English

English, one of the highest-ranked disciplines at UL (QS University Rankings 2022), is home to students and scholars who study and create powerful writing. As teachers and researchers, English staff encourage enquiry across a range of perspectives and traditions, through a variety of degree programmes and activities.

Our staff work in a wide array of specialisms, including Irish, American, and world literatures; creative writing; the study of gender and sexualities; modernisms; migration and postcolonial studies; and medieval and early modern literature and culture.

We teach and publish widely on topics such as Irish studies; eighteenth-century poetry; environmental and medical humanities; contemporary North American fiction; Irish gothic literature; twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry; the nineteenth-century New Woman; Shakespearean drama; science fiction and fantasy literature; Renaissance women’s writing; Utopian writing; human rights discourse and affect theory; and trauma in contemporary women’s fiction.

Our students use the creative and critical skills they develop in our modules to create new cultural realities.

English at Postgraduate Level

The MA in English and the MA in Creative Writing.
The MA in English provides opportunities and skills for the advanced study of literatures in English, literary and cultural theory, and textual practices, while the MA in Creative Writing offers workshop- and literature-based modules, integrating the expertise of our faculty in creative writing and literary study. UL Creative Writing graduates have published novels, short stories, poems and nonfiction and have won or been shortlisted for major awards including the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award, the RTÉ Francis McManus Award, the Arts Council Next Generation Award, the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair Prize, the Listowel Writers’ Week Bryan McMahon Short Story Award, Irish Literary Critic of the Year Award, and the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Fiction.

As a student of English literature at UL you will have exciting opportunities to study and work in Europe and around the world through international exchange and work placement programmes. In your undergraduate career you will have the chance to develop your own research interests and passions to shape independently an extended, final-year research project (FYP). Throughout your studies, you will collaborate with your peers and engage individually with award-winning teachers and researchers. A degree in English provides vital skills such as the ability to see connections between a multiplicity of ideas and disciplines, to understand the nuances of language, to interpret written and cultural texts of all kinds, to write effectively and persuasively, and to move between print and digital worlds. Our graduates are passionate about the written and spoken word. They go on to become teachers, researchers, editors, consultants, entrepreneurs, public servants and community activists, and to work in media and public relations. Our MA and PhD graduates also work in academic institutions and as professional writers.

We look forward to collaborating with you on your educational journey!

English at Undergraduate Levels

The principal entry route to studying English as part of an undergraduate degree at UL is via

Academic Staff in English Section