The English Literature and the Global Research Group will continue to cross into history, history of art, politics, historiography, and cultural theory – other disciplines that are also reckoning with the diminishing importance of Britain, and lingering questions about British intellectual thought.

Our primary research interests as a group are diverse—covering the period of Shakespeare up to contemporary fiction, ranging between fine art and under-researched archives—but they are also focused on the written text. We believe that by exploring the written text as it emerges differently in time and space, we are better able to explore the global world today. Our recent research, for instance, has:

• examined pan-European networks of Romantic writers to identify how the ‘global’ emerged throughout the nineteenth century;
• explored book-prize winners and led to examinations of the importance of decolonising and diversifying the curriculum;
• unearthed lesser-known writers’ biographies in the archives to demonstrate the longer history of queer identities than has yet been recognised.

Our research is thus original in scope, and global in its wider contexts. We already work with colleagues across Europe and in South America, and our research students include those jointly supervised with colleagues in Saudi Arabia, and Welsh-based students include those examining writing from Japan. These approaches and focuses on the global—nested throughout the CSESP English Literature research community—feed in especially to the University Research Strategy as manifested in the Global Academies (GA). We intend to expand the GA through our research and to demonstrate the significance of reading literature in English to help explore the global community.