Department of History, English, Linguistics and Music

Music

The University of Huddersfield is home to a vibrant, diverse, international, and innovative group of music researchers. Our staff are recognised as leading figures in their fields, as evidenced by major commissions, performances, recordings, and publications. Our international postgraduate student community includes early career researchers who are already making significant contributions as composers, performers, technicians, engineers, and musicologists.

English and Creative Writing 

English and Creative Writing at Huddersfield carries out world-leading research and is highly ranked nationally (REF 2014) and internationally (QS 300 2017).  We are the home of the Ted Hughes Network: a centre of excellence for Hughes-related research, teaching, public engagement, and creativity.  We have a team of award winning creative writers working in script writing, novels, poetry and experimental fiction.  Our internationally recognized research includes exciting work in cultural narratives of ageing, illness and care; Shakespeare and ecocriticism; twentieth-century poetry especially Plath, Larkin and Hughes; Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction; the emotions of war in the Romantic period; the lives and the landscape of the Brontes; representations of Romani/Gypsy people; narratives of early modern women; and the intersections of philosophy and literature.  Work in autobiography continues to explore new ground and is supported by major research grants. We have a vibrant research community of experienced, early career and post graduate researchers.  

Linguistics and Modern Languages

At Huddersfield we have a long-standing reputation for excellent research in linguistics and English language, particularly research with an applied focus. We are also active in making our research accessible to the wider public, which we do through a number of initiatives, including our consultancy, Language Unlocked, and Babel: The Language Magazine, which is published in the department. Research in Linguistics and Modern Languages is clustered around two research centres and one research group, though staff frequently work collaboratively across these areas.

History

Our research encompasses a wide range chronologically, geographically and conceptually. Spanning the Middle Ages to the modern day, Huddersfield’s historians are internationally acknowledged experts in the fields of oral history, gender history, health history, political history, digital history, religious history, social history, public history and battlefield archaeology.

As individuals we are specialists in a variety of fields including topics such as the interaction between kingship and masculinity in the Middle Ages; social and cultural responses to mental illness in the 20th Century; the experience of children in Vichy France; the scientific culture of Nazi Germany; and the history of sexual, racial and cultural encounters between different national and ethnics groups in Britain during the Second World War.