School of Language, Literature, and Media
Research
Pioneering research in language, literature, media, and the creative industries
Our school is home to a thriving research community whose work is at the heart of our research-led teaching and scholarship.
Our researchers in film studies, languages, linguistics, literature, and journalism regularly publish their work in leading journals and monograph series. Our acclaimed practitioner-researchers in theatre, filmmaking, and creative writing have produced award-winning poetry, fiction, drama, screenplays, and films.
Researchers in literary studies, film studies, theatre studies, and journalism study culture and communication in both their historical and their contemporary aspects. They work on a variety of cultural forms – novels, plays, poems, films, TV shows, podcasts, political broadcasts, and news stories – and an equally wide range of subject matter – covering everything from the cultural history of sensibility, the politics of utopian literature, and the films of Nora Ephron, to transnationalism in Chinese theatre, nostalgia in recent European cinema, and the role of media in broadcasting the Arab Spring.
Researchers in language and linguistics study the complexities of language from the perspectives of theory, application, and experimentation. Their work covers diverse topics, such as how children and adults learn languages, how the brain processes language, how social identity is encoded in the way a person uses language, and variations in the structure of languages across the world, especially in Africa and the Middle East. We look at the impact of multilingualism on diverse areas such as language learning and teaching, education policy, and violent conflict. We also study the development of language technologies and the mitigation of bias in AI systems. As well as informing our teaching and PhD supervision, this expertise is regularly drawn on by policymakers and public bodies. In the most recent REF, we were 1st in the UK for research impact and 3rd overall for research in modern languages and linguistics.
Practitioner-researchers in theatre, filmmaking, and creative writing produce innovative and impactful work that enriches the cultural field and inspires our students. Staff in these areas have expertise in poetry, fiction, memoir, travel writing, playwriting, screenwriting, and documentary and fiction filmmaking. Notable successes in recent years have included plays performed at Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and broadcast on Radio 4, award-winning work in contemporary poetry and memoir, modern adaptations of Ovid and Dante, and critically acclaimed contributions to the New Nature Writing.
60 Stories: It ain't what you say...
Essex accents are maligned for sounding thick, a scouser might seem friendly and the Glaswegians, well they’re all looking for a fight. These are some of the stereotypes attached to regional British accents. Essex researchers are studying regional accents, the way we sound and how we are perceived because of our voices.
Research clusters
African Languages
American Literatures and Cultures
Comparative Literature and Translation
The study of literatures in a transnational and transcultural series of contexts is at the core of our research activity. Our researchers work in the key original areas of British, Irish, United States, Caribbean, Latin American and also in Hispanic, Francophone, Italian, German, Polish, Yugoslav, Russian and Chinese literatures.
Creative Writing and Scriptwriting
Ecocriticism, Green Writing, and Literary Geographies
English Language Teaching
This cluster explores a wide range of English language teaching contexts with interests in areas such as the use of literature as a resource for language teaching, the affective dimension of language learning and teaching such as language learner anxiety and language teacher emotions and multilingual pedagogies.
Experimental Linguistics
Language Policy and Multilingualism
Language Variation, Identity and Interaction
Linguistic Diversity and Theoretical Linguistics
We are interested in the diversity of the world’s languages. With some 7000 languages found around the world, there is a substantial amount of linguistic diversity. We are interested in studying this diversity, as well as in ways in which a better understanding of this diversity can contribute to our understanding of human language.
Human Rights and the Humanities
Bringing together scholars and practitioners specialising in journalism, theatre-making, playwriting, filmmaking, film theory and literature, our research explores the role of the media and the arts in conflict and post-conflict settings around the world and in situations where disregard of human rights and statelessness are the result of political and legal actions supported by exclusionary ideological frameworks.
Speculative Humanities
Our research analyses how speculative literatures inform decision-making from government policy to corporate futures, and the mutual influence between technology, scientific discovery and cultural forms and representations. Our aim is to foster greater collaboration between the arts and humanities, the social sciences, STEM and beyond.
60 Stories: Writing the natural world
There is a climate emergency and humankind’s relationship with the natural world is in crisis. By combining literature with new ways of exploring landscape and the environment, we are revealing how art can play a vital role in healing the rift between people and our planet.
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