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.

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.

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.

The relation between modern guilts and other forms and discourses of guilt is rich and strange. We aim to foster debate around this topic.

We aim to think about migration in a different way, as a loss of homeland but also the making of a new home.

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

We encourage critical and imaginative thinking about the relationship between materiality, culture and literary studies in research.

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

The Psychoanalysis Working Group provides a context for colleagues across the College to meet together to explore psychoanalytic theory and practice in all its diverse dimensions.

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

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

In the later Middle Ages, thousands of European pilgrims travelled to Jerusalem and Rome, part of a highly organised industry. We look at this history to see what we can learn from this trans-national activity.

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.

Listen to podcasts from academics discuss various topics on literature.

Find out about the research our PhD students have undertaken.