Our REF submission
Between REF 2014 and REF 2021, we saw substantial growth in the scale of our research activity, increasing the volume of staff submitted for assessment by 25%.
Our submission to this unit of assessment featured contributions from 17 people, 37 outputs and two impact case studies:
- Stories of Sacrifice: increasing cross-cultural, cross-faith awareness and dialogue through a public exhibition and collaboration with the Armed Forces, police, and schools.
- Developing automated linguistic analysis and annotation tools to support collaborative learning, professional translation, policy making and HE management decisions.
This area of our work also saw eight doctoral awards and £170k research income during the REF 2021 period.
Our research
Research in English Language and Literature is hosted by the School of English, situated in our Institute of Media and English within our Faculty of Arts, Design and Media.
The primary driver of research excellence in this area the intellectual curiosity of our academic staff and doctoral students. We have an eclectic understanding of our discipline, with staff engaged in activities ranging from software development and quantitative analyses to public exhibitions and creative forms of expression.
Research in English is coordinated through our two research clusters:
- Descriptive Linguistics, including Corpus Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and Language and the Law.
- Literary Studies, especially the Long Eighteenth Century and the Modern Period, also encompassing Drama and Creative Writing.
Our outputs and impact case studies demonstrate the power of English to reinvent its historic boundaries and form new alliances, and we work increasingly with researchers in Law and Social Sciences.