhD research with one or more supervisors based in French and Francophone Studies can also be found under:
- Comparative Literature
- Film Studies
- Medieval Studies
- Translation Studies
Staff in French and Francophone Studies are also supervising PhD projects in the following subjects at the University of Edinburgh:
- Philosophy
- Design
- History
Can't find who you're looking for? Students undertaking PhD research with one or more supervisors based in German can also be found under:
- European Theatre
- Medieval Studies
- Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
- Translation Studies
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Adam Ferron | Networked Public: Islamic Twitter in Salman’s Saudi Arabia |
Frédéric Volpi (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Ebtihal Mahadeen (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Walid Magdy (Informatics) |
| Integration of Sufism and Ash’arite Theology in the legacy of Abū al-Qāsim al-Qushayrī’ |
Jaakko Hameen-Anttila (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Andreas Görke (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) |
|
| Bahar Fayeghi | Everyday resistance of Afghan women in Iran |
Nacim Pak-Shiraz (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies / Elvire Corboz (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) |
| Julien Mittre | Gender discourse in Tunisian legislation | Frédéric Volpi (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Ebtihal Mahadeen (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) |
| Leone Pecorini Goodall | Heirs to the Caliphate: Continuity, Territoriality and Gender in the accession of the late Umayyads and early Abbasids. |
Marie Legendre (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Yannis Stouraitis (History, Classics and Archaeology) / Tim Greenwood (History, University of St Andrews) |
| Salafist Political Identity in India |
Frédéric Volpi (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Elvire Corboz (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) |
|
| Moh Zaimil Alivin | Muslims in the Periphery: Intersectionality of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary Middle Eastern Diaspora Novels | Ebtihal Mahadeen (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Ines Aščerić-Todd (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Daniele Falcioni | ||
| Irene Ros | Performing Stragismo and Counter-spectacularisation: Italian Terrorism and Its Legacies |
Federica Pedriali (Italian) / Philip Cooke (Italian, University of Strathclyde) / Deirdre Heddon (Culture & Creative Arts, University of Glasgow) |
| Marco Ruggieri | The Young Eco's Library: Mass Culture and Interpretive Freedom in the Fascist Period |
Davide Messina (Italian) / Federica Pedriali (Italian) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Anna Vittinghoff | Yonezu Tomoko, ūman ribu and the disability movement - Radical intersectional feminism in Japan in the 1970s | Chris Perkins (Japanese) / Helen Parker (Japanese) |
|
Thesis title: Narratives and counter-narratives of 'cultural trauma' in post-3.11 Japanese cinema. |
||
| Frank Fan | To understand the development of Kaidan in Tokugawa Japan as a vehicle for the transmission of Buddhist, Confucian and National learning ideologies. | Ian Astley (Japanese) |
| Giuseppe Strippoli | The rise of a literary genre: Encounters between science fiction and the techno-scientific discourse in modern Japanese literature (late Meiji-beginning Shōwa) | Aaron Moore (East Asian Relations) / Alexandra Smith (Russian) |
| Matt Loten | The Abe Government and a Strategic Narrative Approach to Contemporary Japanese Politics | Chris Perkins (Japanese) |
| Olivia Putyer |
Representations of Intimacy in Japanese Contemporary Visual Art |
Chris Perkins (Japanese) |
Staff in Japanese are also supervising PhD projects in the following subjects at the University of Edinburgh:
- Film Studies
- Translation Studies
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Daniel Lee | A Study on 518 Narrative Identity and Its Effect on Social Change | Youngmi Kim (Korean) / Holly Stephens (Korean) |
| A Look at Life Success and Suicide: Critical Reflections from South Korean Young Adults | Youngmi Kim (Korean) / Amy Chandler (Health in Social Science) |
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Becoming heroes: construction(s) of masculine identity in medieval French and Northern Italian epic | ||
| Cameron Cross | Corpora Arcana: Investigating the Supernatural-Body Paradigm in Selected Old French and Middle High German Literature |
Fionnuala Sinclair (Medieval Literatures and Cultures) / Sabine Rolle (German) / Eleoma Bodammer (German) |
Can't find who you're looking for? Students undertaking PhD research with one or more supervisors based in Russian Studies can also be found under:
- English Literature
- Japanese
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Joe Wade | Making Old Norse New: Nynorsk saga translations as a tool for corpus planning and Norwegian nation building |
Guy Puzey (Scandinavian Studies) / Arne Kruse (Scandinavian Studies) / Hephzibah Israel (Translation Studies) |
Can't find who you're looking for? Students undertaking PhD research with one or more supervisors based in Scandinavian Studies can also be found under:
- Film Studies
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Beth Blakemore | The changing representation of Spanish moros and moriscos in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish literature | Jeremy Robbins (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) / Frauke Matthes (German; Comparative Literature) |
| Elisabeth Goemans | Global memory imperative translated: cultural memory and trauma related to dictatorial and gender-based violence in contemporary feminist Argentinian literature | Iona Macintyre (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) / Fiona Mackintosh (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) |
| The acquisition of tense and modality in Spanish as a second and third language in native English speakers. Contrastive analysis of grammatical transfers | Carlos Soler Montes (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) /
Michael Ramsammy (Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences) |
|
| Mario Saborido Beltrán | Linguistic Beliefs and Attitudes towards Dialectal Varieties of European Spanish: The Case of Ceceo, Seseo and Distinción | Carlos Soler Montes (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) / Iona Macintyre (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) |
| Rolando Bompadre | In development |
Can't find who you're looking for? Students undertaking PhD research with one or more supervisors based in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies can also be found under:
- Film Studies
Staff in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies are also supervising PhD projects in the following subjects at the University of Edinburgh:
- History of Art
- History
| Name | Thesis title | Supervisor(s) |
|---|---|---|
| David Hayes | English and French Liturgical Translations in the Latin Rite Catholic Church - Analysing Theoretical Approaches and Reception |
Hephzibah Israel (Translation Studies) / Véronique Desnain (French) |
| Hanyu Wang | Seeking the Other and the Self: The Translation and Reception of The L Word by Chinese Queer women |
Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (Translation Studies) / Charlotte Bosseaux (Translation Studies) |
| Karin Bosshard | Translating heteroglossia in contemporary Scottish fiction into German - the case of Ian Stephen's 'A Book of Death and Fish' from a theoretical and practical perspective | Hephzibah Israel (Translation Studies) / Eleoma Bodammer (German) |
| Katherine Heller | Fan Culture and Retranslation: The 'Sailor Moon' Franchise |
Charlotte Bosseaux (Translation Studies) / Yoko Matsumoto-Sturt (Japanese) |
| Yijia Dong | Reconstructing the Female Subject: the English Translation of Contemporary Chinese Women’s Writing |
Şebnem Susam-Saraeva (Translation Studies) / Christopher Rosenmeier (Chinese) |
Edinburgh Research Archive
Browse the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) by title, subject, supervisor or date to find out more about past PhD projects undertaken in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC).
ERA is a digital archive of original research produced by or affiliated with academic authors based at the University of Edinburgh. The archive contains doctoral theses, masters dissertations, project reports, briefing papers and out-of-print material.
Take me to the Edinburgh Research Archive
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As an online asset, with a place to talk about your research interests, expertise and thesis, and any teaching you do, your profile page is a useful digital footprint when establishing yourself as an early career researcher in a global community. To make the most out of it, you need to keep you profile up to date.
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