Centre
Centre for Research in Literature Linguistics and Culture
Unit(s) of assessment: English Language and Literature
Research theme(s): Safety and Sustainability | Digital, Technology and Creative
School: School of Arts and Humanities
Overview
The Centre for Research in Literature, Linguistics and Culture is a multi- and interdisciplinary hub that promotes research innovation across Literary Studies, Linguistics, and Media, Film, and TV Studies. Our work advances new directions in criticism and scholarship, and we work with our partners to develop research that is culturally and socially significant, and publicly valuable. The Centre is comprised of five Research Groups which represent our collaborative and interdisciplinary strengths. The Centre has attracted funding from the AHRC, Arts Council, England, British Academy, ESRC, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
Research groups
Critical Poetics Research Group
Established in 2015, Critical Poetics is an interdisciplinary research group that seeks to stimulate debate, collaboration and innovation among scholars and practitioners whose work is concerned with creative and critical theory and practice
Language, Identities and Institutions Research Group
This interdisciplinary research group comprises members from across NTU in linguistics, psychology, politics and international relations, global and sustainable development, computer science, criminology, youth and community studies, film and TV.
Media and Film Cultures
The Media and Film Cultures Research Group engages with creative and innovative approaches to contemporary critical theory and cultural studies with particular focus on film, media, arts, gender/sexuality, and commons/commoning.
Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group
NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group brings together researchers who address the impact of colonialism, postcolonial thinking, decoloniality, and global justice, with an emphasis on culture and creativity.
Periodicals and Print Culture Research Group
The Periodicals and Print Culture Research Group (PPCRG) aims to develop work on the study of modern periodicals and print culture (from the nineteenth century to the present).
Selected current and recent funded projects
Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project
The Lincolnshire Folk Tales project explores, preserves and celebrates the rich, yet often overlooked, oral storytelling traditions of Lincolnshire in the East Midlands.
Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics
This project builds on a small pilot study funded by NTU, which proposed a theoretical and methodological framework to account for the post-millennial revival of horror movies in popular Turkish cinema.
Researchers Revealed
Rewriting the narrative. Find out how Dr Jenni Ramone’s research is changing the narrative on breastfeeding.
Ay up me duck! Natalie Braber, Professor of Linguistics, explores the fields of sociolinguistics and language variation. Watch her and our students talk about the local Nottinghamshire dialect and find out more about her research.
Publications
- Natalie Braber, ‘Scabs, Pickets and Camraderie: Words and Memories of East Midlands Coal Miners’ in Sophie van den Elzen and Ann Rigney (eds), Memory and the Language of Contention (Brill, 2025)
- Cüneyt Çakırlar, Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025)
- Cüneyt Çakırlar and Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, ‘Families in Constant Crisis: Ömer’s Nostalgia, Critical Affordances of TV Genres, and the Politics of Intimacy in “New Türkiye”’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 63 (2025)
- Anna Milon and Rory Waterman (eds), Lincolnshire Folk Tales Reimagined (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2025)
- Alice Paver, David Wright, and Natalie Braber, ‘Stereotyped accent judgements in forensic contexts: listener perceptions of social traits and types of behaviour’, Frontiers in Communication 9 (2025)
- Jenni Ramone, Global Literature and Gender (London: Routledge, 2025)
- Andrew Taylor, There’s Everything to Play For: The Poetry of Peter Finch (Bridgend: Seren Books, 2025)
- Andrew Thacker, ‘Representation’ in Elizabeth Evans (ed), Space and Literary Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
- David Wright, Corpus Approaches to Discourse in Forensic and Legal Contexts (London: Routledge, 2025)
- David Wright, ‘The importance of context in analysing the incitement of violence: a case study of an online community’ in Sofia Rüdiger and Daria Dayter (eds), Manipulation, Influence and Deception: The Changing Landscape of Persuasive Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
- Francesca Hardy, The Body in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave Films (London: Routledge, 2024)
- Jenni Ramone, '“There are things you don't need to be told. You suckle them at your mother's teat”: Dynamic Subjectivity, Breastfeeding, and Storycrafting in The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi', in Sheldon George and Jean Wyatt (eds), Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing (London Bloomsbury, 2024)
- Andrew Taylor, European Hymns (Swindon: Shearsman Books, 2024)
- Andrew Thacker, ‘“Rest. Stay.” Life in the hotels of Katherine Mansfield’, Katherine Mansfield Studies (2024)
- Rory Waterman, Come Here To This Gate (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2024)
- Rory Waterman, Endless Present: Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23 (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2024)
- David Wright and Charlotte Kennedy, ‘Discourses of force and failure: the construction of crisis in the policing of UK climate change protests’ in Tamsin Parnell, Ton Van Hout, and Dario Del Fante (eds), Critical Approaches to Polycrisis: Discourses of Conflict, Migration, Risk and Climate (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
- David Wright and Isabel Picornell, ‘Semiotic perspectives on forensic and legal linguistics: unifying approaches in the language of the legal process and language in evidence’, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 37: 1 (2024)
- Heather Alberro, ‘“The Great Refusal”: Radical Environmental Resistance Against Contemporary Ecological Breakdown’ in Elisa Orofino & William Allchorn (eds), The Routledge Handbook on Non-Violent Extremism (London: Routledge, 2023)
- Natalie Braber, ‘Community projects’ in Hazel Price and Dan McIntyre (eds), Communicating Linguistics: Language, Community and Public Engagement (London: Routledge, 2023)
- Natalie Braber, Harriet Smith & Jeremy Robson, ‘Assessing the Specificity and Accuracy of Accent Judgments by Lay Listeners‘,Language and Speech 66:2 (2023)
- Cüneyt Çakırlar, ‘Curating Folk Horror: Anti-Canonisation, Critical Transnationalism, and Crossover Festival Programming’, Frames Cinema Journal 21 (2023)
- Elif Akçalı, Cüneyt Çakırlar, Özlem Güçlü, Mustang: Translating Willful Youth (London: Routledge, 2023)
- Laura Coffey-Glover and Victoria Howard, ‘At the breast is best?’ A corpus-informed feminist critical discourse analysis of the marginalisation of expressing human milk in online infant feeding promotional discourse’, Discourse, Context & Media 55 (2023)
- Laura Coffey-Glover and Jai Mackenzie, 'Balancing family time with fighting villains': Gender, agency and social action in the representation of Disney Heroes’, Gender and Language 16: 4 (2023)
- Sarah Jackson, Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)
- Stephanie Palmer, ‘Reviews Outside the Usual Places: Daily Newspaper Reviews of Edith Wharton in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,’ Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 14.1 (2023)
- Stephanie Palmer, Myrto Drizou, and Cecile Roudeau (eds), New Perspectives on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Reading with and against the Grain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
- Andrew Rothwell, Joss Moorkens, María Fernández-Parra, Joanna Drugan, and Frank Austermuehl, Translation Tools and Technologies (London: Routledge, 2023)
- Andrew Thacker & Tim Satterthwaite (eds), Magazines and Modern Identities: Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).
- Andreas Wittel and Götz Bachmann, ‘Solidarity in the digital commons’, in Kerstin Schmidt & Joost Van Loon, Herausforderung Solidarität: Konzepte - Kontroversen – Perspektiven (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2023).
Re:search Re:imagined Podcast
Listen to special episodes of the Re:search Re:imagined podcast with Centre staff.
Episode 4 “Ay up miduck!” - Exploring Nottingham culture and why it matters - Listen to Episode 4
Episode 17 - Preserving our legacy: Black History beyond October - Listen to Episode 17
News
NTU News articles about our Centre members can be seen below. Our staff also contribute to news articles outside of NTU, including for The Conversation.
- ‘Edwardian local press invented the “middlebrow” with a lively mix of local news, reviews and fiction’
- 'All of Us Strangers: coming to terms with the grief and trauma of being gay in the 1980s'
Professor Rory Waterman has regularly contributed to BBC Lincolnshire's 'Secret Lincolnshire' podcast featuring on episodes about:
Dr Laura Coffey-Glover contributed to the following news articles as an expert commentator:
Distinguished Professor becomes NTU’s first elected to the British Academy
Fri 21 Jul 2023
Expert blog: Can New Weird Fiction Help Us Tackle the Climate Crisis?
Wed 22 Mar 2023
Regional accents are a bar to legal careers, researchers find
Tue 31 Jan 2023
Sharon Monteith's book wins second international prize
Mon 5 Sep 2022
Accountability for COVID-19 policies was blurred during televised briefings, study shows
Wed 24 Aug 2022
Expert blog: Long after midnight. On our new nuclear fears
Wed 2 Mar 2022
Saying ‘respect’ in court can in fact mean the opposite, study shows
Thu 6 Jan 2022
Expert blog: Perfect storm for a Black revolution
Mon 10 May 2021
PhD students
We supervise a number of research students in the Centre.
Collaboratory Research Hub
Collaboratory Research Hub brings together university researchers, citizens, and community organisations to tackle real-world challenges across Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Rutland.
Fully funded PhD studentships
Our fully funded PhD studentship competition is now open and we are looking for talented researchers to join our inclusive community. In return our studentships will cover the full cost of your PhD fees and a tax-free stipend for living expenses.