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On this page, you will further information about recent and current postgraduate students whose work has focused on the relationship between writing and place
'Singing Places of the Upper Reaches: Exploring Deep Resonance on the River Thames' (2020 - )
What is it about particular places on the Upper Thames that causes them to have significant resonance? How do those who live and work on the river experience this resonance? Is it possible to find a language and form to translate this resonance – this characteristic of place – into poetry, music and narrative non-fiction? Virginia's creative-critical project will explore such questions as it expands the field of place writing by focusing on the aural imagination.
‘For Rochdale: Reading, Mapping, and Writing Place in the Era of the Northern Powerhouse’ (2014-18) - Interdisciplinary English Studies Studentship Award, Manchester Met Cheshire
Jennie’s interdisciplinary, critical-creative work utilises approaches from the GeoHumanities - specifically literary geographical research and practice. Her thesis offers new creative responses to Rochdale while exploring the borough’s (his) stories, geographies, and cartographic and literary representations. Her research interests include: place writing praxis; urban studies; folklore and mythologies of place; critical and creative cartographies; practice-as-research; imaginative writing; and interrogating the somewhat fractious relationship between how place is made in the imagination and how it is portrayed in regeneration projects
'Writing the West Midlands: A GeoHumanities Approach to the Poetry of Place' (2016-)
How does creative-critical practice open up new ways to imagine and understand the complex geographies of the urban West Midlands? Natalie's research will: produce a substantial body of original poems drawn from field-work; review post-1960 West Midlands place poetry; examine the creative approaches used to highlight geographical themes; and expand regional knowledge and understanding, using existing spatial theories and auto-ethnography.
'Writing Manchester's Canals Into Place' (2017-)
Manchester's growth as industrial powerhouse was inextricably bound to building of man-made canals in the UK. Since the opening of the Bridgewater Canal in 1761, the role of canals in the country has shifted from industry to leisure. Manchester's waterways are simultaneously viewed through the filter of gentrification and avoided as neglected or threatening places. Sarah's research explores the place of the canals in today's city, using creative non-fiction and a hybrid approach to track her experience of walking along the towpaths, bringing in questions of psychogeography, new nature writing and memoir.
'Contemporary British Place Writing: Origins, Definitions, New directions’ (2019-2020)
This PhD by Publication (Route 2) focused on a trilogy of Lichtenstein’s books: On Brick Lane (2007), Diamond Street: the Hidden World of Hatton Garden (2012) and Estuary: Out from London to the Sea (2016) and demonstrated how these publications have contributed to, and helped to define, the existing body of work that has come to be included within the genre of contemporary place writing. Her thesis also articulated the unique ways her multi-media community-engaged site-specific creative praxis, that focuses on the geographical, cultural and social history of these urban and peri-urban spaces, pays particular attention to describing these locations through the oral testimonies of people who have lived and worked there over time, in order to reveal new and previously hidden histories.
‘North of Here: Past Imaginative Geographies of the North-West’ (2017-) - Vice-Chancellor PhD Scholarship
Richard is writing about the north-west of England during the Late-Glacial period, c. 15-10 kya, as perceived by the first peoples who returned following the retreat of the ice. He is specifically interested in their magico-religious beliefs and practices, as well as their attitudes towards the natural environment, its plants and animals.
‘Taking the Reader into the Woods: Walking in Woodland & the Writing of Fiction’
Anna’s PhD will explore the connection between walking, creative process and fiction with a focus on creative practice as a research method. The project will be structured around a series of intellectual, practical and creative explorations of woodland environments, in the hope that a symbiotic relationship will become apparent as these strands support and inform each other. Hence, the walks will form part of the generative process and guide both the creative work and the literary study, all of which will feed into the finished novel and thesis.