PhD

Information for

PhD Students

PhD Students CIRCL

CIRCL supervisors welcome applications for PhD research from applicants who have an interest in advanced research in Children’s Literature, as well as in literary and cultural studies in general. Please contact them by e-mail to describe your project, to see if it would be suitable for supervision at CIRCL. For general University guidelines on how to write a research proposal for an application, please go to: https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/graduateschool/writing_a_research_proposal_for_application.pdf

For information on fees, please go to the University web-site post-graduate fees page.

CIRCL PhD graduates have gone on to achieve academic careers at the Universities of Reading, Roehampton, Plymouth, Exeter, Manchester and East Anglia, as well as at Soochow University in Taiwan and Bunkyo University in Japan.

Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein 

• k.b.lesnik-oberstein@reading.ac.uk

Present PhD Students and their Supervisors and Projects

CIRCL has a large and active group of PhD students, both full and part-time and both home, EU and overseas. Most CIRCL PhD students complete the CIRCL M(Res) in Children’s Literature before they start on the CIRCL PhD in order to have already addressed and worked through significant issues and questions to have the best preparation for PhD research. Many CIRCL PhD students research in areas other than children’s literature or childhood because of the transdisciplinary critical theory which is CIRCL’s main focus.

Supervisor: Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein

Katy Corderoy

Researching ideas around ‘expression’.

Natalie England

Researching ideas around ‘adaptation’

Lex Nicholls

Researching ideas around mental health and the internet

Kasturi Roy Bardhan

Researching ideas around ‘invisible’ Dis/abilities

Claire Buckley

Researching childhoods in literature

James Gillick

Researching childhoods in education and pedagogy

Supervisor: Dr Neil Cocks

Lana Theodoulou

Researching Pokemon

Kate Rhodes

Researching construction of childhood in educational texts and practices.

Rachel Gauthier

Researching fandom and computer games.

Supervisor: Dr Sue Walsh

Sue is second supervisor to several of the PhD students listed above.

• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Ting Fang (Grace) Yeh
  “Art History and Textual Return: Reading Self-portrait, Geometry and Paint”
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Xiaoyu Hou
  ‘‘‘It Can Point to the World”: A Close Analysis of Representation in (Children’s) Literary Criticism, Psychology and Pedagogy’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Alex Hellens
  ‘No Man is an Island: Dethinking Island Methodologies’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Krissie Hunt
  ‘Reading Bodies and the Fairy Tale Gaze’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Soma Das
  ‘Reading Time and the Time of Reading’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Ian Mulholland
  ‘The Word Is All That Is The Case: A reading of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus”‘
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Natthavimol (‘Sai’) Wangsittikul
  ‘What is Manga? Reading Representation and Culture’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Haleemah Ziarab
  ‘Shakespeare and Narration: Feminism, Structure, History’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Liz Harris
  ‘”Never Too Rich or Too Thin” Readings About the Fat Body’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Rebecca Lindsay
  Psychoanalytic Readings of Language, the Unconscious, and the Desire for the Object
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Yuna Nam
  ‘Reading Differences from Children’s Picture Books: Constructing and De-constructing Images and Texts’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Bonnie McGill
  ‘Reading a formula(ting) of space(,)time and Quantum Mechanics’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Anindita Roy
  ‘Reading Child[ren] of Words and Pictures in Picture Books for Children: Three Essays on Picture Book Research’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Krissie West
  ‘”To Be Boy Eternal”: Locating the Child in the Literature and Criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Chris Milson
  ‘On Translation: Reading, Representation, and the Desire to Know’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Jessica Medhurst
  ‘The Child in Charles Dodgson’s Photographs and Their Criticism: Subject, History, Body and Archive’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Kia (Evdokia) Michalopoulou
  ‘The Case of the Purloined Child: Detective Fiction and Criticism’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Yu-Kuan Chen
  ‘Objects of Vision: Text, Colour, Gesture’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Charlie (Charlotte) White
  ‘The Child in Gothic’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Kirsty Pennicard-Wood
  ‘Plotting the Plot: The Plot Unravelled’.
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Catrin Edwards
  ‘Psychoanalysis Reading Psychoanalysis: Questions of Resistance and Interpretation’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Hilary Fraser
  ‘”Small Points of Difference”: the Child in Evolutionary Narratives’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Helen Ainslie
  ‘”Why Autism?” Perspectives, Communication, Community’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Elisabeth Eldridge
  ”In the Beginning was the Word”?: Quoting God and constructing the Child Reader in contemporary retellings of biblical narratives for children
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Louise Tondeur
  ‘Reading Hair Queer’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Sarah Spooner
  Knowing its Place? Language and Landscape in Arthur Ransome
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Hannah Smith (now: Anglin-Jaffe)
  ‘Signs, Text, Truth: Constructions of Deafness’
• Abstract PhD Thesis Dr Yuko Ashitagawa
  Reading and Writing the Primitive: Written Oralities and Fairy-Tale Studies.

PhD students and their thesis abstracts