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.

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Celtic and Scottish Studies

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Dhanya Baird	In development	Abigail Burnyeat (University of the Highlands and Islands)
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)
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)

Chinese

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Beth Price	Colonialism undressed: Negotiating nudity and the female body in media, arts, and popular medical science in Republican China (1910s – 1949)	Natascha Gentz (Chinese) / Xuelei Huang (Chinese)
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

Comparative Literature

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Anna Chiari	Silent Trauma: The Case of Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras	Paul Crosthwaite (English Literature) / Susan Bainbrigge (French)
Matthis Hervieux	Franco-Japanese Intermedial Encounters in Roland Barthes, Michel Butor and Dany Laferrière	Fabien Arribert-Narce (French) / Marion Schmid (French)
Maxime Geervliet	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)

Creative Writing

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)
Lexie Angelo	Criminal spaces: Examining postcolonial places and their effect on criminality in contemporary Canadian and Scottish detective novels	Jane Alexander (English Literature) / Jane McKie (English Literature)
Maria Schiza	Ekphrasis as Encounter, Practice, and Framework	Miriam Gamble (English Literature) / Miriam Gamble (English Literature)

East Asian Studies

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Tsz Ho Wong	The Capital and Power Elites’ Networks of the Wartime Japanese Empire Dual-Use Items Industries and its Aftermath (1944-1955) (Provisional)	Aaron Moore (East Asian Relations) / Felix Boecking (History)
Shihui Yin	American Strategic Narratives of China's Belt and Road Initiative: Making Sense of the US Hegemony and its China Policy	Aaron Moore (East Asian Relations) / Frauke Matthes (German)
Yue Yang	How Does China Respond to Foreign Criticisms During the COVID-19 Pandemic	Youngmi Kim (Korean)

English Literature

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Ash Jayamohan	Fretwork in Modernist Writing	Benjamin Bateman (English Literature) / Carole Jones (English Literature)
Alice Florence Orr	The Function of Parenthesis in Spatial Production in Mid-century American Poetry	Lee Spinks (English Literature)
Alisha Palmer	Abortion and Women's Writing 1900-1940	Anouk Lang (English Literature)
Anupama Shukla	Metaphors, Euphemisms, Stigma: Epilepsy in Literature	Katherine Inglis (English Literature) / Lara Ryazanova-Clarke (Russian)
Carolina Palacious Guerra	Little Revolutions: Home, Identity, and Labour in Chicanx Literature	Keith Hughes (English Literature) / Celeste-Marie Bernier (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)
Eftihia Saxoni	Narrating (In) Transition: A Narratological Approach to Gender and Transformation	Benjamin Bateman (English Literature)
Erin Symons		Alexandra Lawrie (English Literature) / Paul Crosthwaite (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) / Carole Jones (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)
Kai Tjoon Lim	Post-queer Catalysts: Athwart Dynamisms of the In/Organic	Benjamin Bateman (English Literature)
Kunyu Tan	Economics and Ethics: Reconciling Self and Other in George Eliot’s Writings	Paul Crosthwaite (English Literature) / Anna Vaninskaya (English Literature)
Laura Brook	‘That drop of blood is my death-warrant’: John Keats and the Construction of Nineteenth-Century Patienthood	Katherine Inglis (English Literature) / Tim Milnes (English Literature)
Lewis Wood	Precarious queers and queer precarity: cross-cultural literary responses to AIDS from David Wojnarowicz to CAConrad	Benjamin Bateman (English Literature) / Glyn Davis (Film Studies, University of St Andrews)
Mariane Gallet	'Art for People's Sake': A Genealogy of Poetics of Resistance to Logics and Architectures of Institutional Racism	Keith Hughes (English Literature) / Alexandra Lawrie (English Literature)
Matthew Lear	Gathering the Mess: Repurposed Poetics and Anthropocene Time	David Farrier (English Literature) / Michelle Keown (English Literature)
Nadine Barakat	The Black Woman in the American ‘Space’: Narrating Movement and Resistance from Enslavement to Climate Injustice	Keith Hughes (English Literature)
Rachel Chung	Re-Dressing Rape: Sexual Violence in All-Femme Shakespeare	Suzanne Trill (English Literature) / Nicola McCartney (English Literature)
Sara Yahya Hamed		Robert Irvine (English Literature) / Timothy Milnes (English Literature)
Sheelalipi Sahana	Gendered Spaces in Modern India	Michelle Keown (English Literature)
Stephen M. Pett	Anglican Christianity and British Women Writers of the Mid-Nineteenth Century	Robert Irvine (English Literature) / Alison Jack (Divinity)
Yu-Hung Tien	American Keats: A Re-examination of the Literary Afterlives of John Keats through the Writing of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and F. Scott Fitzgerald	Andrew Taylor (English Literature) / Lee Spinks (English Literature)

European Theatre

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Emma Youmans	Community- Based Shakespeare for the 21st Century Stage: Actors and Intermediality	James Loxley (English Literature) / Nicola McCartney (Playwriting)
Judith Drake	The Case of Disability Theatre in Contemporary Scotland	Simon Malpas (English Literature) / Eleoma Bodammer (German)
Rebecca Mahar	Irregular and Wild: Celtic Identity, Influence, and Interpretation in 1 Henry IV	James Loxley (English Literature) / Dermot Cavanagh (English Literature)

Name

Thesis title

Supervisor(s)

Emma Youmans

Community- Based Shakespeare for the 21st Century Stage: Actors and Intermediality

James Loxley (English Literature) / Nicola McCartney (Playwriting)

Judith Drake

The Case of Disability Theatre in Contemporary Scotland

Simon Malpas (English Literature) /

Eleoma Bodammer (German)

Rebecca Mahar

Irregular and Wild: Celtic Identity, Influence, and Interpretation in 1 Henry IV

James Loxley (English Literature) / Dermot Cavanagh (English Literature)

Film Studies

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Emma Dussouchaud-Esclamadon	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)
Gustavo Herrera Taboada	"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
Katarina Zabecka	Identity and Belonging in Contemporary Film Encounters	David Sorfa (Film Studies) / Ana Salzberg (Film Studies)
Yi Song	Vulnerability in the Works of Contemporary Women Artists	Marion Schmid (Intermediality; French and Francophone Studies) / Francois Giraud (Intermediality; French and Francophone Studies)
Sam Warnock	Deconstructing Cinema: The Films of Yoshida Kiju	Chris Perkins (Japanese) / Helen Parker (Japanese)

French

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Benoît Loiret	The Dynamics of Music, Language, and Poetry in Yves Bonnefoy's Critical Works	Peter Dayan (French) / Marion Schmid (French)
Madeleine Banatvala	Beyond the Margins: the Off-modern in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Violette Leduc	Susan Bainbrigge (French) / Claire Boyle (French)

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
Intermediality
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

German

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:

East Asian Relations
European Theatre
Medieval Studies
Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
Translation Studies

Intermediality

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Julia Larsen	The Monster, the Body, and the Medium: Reimagining the Monster for Post-Millennial America	Marion Schmid (French) / Inma Sánchez García (Intermediality)
Lucy McMillan	The Femme Fatale in Contemporary Literature and the Moving Image: Adaptation, Intersectionality, and Intermediality	Marion Schmid (French) / Inma Sánchez García (Intermediality)

Can't find who you're looking for? Students undertaking PhD research with one or more supervisors based in Intermediality can also be found under:

Comparative Literature
European Theatre

Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Eleanor Beaton	Transnational family relationships and responsibilities among trans migrants from the MENA region living in Germany	Dr Ebtihal Mahadeen (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Dr Giulia Liberatore (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies)
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)
Bahar Fayeghi	Everyday resistance of Afghan women in Iran	Nacim Pak-Shiraz (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Elvire Corboz (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies)
Felícia Campos	Palestinian futurities: rap, hip-hop and future-making of Palestine	Ebtihal Mahadeen (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Nicola Perugini (Social and Political Science) / Hana Sleiman (History, Classics and Archaeology)
Julien Mittre	Gender discourse in Tunisian legislation	Frédéric Volpi (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) / Ebtihal Mahadeen (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies)
Mohammed Sinan Siyech	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)

Italian

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Daniele Falcioni
Elisa Vivaldi		Federica Pedriali (Italian)
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)

Japanese

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Arden Taylor	Loveliness of the Lost: Alternative Masculinities in Noh as seen through Atsumori	Helen Parker (Japanese) / Abigail MacBain (Japanese)
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)
Jorinde Wels	The Future of the Invisible and its Mediatization – ‘Deadly Germs’ in the Imagination of Infectious Disease Experts, the State, and Popular Culture in Japan, 1918-1958	Aaron Moore (East Asian Relations) / Jan Schmidt (KU Leuven) / Kaat Wils (KU Leuven)
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

Korean Studies

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Daniel Lee	A Study on 518 Narrative Identity and Its Effect on Social Change	Youngmi Kim (Korean Studies) / Holly Stephens (Korean Studies)
Estibaliz Saenz	A Look at Life Success and Suicide: Critical Reflections from South Korean Young Adults	Youngmi Kim (Korean) / Amy Chandler (Health in Social Science)
Sarah Vickery		Youngmi Kim (Korean Studies) / Holly Stephens (Korean Studies)

Medieval Studies

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Ana Inés Aldazabal	Magic and Witchcraft in the Burgundian Literary Imagination	Fionnuala Sinclair (Medieval Literatures and Cultures) / Julian Goodare (History)
Benni Campoleoni	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)
Moss Pepe	Transgender life in medieval French romance	Fionnuala Sinclair (Medieval Literatures and Cultures) / Cordelia Beattie (History)

Russian

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

Scandinavian Studies

Name	Thesis title	Supervisor(s)
Alex Payne	Boundaries of Distance Through Time: Climate Change as a Driver of Historic Othering in the Nordic Circumpolar	Alan Macniven (Scandinavian Studies) / Andrew Dugmore (Geosciences)
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)

Name

Thesis title

Supervisor(s)

Alex Payne

Boundaries of Distance Through Time: Climate Change as a Driver of Historic Othering in the Nordic Circumpolar

Alan Macniven (Scandinavian Studies) /

Andrew Dugmore (Geosciences)

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

Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American 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)
Inés Arteta	Gender Constructs and Intersectional Relations: A Study of Liliana Heker's Fictional Characters	Fiona Mackintosh (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies)
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	Fiona Macintosh (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies)

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

Translation Studies

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)
Katherine Heller	Fan Culture and Retranslation: The 'Sailor Moon' Franchise	Charlotte Bosseaux (Translation Studies) / Yoko Matsumoto-Sturt (Japanese)

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.

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Are you missing from our list?

A PhD profile is a great opportunity to establish your professional digital footprint. Your profile page is all about you and, if you are a University of Edinburgh student, is a part of the University website that you can set up directly, and update yourself, over your time with us.

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Once you have set up your profile, you will need to let the Marketing & Communications team know to appear on this list of current PhD students.

Let us know you have published your profile

All information on the School website is published in line with the University’s Privacy Policy. You can ask for your name and link to your profile to be removed from the School website at any time.

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If you want to remove your profile from the University website, you also need to unpublish it.

Find out how to unpublish your profile

How to manage your digital footprint

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.

Your profile is searchable and findable by people all over the world, so manage it as you would all the digital footprints you leave online. The Institute for Academic Development at the University has a great range of resources on how to understand and manage your online presence and develop skills in eProfessionalism. These include videos, guides and a free online course (MOOC).

Take me to the IAD’s resources on managing my digital footprint

This article was published on 2024-08-13