Professor Gillian Wright BA MA MPhil PhD

• BA, MA (Oxford)
• MPhil, PhD (Glasgow)
• Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Birmingham)

I joined Birmingham as a lecturer in 2005, and was appointed to a senior lectureship in 2010, a readership in 2017, and a professorship in 2020. Previously I held full-time research posts at Nottingham Trent University and St John’s College, Oxford. I have also held visiting fellowships at the Institute of English Studies, London, and the Newberry Library, Chicago.

I contribute to a wide range of undergraduate and MA modules, mainly focusing on the early modern period. I also teach contemporary Irish fiction.

I welcome applications relating to early modern English and Irish literature, and am especially interested in supervising Masters and PhD projects on women’s writing (particularly Aphra Behn), Restoration poetry, Irish literature, and environmental humanities.

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research and teaching both focus on literature from the early modern period, and in particular on poetry, women’s writing, and book history and editing. I am a General Editor on the AHRC-funded Cambridge edition of The Works of Aphra Behn, for which I am editing Behn’s poetry. I also teach contemporary Irish fiction. 

I am the Director of the College of Arts and Law Graduate School, and am also one of the University’s Site Directors for the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.