PhD Applications

PhD Admission Procedures

To be eligible for consideration to enter on a programme of study and research for the Degree of PhD, a candidate must have obtained a standard of at least Second Class Honours, Grade I, in an approved primary degree.  It is increasingly the case that applicants for a PhD will have completed an MA prior to embarking on PhD research. 

Before making an application, we advise you to consult the research profiles of our staff and contact a staff member who has expertise in the area in which you are interested and who may be willing to act as your supervisor.  All applications for a PhD in English (and in the College of Arts more generally) must include a Research Proposal, which your prospective supervisor will want to read before you submit a formal application.  You may receive some guidance on improving your proposal before the formal application.  If you would like to make a general enquiry about the posibility of doing research on a particular topic, please contact the Chair of the Graduate Studies Committee, currently Dr Maureen O'Connor: maureen.oconnor@ucc.ie 

All applications (whether EU or Non-EU) are made online through UCC's application system

Once your application is received by UCC via PAC, it will be forwarded to the Department of English, and approved by the named supervisor(s) and the Head of Department.   It must then be approved by the College of CASSS. The process, from initial enquiry to final approval, can take several months, so do be sure to plan well in advance.  There are 4 recognised start dates for PhD students in UCC: October, January, April and July.  

In the case of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, all successful applicants are registered as "PhD track" (i.e. provisional registration for a PhD) in the first instance. Students will be subject to a review within 12 to 18 months from the date of registration and will be required to demonstrate progress in the form of 10,000 words minimum written work, as well as defending their work at interview. Students may then, on the recommendation of the Head of Department and the Supervisor(s) and with the approval of the College/Faculty, transfer to the PhD. 

For further guidance on application procedures, fees and entrance requirements please consult the following links:

Study@UCC: Postgraduate Students

Studyabroad@UCC (International Students)

PhD Scholarships

Information about the PhD Excellence Scholarships provided by the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences PhD Excellence Scholarships is published on the CACSSS Graduate School website.

PhD students are also encouraged to apply to the IRC's Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Programme. More information on deadlines for the Irish Research Council scholarships can be found IRC website.

Scholarships & Awards

The graduate students and postgraduate researchers of the Department of English have an excellent track record in securing scholarships and research funding, in what is an increasingly competitive environment.  The various awards made are listed here by year:

2018

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Sarah McCreedy "The Resurgence of American Literary Naturalism in the Neoliberal 21st Century"

2017

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Kieran Nee "Solastalgic America: Literature of the environmental psyche"

2016

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Ciaran Kavanagh "Reading Postmodernism: Indeterminacy, Instability and the Changing Role of the Modern Reader"

Fiona Whyte "On Lindisfarne: A Novel"

Loretta Goff  "Hyphenating Ireland and America: Examining the Construction of Contemporary Hybrid Identities in Film and Screen Media 1990-2015"

Patricia O'Connor "Retrieving the Textual Environment of the "Old English Bede": A Digital Remediation of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41"

Sean Travers "Innovative Representations of Trauma in Contemporary Literature, Postmodernism and Popular Culture"

 

2015

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Eoin O'Callaghan "Submerged Stories: The Evolution of William Faulkner's Short Fiction"

Martin McConigley "The Border in Contemporary Irish Fiction 1970-2014: Interrogating the lines that continue to separate"

Niamh Kehoe "Vernacular Saints' Lives in England 900-1300: Humour, Gender, and Violence.

Yen-Chi Wu "Temporalities in the Novels of John McGahern: "Against the Tide"

2014

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Kathy D'Arcy "A Poetic Heteroglossia Re-Articulating 1930s Irish Women's Poetry: Weighted Silences"

Rebecca Graham "An Ecofeminist Reading of Identity, Place, and Language in Éilís Ní Dhuibne's Fiction" 

David Roy "The Unity of Edmund Spenser's Complaints

2013

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Dan O'Brien "The Intertwining Fiction of Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien: 'A Piece of Fine Meshwork'"

Murphy Irish Exchange Fellowship (University of Notre Dame)

Dan O’Brien  "The Intertwining Fiction of Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien: 'A Piece of Fine Meshwork'"

UCC CACSSS 2013/14 PhD SCHOLARSHIP

Rebecca Graham "An Ecofeminist Reading of Identity, Place, and Language in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's Fiction"

Eoin O'Callaghan "William Faulkner's 'Snopes' Trilogy"

 

2012 

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Donna Alexander"Women in the Borderlands in the Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes"

Gwendolen Aoife Boyle "Autobiography and Fiction in the Work of Thomas Wolfe"

Mark Kirwan "Banville as Writer: The Discursive Practices of John Banville"

Laura Pomeroy "Mary Devenport O'Neill: Writing the Free State"

2011

IRC POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

James Cummins "'I shall / be in my segments': Dissecting and Reassessing Raworth's Oeuvre through a Multitude of Influences"

Siobhan Higgins "Britain's Bourse: Cultural and Intellectual Transmissions between the Low Countries and Britain in the Early Modern Era"

Edel Mulcahy "Travel, Pilgrimage and the Family in Middle English Writing"

Niamh O'Mahony "Poetic Epistemology and Philosophical Fact"

Michael Waldron  "Verbal Painting: Elizabeth Bowen and the Art of Visuality"

FULBRIGHT SCHOLARSHIP

Niamh O'Mahony "Poetic Epistemology and Philosophical Fact"

2010

UCC COLLEGE OF ARTS, CELTIC STUDIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES PHD SCHOLARSHIP

Donna Alexander "Women in the Borderlands in the Writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes"

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP 

Coirle Mooney "Infected Vision in the Works of Thomas Middleton"

2009 

WILLIAM J. LEEN AWARD (UCC)

Niamh O'Mahony "Poetic Epistemology and Philosophical Fact"

IRCHSS CARA POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

Dr. Carrie Griffin  "Learning and Information in the English Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: An Analysis of Textual Genres, Material Structures and Reorganisation"

UCC DOCTORAL SHOWCASE

Michael Waldron (2nd Place)

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Adrian Goodwin  “The Language of Space”: The Influence of Twentieth Century Irish Gay and Lesbian Narrative on the “Post-Gay” moment in Irish Literature.

Colin Lahive  "Milton and Romance: Vernacular Romance and Chivalric Traditions in Paradise"

Cian O'Mahony  “A King for the Queene”: Samuel Sheppard’s The Faerie King and his reception of Spenser’s epic authority.

Bairbre Anne Walsh "Claude McKay and the Transnational Novel"

2008

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Alan Foley, "The Objects of Laughter:  A Poetics of Humour in Old and Middle English Literaure".

Sarah Kate Hayden, "Resonances of the Radical in the Female Modernist Poetic"

2007

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS

Richard A. Hawtree, "Vox Meditans:  Studies in the Anglo-Saxon Liturgical Imagination and the Unity of Old English Poetic ManAuscripts.

Victoria Kennefick, "Lonely Voices of the South:  Exploring the Transatlantic dialogue of Frank O'Connor and Flannery O'Connor"

IRCHSS POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

David Coughlan, "Ghosts of American Writing"

NUI POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

Liam Lenihan

2005

UCC COLLEGE OF ARTS, CELTIC STUDIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES PRESIDENT'S SCHOLARSHIP

Katherine D'Arcy

IRCHSS RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

Dr Andrew King, "Mirrors Of British Kingship: The Galfridian Tradition in Early Modern Drama"

2005

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Sarah Louise Melnyk, “The Arthurian Legend in Scottish and English Literature”  

2004

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Mary O’Connell,  “Truth from the bookseller”:  Murray, Moore and the manufacturing of Byron

Louise Denmead,  “Representations of ‘Blackness’ and the Female Foreigner in Aemilia Lanyer and Elizabeth Cary.”

Sorcha Fogarty, In Memoriam:  Jacques Derrida, The Working of Mourning, and the Regeneration of Responsibility.

IRCHSS POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

Dr Mary Pierse, “George Moore and Early Literary Impressionism” 

2003 

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Emma Bidwell, "Female Performance of Masculinity." 

2002

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIP

Siobhan Collins, "Discourses of sexuality in the poetry of John Donne"

Eileen Forristal, "The sublime in Virginia Wolf"

Kalene Nix-Kenefick,  "Una Troy (1910-1993)"

IRCHSS POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

Dr Tina O’Toole, “Narrating the new woman: the feminist fictions of Sarah Grand and George Egerton."

Dr Jason King, "Refugee narratives in Irish historical and contemporary perspective"

IRCHSS RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

Dr Lee Jenkins, "The language of Caribbean poetry" 

Dr Margaret Connolly,  “An Index of Middle English Prose in the Main Manuscript Collection of Cambridge University Library”.

SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP

Professor Patricia Coughlan,  "Gender, sexuality and social change in Irish literature 1960-2000"

2001

IRCHSS POSTGRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS

Susan Burke, “The Presence of Wollstonecraft in the Work of Mary Shelley.”

Ruth Connolly, “Subjectivity in the Writings of Mary Boyle Rich and Katherine Boyle Jones.”

Brendan Kavanagh, “W.B. Yeats and Eastern Mysticism”

Catherine MacHale, “Infinity in Language and Literature.”

Eleanor Neff, “A Comparative Study of Beowulf and the Tain Bo Cuailnge”  (Department of Celtic Civilisation and Department of English).

Paul O’Connor,  “Sensibility & Romanticism:  The Poetics of Modernity.”

Michael O’Sullivan, “Where is the Ethics in Ethical Criticism?”

Mary Pierse, “Rattling the Railings:  George Moore’s Creative Literary Resistance to Late Victorian Society.”

2000

IRCHSS POSTGRADUTE SCHOLARSHIP

Kenneth Rooney, “Timor Mortis: Aspects of the Macabre in Late Middle English Narrative.”

PhD Theses since 2000

YEAR	NAME	THESIS TITLE
2019	Edel Mulcahy	"Travel, pilgrimage and the family: displacement, obligation and crises of kinship in Middle English"
2019	Andrew Farrow	"Every Nation under Heaven":  National unity in the poetry of William Blake.
2018	Alison Killilea	"Translating the past: An analysis of Beowulf's reception history through the figures of Grendel and Grendel's mother"
2018	Niamh Kehoe Rouchy	"Humour in vernacular hagiography from the tenth to the thirteenth century in England"
2018	William Wall	"Stealing From Winter"
2017	Edel Mulcahy	"Travel, pilgrimage and the family: displacement, obligation and crises of kinship in Middle English narrative"
2017	Meadhbh O'Halloran	"Marlowe's medievalism: subversion and medieval literature in Christopher Marlowe's drama"
2017	David Karl Roy	"The unity of Edmund Spenser's Complaints"
2016	Dan O'Brien	"'A piece of fine meshwork': The intertwining fiction of Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien
2016	Ian O'Sullivan	"The masks of Mnēmosynē: modulations of memory from ancient Greece to modern Paris"
2016	Mark Kirwan	"Beneath the penumbral glow: John Banville and the cinema"
2016	Miranda Corcoran	"Social paranoia and absurdist fiction in Cold War America and Soviet Russia: A comparative study"
2015	Niamh O'Mahony	"'I have nothing to say, only to show': Appropriation in the poetries of Trevor Joyce, Alan Halsey and Susan Howe"
2015	Nicola Moffat	"Monstrative acts and becoming-monster: on identity, bodies, and the feminine other"
2015	Ian Murphy	"Corporeal prisons: dynamics of body and mise-en-scène in three films by Paul Schrader"
2015	Ross Griffin	"'Something isn't right here': American exceptionalism and the creative nonfiction of the Vietnam War"
2015	Elizabeth Ann Coughlan	"Frederick Douglas and Ireland, 1845: The dynamics of discourse in politics, temperance and poverty"
2015	Laura Pomeroy	"Mary Davenport O'Neill: Writing the Free State"
2015	Michael Waldron	"Elizabeth Bowen and the art of visuality"
2015	James  Cummins	"'I shall / be in in my segments': Dissecting and reassessing Tom Raworth's Oeuvre and its influences"
2014	Donna Alexander	"Chicana poetics: genre and style in Gloria Anzaldúa and Lorna Dee Cervantes"
2015	Anthony Colonna	"Prophets of the beast: the modernist esotericism of D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats"
2014	Diane Fawsitt	"Reading Lydgate's Troy Book: patronage, politics, and history in Lancastrian England"
2014	Kate Kirwan	"Historiographic Intertextuality in American Historical Fiction"
2014	Siobhan Higgins	"Britain's Bourse: cultural and literary exchanges between England and the Low Countries in the early modern era (c. 1580-1620)"
2014	Adrian Goodwin	"Afterwords: reparative queer death and the contemporary Irish novel, 1960-2000"
2014	Karen Moloney	"'Ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen': female autonomy and authority in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur"
2014	Heffernan, Niall	"Scientism and Instrumentalism after the Bomb: Dr Strangelove, End Zone, Crash, and The Wire"
2013	Pyburn, Daniel	"Catholicism in the writings of Colm Tóibín"
2013	Boyle, Gwendolen	"Thomas Wolfe and the genre questions: Beyond the 'Charge of Autobiography'"
2013	O'Mahony, Cian	"A King for the Queene: Samuel Sheppard’s The Faerie King and his reception of Spenser's Epic authority"
2013	Mooney, Coirle	"Infected Vision in the Works of Thomas Middleton"
2013	Lahive, Colin	"Milton and Romance: Vernacular romance and chivalric traditions in Paradise Lost"
2013	Murphy, Carmel	"History, revolution and the British popular novel: historical fiction in the romantic age"
2012	Buchanan, Avril	"The Renaissance re-imagination"
2012	Costello, Lisa	"Diverse Heritage: Exploring Literary Identity in the American Southwest"
2012	Hayden, Sarah	"'intimate irritant': Constructions of futurist, dada and surrealist artisthood in the work of Mina Loy"
2012	March, Kirsty	"Performance, transmission and devotion: understanding the Anglo-Saxon prayer books, c. 800-1050"
2012	Dorrington, Jesse	"Defining 'the deare spouse of Christ' : the polemically protestant employment of the sitch in early modern English witchcraft texts"
2011	Foley, Alan	"To 'maken folk to laughe' : humour in medieval English writing"
2011	McCarthy, Bernadette	"The 'lidless eye': William Butler Yeats, Visual Practice and Modernism"
2011	Huguelet, Mary Catherine	"Editing modernity : H.L. Mencken, George Lorimer, and the early magazine owrk of F. Scott Fitzgerald" /
2011	Walsh, Bairbre	"Claude McKay and the Transnational Novel"
2011	Madden, Leonard	"The 'Tempest of Emblems': Intertextuality in some of Samuel Beckett's Early Poems and Prose"
2011	Kennedy, Danny	"Anarratology: The Writings of New Narrative"
2011	Whittredge, Julia	"Irish Modernist Poetry"
2010	Rooney, Peter	"Primitivism in the Short Fiction of Ernest Hemmingway"
2010	Smith, Catherine	"Historical Fiction by Irish Women since 1800"
2010	Mellamphy, Deborah	"Hollyweird: Gender Transgression in the Collaborations of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp"
2010	Melnyck, Sarah	"The Arthurian Tradition in Medieval Scotland"
2010	Fogarty, Sorcha	"The Affirmative Nature of Impossibility in Jacques Derrida's Work on Mourning"
2010	Kennefick, Victoria	"Lonely Voices of the South: Exploring the Transnational Dialogue of Flannery O'Connor and Frank O'Connor"
2009	O'Connell, Mary	"A Poet, his Publisher and Posterity: Byron and John Murray"
2008	Nijhuis, Letty	"Deor and Nytena mid Us: Animals in the Work of Aelfric"
2008	Nix, Kathleen	"Una Troy's Fiction: The Figure of the Irish Woman Writer"
2008	Denmead, Louise	"Representations of Femininity and Blackness in Three Early Modern Texts"
2007	Neff, Eleanor	"Beowulf and the Ulster Cycle: A Comparative Study of Narrative Parallels in Beowulf, Fled Bricrend and Táin Bó Cúailgne"
2007	Bidwell, Emma	"Members of Masculinity? Masculine Females in the Work of Carson McCullers"
2007	Walsh, Ann	"Revising the Evidence: A Reappraisal of Robert Lowell's Poetry"
2007	Collins, Siobhan	"John Donne's 'Russet Pawe': Body and Word in Metempsychosis"
2007	Mannion, Una	"'Within Private Armes': Enclosure in the Work of Thomas Carew"
2007	Murphy, Orla	"Handheld Laser Profilometry of Certain Medieveal Inscribed Stones"
2006	Carney, James	"Narrative Space, Narrative Time: A Spatiotemporal Model of Narrative Semantics"
2006	Forristal, Eileen M.	"Schopenhauer's Sublime in a Range of Virginia Woolf's Later Novels"
2006	Griffin, Carrie	'A Good Reder': The Middle English Wise Book of Philosophy and Astronomy, Instruction, Publics and Manuscripts"
2005	Connolly, Ruth	"All our Endeavours Terminate but in This’”: Self-Government in the Writings of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick and Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh”
2004	Rooney, Kenneth	“Mortality and Imagination:Aspects of the Macabre in Middle English Narrative”
2004	O'Sullivan Michael	“Deterring Deconstruction:I ncarnation, Ethical Criticism and the Joycean Epiphany”
2004	MacHale, Catherine	"Cantor’s Lovely Game: The Mathematics of the Infinite in the Writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Julia Kristeva”
2003	Gaynor, Fergal	"To touch the world of substance’: D.H. Lawrence’s Critical Intervention in the Modern Movement”
2003	Pierse, Mary	“Towards a Novel Freedom: George Moore’s Sophisticated Literary Shapings in Esther Watersand Celibates.”
2003	Kavanagh, Brendan	“W.B. Yeats and Eastern mysticism”
2002	Byrne, James P.	“Inalienable citizenship:assimilation and the crisis of self-representation in Irish-American and Jewish-American literature”
2001	Sweeny,  Fionnghuaile	“Frederick Douglas: Mask or Maroonage? Atlantic sites and the Politics of Representative Identity”
2001	Howard, Anita	“The Reconstruction of Kinship in the drama of William Shakespeare and Pedro Calderon de la Barca”
2001	O'Toole, Martina M.	"Narrating the New Woman: The Feminist Fictions of Sarah Grand and George Egerton”
2000	O’Donnell, Katherine	“Edmund Burke and the heritage of oral culture”