Our research

We provide a forum for discussing the (historical) avant-garde.

We facilitate innovative interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange in gender and sexuality studies.

We engage with important public issues to foster and promote a climate of interdisciplinary research and collaboration among academics and researchers.

The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) fosters research on social, psychosocial and feminist theory and methods, social movements and citizenship, subjectivity and intimacy, and the role of place and nation.

We provide a meeting place for academic staff, creative writers and graduate students to discuss a range of contemporary writers.

We foster a critical and creative culture in which artists can develop their practice.

We draw together research in the field of Medical Humanities which take place across Birkbeck.

We focus on innovative research projects exploring the long nineteenth century (ca. 1790-1914).

We provide a forum for the study and performance of contemporary poetries, and research into their historical, political and theoretical contexts.

Our postgraduate students run Dandelion, an arts journal and research network.

We bring together researchers who use a wide variety of media to explore Europe in the eighteenth century.

We offer a space for postgraduate students, academics and fellows to meet, share and discuss current scholarship and research in progress.

A place for the discussion of all aspects of early modern history, literature and culture.

The LSFRC brings researchers together to foster and encourage the research of science fiction at Birkbeck and beyond.

MaMSIE is a network based at the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, that creates spaces for interdisciplinary conversations about motherhood and the maternal more broadly.

Run by staff and students at Birkbeck, the Mechanics’ Institute Review (MIR) is a forum for the most exciting new writing in short fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction.

We support academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, as well as hosting its own multidisciplinary journal.

We promote research into the life and work of the Elizabethan mathematician Thomas Harriot.

This collaborative project with Goldsmiths Department of Art explores digital animation, its political contexts and critical role in understanding how the animated image functions in the contemporary world.

Conceiving Histories is a project about ‘un-pregnancy’ in the past. ‘Un-pregnancy’ is the time before diagnosis, either of pregnancy or infertility, a time which is characterised by waiting, disappointment and the unknown.

We are studying how violence, death, hatred and persecution affected the development of modern queer identity and culture, 1900-1950.

We investigate how the colonies of the British Empire provided a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of medical and scientific practice.

Find out more about the staff in the department.

Find out more about becoming an MPhil/PhD student in our department.

Find out about the research our PhD students have undertaken.