Doctoral Studies in English

English Literature

Contact: Johan Höglund and Niklas Salmose.

Doctoral studies in English Literature are conducted within internationally oriented research groups. Supervision is offered by associate professors and professors with broad expertise in literature in the English-speaking world.

English Literature is understood as a wide, multimodal, and intermedial field of research, where literature is studied in relation to other media and forms of expression. In addition to traditional literary studies, supervisors have expertise in areas such as poetry, comics, graphic novels, video games, television, and film, and research projects address both traditional and emerging narrative forms.

Examples of doctoral projects

Currently, there are five doctoral students working on topics such as:

• Moods in narrative video games
• The relationship between digital and analogue media in speculative fiction
• The role of the grotesque in world literature and world ecology
• Intermedial representations of nature and human ecology in contemporary theatre

Research groups and research schools

The doctoral programme is closely connected to Linnaeus University’s two leading research centres: IMS (Intermedial and Multimodal Studies) and Concurrences (Colonial and Postcolonial Studies). They provide doctoral students with access to international networks, interdisciplinary collaborations, and a vibrant seminar culture.

We provide an international atmosphere with supervisors, doctoral students, and visiting scholars from around the world. Doctoral students attend seminars, workshops, invited guest lectures, and are offered a wide range of doctoral courses.

We also host externally funded research schools, including Global Humanities and MIDWord (in collaboration with Örebro University).

Through partnerships with universities abroad, doctoral students have opportunities for international exchange. Examples include the University of Edinburgh, UCLA, L’Università degli Studi Roma Tre, and Universität Innsbruck.

English Language Education

Contact: Marie Källkvist

English Language Education is the transdisciplinary study of the teaching and/or learning  of English.

English Language Education researchers are affiliated with the Centre for Educational Linguistics and collaborate closely with the doctoral programme in Swedish Language Education, and with colleagues in the Spanish Unit. The Centre for Educational Linguistics is home to around twenty researchers and ten doctoral students who gather every other week for seminars. Supervision is provided by a professor and an associate professor, with senior lecturers serving as assistant supervisors.

For their theses, PhD students may choose to focus on the English language, or English literature or media such as film and their use in the classroom and beyond. We see the teaching and learning of English as part of societal and individual multilingualism. 

Supervisors’ expertise includes classroom research from multilingual, sociocultural, cognitive, and multimodal perspectives. Recent research focuses on translanguaging and multilingualism, writing pedagogy, children’s literature in the early school years, vocabulary development, and educational policy.

The most recent PhD was on this topic:

• “Teaching writing in language classrooms: From autonomous to cross curricular and multilingual practices” (Justyna Legutko).
  The dissertation examines upper secondary language teachers’ writing instruction and whether it could be conducted across subject boundaries. (Available in DiVA.)

English and Multilingualism

Contact: Marie Källkvist

English and Multilingualism is a new doctoral programme at Linnaeus University. The field is broadly defined, and ongoing research concerns individual, institutional, and societal multilingualism. This may include how teachers and students use multilingual resources in teaching and learning, as well as language policy in schools, higher education, and society at large.

Researchers are part of the Centre for Educational Linguistics and collaborate closely with researchers in the subjects of Swedish, Swedish as a Second Language, and Spanish. Supervision is provided by a professor and a senior lecturer.

English Linguistics

Contact: Charlotte Hommerberg

Research in English Linguistics at Linnaeus University includes corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis.

Corpus linguistics involves analysing large digital collections of texts or speech (corpora) to investigate how language is used in authentic communication, for example by identifying patterns and features. Researchers use specialized digital tools to search these collections.

Research in sociolinguistics in the English Unit focuses on linguistic variation in English and on the role of English in multilingualism in Sweden. Research on language variation primarily concerns agreement patterns, while research on English in Sweden examines language policy and planning in the public sector. The aim is to describe and understand how and why different languages are used in different domains of Swedish society, and how this may affect individuals and society.

Discourse analysis studies language use in specific social contexts using both quantitative and qualitative methods, often to reveal underlying ideologies and power structures and how these shape attitudes and ways of thinking.

Although these three fields originate from different branches of English Linguistics, they overlap—for example through the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology.

The most recent doctoral dissertation is Alexander Lakaw’s “Agreement with collective nouns: Diachronic corpus studies of American and British English” (2024). His research is at the intersection of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Examples of research projects:

• Translating complexity
• Variation and change in agreement patterns in English as a second language
• English in language policy and planning in Swedish schools and higher education
• Metaphors in anger therapy on digital platforms