m phil for phd in english

King's College London

English research mphil/phd.

Key information

Joint PhDs available: Exciting opportunities to gain a joint PhD with Hong Kong University (HKU), the National University of Singapore (NUS) or Humboldt University in Berlin.

King’s is one of the oldest English departments in the country and is home to a lively and supportive group of academics and students engaged in the exploration of literary cultures from the 7th to the 21st centuries. Academics in the department have cross-period interests in visual and material cultures; literature, medicine and science; gender and sexuality; colonial, postcolonial and transnational cultures; creative writing, life writing and performance; text, history, politics.

All members of staff are actively involved in research: most have gained an international reputation for the quality of their scholarship and are frequently called on to contribute their specialist knowledge to newspapers and other media. Staff in the department regularly attract large-scale research grants from the European Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Leverhulme Trust.

PhD students are at the heart of our Department and its research culture. We have over 100 doctoral students from all over the world working on a wide range of projects. Many are AHRC-funded and some are working on collaborative doctoral projects with our cultural partner institutions. Together with our community of postdoctoral fellows, our early career researchers both organise and participate in our thriving seminar and conference culture.

Research at the Department has been recognised in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, with 90 per cent overall rating for either ‘world leading’ (4*) or ‘internationally excellent’ (3*) research and 100 per cent at 4* and 3* for research environment. Current number of academic staff : 57 Current number of research students : 122

Recent publications:

Clare Birchall, Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America
Adelene Buckland, Victorian Material Culture: Raw Materials
Jon Day, Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia
Lara Feigel, Look! We Have Come Through! Living With D.H. Lawrence
Carl Kears, MS Junius 11 and its Poetry
Lucy Munro, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men
Luke Roberts, Glacial Decoys
Edward Sugden, Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture: Junctures of Time, Space, Self and Politics
Benjamin Wood , The Young Accomplice: A Novel

Current and recent research projects:

India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Decolonial Period: Archipelagic Imaginaries, 1950s-1970s
REDACT: Researching Europe, Digitalisation, and Conspiracy Theories (ESRC funded)
Stories from Rwanda: Agency, Editing and New Audiences (AHRC funded)
The Automation Imaginary, from 1822 to the Present (Leverhulme Trust funded)
Underwater Lives: Humans, Species, Oceans (Leverhulme Trust funded)

Current doctoral projects:

Elite Female Servants in Early Modern English Drama: Gender, Race and Status in Service
Branding Bondage: Racialised Slavery in the Mediterranean on the Early Modern English Stage (1560 - 1640)
The Myths I Became
The New Carthaginians / The Codex of Basquiat: Writing through his Paintings as an African Diasporic Poet
Pretending and Performing Gypsy Identity in Early Modern England
Enacting Scripts of Mourning: Mourning Rituals in the Performing Arts in the Interwar Period, 1918-1939
Modernist Up-topias: Imaginations of Height and Flight In Literature, Film, and Culture
'Dark Practices and Cunning Devices': The Materiality of Secrecy and Written Cultures of Security in Elizabethan England
Women, Archaeology and the Provincial Press
Changing Emotions in Early Modern Drama: Individual Agency and Social Frameworks

Joint PhDs available: Exciting opportunities to gain a joint PhD with either the National University of Singapore or Hong Kong University or Humboldt.

How to apply
Fees or Funding

UK Tuition Fees 2024/25

Full time tuition fees:

£6,168 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£6,168 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin/University of Hong Kong/National University of Singapore)

Part time tuition fees:

£3,084 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£3,084 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin)

International Tuition Fees 2024/25

£24,786 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£24,786 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin/University of Hong Kong/National University of Singapore)

£12,393 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£12,393 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin)

UK Tuition Fees 2025/26

£6,600 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£6,600 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin/University of Hong Kong/National University of Singapore)

£3,300 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£3,300 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin)

International Tuition Fees 2025/26

£27,100 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£27,100 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin/University of Hong Kong/National University of Singapore)

£13,550 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research)

£13,550 per year (MPhil/PhD, English Research with Humboldt-Universität Zu Berlin)

These tuition fees may be subject to additional increases in subsequent years of study, in line with King’s terms and conditions.

Study environment

Base campus

Strand Campus

Located on the north bank of the River Thames, the Strand Campus houses King's College London's arts and sciences faculties.

We place great emphasis on pastoral care and are a friendly and welcoming department. Our home in the new Virginia Woolf Building offers many spaces for postgraduate students to work and socialise. Studying in London means students have access to a huge range of libraries from the Maughan Library at King’s to the Senate House Library at the University of London and the British Library. In addition, archives and special collections abound: for instance The Women’s Library at LSE.

The department hosts a number of vibrant research seminars series and symposia open to all graduate students. In addition, there is a student-led graduate seminar series called ‘The Abstract’ and an online journal which allow students to present, discuss and publish their work. We also organise an annual graduate conference attended by students and staff in the department which provides a friendly and supportive forum in which research students can give papers on their work. Students are encouraged to organise their own events, with Departmental and College support.

Postgraduate training

There is a range of induction events and training provided for students by the Graduate School, the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the English Department.

A significant number of our students are AHRC-funded through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) which also provides doctoral training to all students. All students take the ‘Doctoral Seminar’ in their first year. This is a series of informal, staff-led seminars on research skills in which students can share and gain feedback on their own work.

We run a series of ‘Skills Lunches’, which are informal lunch meetings with staff, covering specific topics, including Upgrading, Attending Conferences, Applying for Funding and Post-Doctoral Awards, etc. Topics for these sessions are generally suggested by the students themselves, so are particularly responsive to student needs.

We have an Early Career Staff Mentor who runs more formal workshops of varying kinds, particularly connected to career development and the professions (for example, ‘Applying for Jobs’ and ‘How to Write an Academic CV’). Furthermore, individual research groups within the department also provide various forms of trainings, including ‘Work in Progress’ sessions, in which students raise research/methodology questions related to their own projects. Through our Graduate Teaching Assistantship Scheme, doctoral students are given the opportunity to teach in the department (usually in their second year of study) and are trained and supported as they do so.

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How To Apply

Cambridge is an outstanding place to work on Anglophone literature. Students and scholars benefit from world-class libraries, and from each other. The PhD cohort is diverse and large in number. No particular area or approach is preferred. Faculty members who act as supervisors and advisors for doctoral theses work on a great variety of topics and in varied ways. Proposals of all kinds are therefore welcome: from little-known as well as canonical authors, innovative and interdisciplinary perspectives, and more traditional thematic, theoretical, cultural, and literary-historical perspectives. Regular postgraduate training sessions offer guidance at every stage of the process - from first-year assessment to learning to teach to applying for jobs. In addition to the formal training, there are excellent opportunities for the sorts of enriching conversations and collaborations that emerge informally, between fellow PhDs, MPhils, and Faculty members. Some of these take place under the auspices of the student-run Graduate Research Forum. Regular Research Seminars focus on particular periods and fields (for instance, Medieval, Nineteenth Century, Postcolonial and Related Literatures); these combine internal and invited speakers, and encourage discussions and relationships between the entire research community. The Faculty also puts on occasional conferences on all manner of topics; like the research seminars, many of the most successful and exciting ones are conceived of and run by PhD students.

MPhil students in English Studies who wish to continue to the PhD must apply for admission through the University's admission processes, taking funding and application deadlines into consideration. Readmission is not automatic and each application is considered on its own merits. The expected standard for continuation is an overall mark of at least 70 in the MPhil course, including at least 70 for the dissertation. Other conditions may be imposed.

The University hosts and attends fairs and events throughout the year, in the UK and across the world. We also offer online events to help you explore your options:

Discover Cambridge: Master’s and PhD study webinars - these Spring events provide practical information about applying for postgraduate study.

Postgraduate Virtual Open Days - taking place in November each year, the Open Days focus on subject and course information.

For more information about upcoming events visit our events pages .

Key Information

3-4 years full-time, 4-7 years part-time, study mode : research, doctor of philosophy, faculty of english, course - related enquiries, application - related enquiries, course on department website, dates and deadlines:, michaelmas 2025.

Some courses can close early. See the Deadlines page for guidance on when to apply.

Easter 2026

Funding deadlines.

These deadlines apply to applications for courses starting in Michaelmas 2025, Lent 2026 and Easter 2026.

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