English Research Group

Barrie Llewelyn

Creative writer Barrie Llewelyn developed and leads the Speak to Me project (which has been funded in its various iterations by Literature Wales’s Literature for Well-Being Funding Scheme, Civic Activity Funding, Research Funding, Keif Funding and Build Back Better Funding). In January 2020 Syrian and Sudanese refugees resettled in Rhondda Cynon Taff were paired with local English speakers in a series of creative workshops. The project investigated the role of creativity in language acquisition and also aided integration and the understanding of each other’s cultures. The output was an exhibition of words, photographs, art and sound recordings. Speak to Me activities have continued with an online woman’s group who met during the Covid 19 lockdowns, with monthly walk and talk groups that have visited places like Tenby, Skirrid Fawr, St Fagans National Museum of History, Gwaelod y Garth and London, to name a few. There have been several more six week creative projects and one day activities. Barrie has also published two book chapters on this project so far.

Dr Rhian Webb

Dr Rhian Webb worked with Professor Kenan Dikilitas, from Stavanger University, Norway, to explore the impact of Covid-19 on TESOL education globally. Education moved from being a physical to digital experience overnight and teachers delivered lessons without training or experience. This research explored the impact of this on teachers’ beliefs, roles, practices and feelings post pandemic. The topics were discovered from a pilot qualitative questionnaire, which was distributed to 50 TESOL contacts in 25 countries. From this, a quantitative and qualitative questionnaire was constructed and distributed using the snowball sampling technique. More than 500 responses from 42 countries have been received.

Many TESOL practices undertaken during the lockdown will not be reversed as the pandemic changed global English Language teaching. It is important to research and document what changes have taken place by teachers. Findings will create an understanding of future teacher education needs and training requirements, which will impact the TESOL industry globally.

Prof Diana Wallace

Professor Wallace’s most recent publication is a new edition of Margiad Evans’s Autobiography (1943) for Honno’s Welsh Women’s Classics series. An outstanding piece of nature writing, Autobiography explores in delicate and precise detail Evans’s relationship with the Welsh borders landscape around Ross on Wye. This new edition was published, with a scholarly introduction by Professor Wallace, in Autumn 2022. It was reviewed in Nation Cymru where Jon Gower commented that ‘Margiad Evans’ pulsing, invigorating words in this marvellous volume are ineffably beautiful, tellingly honest and strikingly true’ and The Guardian where the reviewer noted Wallace’s ‘perceptive introduction’ to this ‘Visionary and lyrical’ text.

Dr Rebecca Hutcheon

Dr Hutcheon’s most recent book, New Approaches for Digital Literary Mapping: Chronotopic Cartography, co-authored by Sally Bushell (Lancaster University), reconsiders what the focus of digital literary mapping should be for English Literature, what digital tools should be employed, and to what interpretative ends. It asks: how can we harness the digital to find new ways of understanding spatial meaning in the Humanities? It explores the potential of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ as a way of structuring digital literary maps that provides a solution to the complexities of mapping time and space. This method is then applied to mapping the realist novel by way of Dickens, and then to the multiple states of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

Hutcheon is also a co-director of the social enterprise company Litcraft: Bringing the Text to Life. Litcraft makes accurate scale models of literary worlds in Minecraft to re-engage children with reading through play. It has school and library collaborators across the UK. Cardiff Libraries are its most recent partnership.

Professor Mike Chick

In 2023, Prof Chick and Learning and Work Institute were commissioned by the Welsh Government to review their policy on language education for migrants in Wales, with recommendations from the review informing both policy and practice. At present, Prof Chick is researching the role the Welsh language might play in fostering a sense of belonging amongst those people seeking sanctuary in Wales.

In February 2020, Prof Chick and Dr Catherine Camps were awarded a £4k grant from Advance HE to conduct research with students and alumni of the scheme in order to understand how it benefitted them, and how their well-being can be transformed as a model for further developments.

Professor Kevin Mills

Research on St Cadoc/Catwg, one of founders of Christian Wales and an early contender for patron saint, by poet and critic Kevin Mills has led to a series of publications and a co-authored experimental drama. Professor Mills’ award-winning poetry pamphlet, Stations of the Boar (2016), led to a co-authored play, Cadoc and the Drowned Boys, which was performed in Blackwood Little Theatre and seven churches named after the saint, and to a sequence of poems in his collection, Zeugma (2020). It has also led to the formation of a CIC theatre company, Contemporancient Theatre, which is now planning a new project based on Professor Mills’ research on Dr Richard Price.

Dr Rhian Webb

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Dr Rhian Webb undertook two collaborative research projects with Nicky Partridge from Peartree Languages, Cardiff, which were funded by USW’s Partnership and Engagement Programmes and USW’s Strategic Impact Planning Fund respectively. The research explored digital online learning with a specific focus on breakout rooms. Participants included undergraduate USW TESOL students, who managed breakout room activities during Peartree Languages’ online lessons, which were delivered to over 80 international learners from 12 countries. The research informed online live teaching practices and was at the cutting edge of industry requirements during the pandemic. In 2022, Dr Webb undertook a collaborative research project with Professor Kenan Dikilitas at University of Stavanger, Norway, which was funded by USW’s English Research Fund. The research explored the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on TESOL education globally through an examination of teachers’ beliefs, roles, practices and feelings about teaching and learning post pandemic and the impact of these on traditional thinking.

Interior Monologues (February – March 2019) was an exhibition and zine publication highlighting the work of seven artists and eight writers all working in response to artworks selected from the USW art collection.

The title of the exhibition is a play on words meaning both a person's inner voice and the personal truths revealed through choices of interior décor. As a literary device the Interior monologue creates a window into the mental processes of a character. Modernist writers such as May Sinclair, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf used interior monologues to challenge literary form and to convey the psychology of their protagonists.

The USW writers – Tony Curtis, Cathy Dreyer, Judith Goldsmith, Dale Frances Hay, Maria Lalić, Colum Sanson-Regan, Melanie Smith - were invited to contribute stream of consciousness writing in prose or poetry which was then displayed in the gallery alongside with the artworks and printed in the accompanying free zine.

Professor Philip Gross

As a prize-winning poet, novelist and teacher of Creative Writing, Emeritus Professor Philip Gross’s work is concerned with the development of individuals’ creative practice (both adults’ and children’s), outside the academy as well as inside it. His work has led to a wider awareness of the ways in which creative process can enhance our understanding of some of the most urgent challenges of contemporary society.

Since 1993, Professor Gross has published twenty collections of poetry, including the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning The Water Table (2009) and Deep Field (2011),and three collections of poetry for young people, including the prize-winning Off Road to Everywhere (2010), as well as nine novels.

His work has enhanced consciousness of environmental issues and impacted on thinking about the disintegration of language and its implications for the personality.

Professor Jane Aaron

Since 1997, Emeritus Professor Jane Aaron has been the founding and continuing editor of the series ‘Welsh Women’s Classics’, published by the independent Welsh feminist press Honno. Professor Diana Wallace joined her as co-editor on the series in 2025. The series aims to bring back into print virtually forgotten texts. Thirty six volumes have appeared to date, five of which Aaron edited and introduced while three have been edited by Wallace.

Their impact on the reading public and on higher educational institutions in Wales has been considerable; far more Welsh women writers – the majority of them published in the series – are taught, researched and read today than in the mid-1990s.

Each edition includes a scholarly introduction setting the work in its historical context. Writers published in the series include Margiad Evans, Dorothy Edwards, Hilda Vaughan, Menna Gallie, Eiluned Lewis and Amy Dillwyn. Recent publications include Allen Raine’s A Welsh Witch (1902) edited by Jane Aaron, and Margiad Evans’s Autobiography (1943) edited by Professor Diana Wallace.

• Dr Ayo Amuda
• Professor Mike Chick
• Dr Nic Dunlop
• Rebecca Hutcheon
• Barrie Llewelyn
• Professor Kevin Mills
• Professor Diana Wallace
• Dr Rhian Webb

Professor Jane Aaron is the editor of Honno Press’s reprint series Welsh Women’s Classics, for which she has edited five volumes. Her monographs include Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales (2007), which won the 2009 Roland Mathias Award, and Welsh Gothic (2013), and a biography of the nineteenth-century woman writer and editor, Cranogwen, which won the Creative Non-Fiction award in the Wales Book of the Year 2024. She was a co-founder of the UWP series Gender Studies in Wales.

Professor Tony Curtis is a poet, critic and writer of fiction who introduced Creative Writing to the campus over thirty years ago. He is the author of numerous collection of poetry and his Fortunate Isles; New and Selected Poems was published by Seren in 2016. His most recent publications include a novel, Darkness in the City of Light, and a poetry collection entitled Leaving the Hills. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Professor Gavin Edwards has published on the poetry of George Crabbe, theories of narrative, travel writing and book history. study of innovative uses of a typographic case, The Case of the Initial Letter: Charles Dickens and the politics of the dual alphabet, was published in 2020. From 2010 to 2012 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Professor Philip Gross is a writer of many parts, author of poetry, fiction and drama for children and adults and Professor of Creative Writing. Winner of a hat-trick of major awards within the last few years – the TS Eliot poetry prize for The Water Table, Wales Book of the Year for ‘I Spy Pinhole Eye’ and the CLPE Award for children’s poetry for Off-Road To Everywhere, and the Roland Mathias Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year) for Love Songs of Carbon. His most recent publications are The Thirteenth Angel (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize) and The Shores of Vaikus.

Professor Jeremy Hooker is a poet and critic. His criticism and scholarship focus on Anglophone Welsh writing, including David Jones and John Cowper Powys, modern British and American poetry, the English rural tradition (e.g. Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy, and Edward Thomas), and British landscape painting. His collected poems, The Cut of the Light: Poems 1965-2005, was published in 2006 and a collection of his critical essays, Ditch Vision: Essays on Poetry, Nature, and Place, was published in 2017. His most recent publications include With a Stranger’s Eyes and a collaboration with the sculptor Lee Grandjean, Presence and Place.

Professor Christopher Meredith is a novelist, poet, critic, and translator, as well as doing a little writing for radio and the stage, and articles and reviews, fiction and verse for many magazines. His first novel, Shifts (1988), is regarded as the classic novel of post-industrialization in South Wales and is now ‘an automatic choice’ as a set text on any university course on Welsh writing in English. It was republished in Parthian’s Library of Wales series in 2023. His most recent books are a novella, Please, and a collection of poetry entitled Still.

Professor Jeff Wallace’s main research interests are in science and literature since Darwin, modernism, D.H. Lawrence, contemporary writing, and posthumanism. His most recent publication is a monograph entitled Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman (2023). He is Emeritus Professor of English at Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Jan Tunley, PhD
Title: Self and Others in the role of Woman: Selima Hill, Liz Lockhead and Rupi Kaur.

Katriona Rees, MPhil/PhD
Title: Anglo-Welsh gothic genre fiction.

Juliet Larsen, PhD
Title: Religion, Folk Belief and the Sacred Landscape in Women’s Writing in Wales, 1847 – 1909.

Dr Carolyn Reagon, PhD by Portfolio
Title: Depictions of space and place in contemporary ghost novels: fostering the uncanny and reflecting social identities and relationships.

Rev David Parry
Title: Cultivating Presence: A conceptual autoethnography examining my rejection of received representation in contemporary miracle and mystery traditions.

Emily Grist, MA by Research
Title: Representations in Gay Wales: A Comparison of Gender Representations and Queer Experiences in Contemporary Welsh Literature.

Nazmia Jamal, MA by Research
Title: Lesbians Talk Issues – 50 years of shifting lesbian feminisms in Britain.

Joanne Spearman, MA by Research
Title: Genre and Politics: The Historical Fictions of Godwin and Shelley.