Postgraduate Admissions

The high number of applications we receive means that postgraduate admission is often very competitive. The majority of students accepted onto the MPhil have a first class BA degree or its overseas equivalent, and the majority of students accepted for the PhD have similarly strong MA marks. (If your degree is not from the UK, please check International Qualifications to find the equivalent.) But we recognise that things sometimes do not go a candidate’s way in examinations, that a sparkling examination style is not always the best qualification for postgraduate work, and that candidates can have different academic and professional journeys. The Faculty regularly accepts candidates with strong 2.1s, or mature students who have not pursued an orthodox pattern of higher education, provided that such applicants have strong backing from their referees, have a feasible topic, provide a recent high-quality writing sample, and are well qualified for their proposed course of research. The Faculty also considers a wide range of contextual factors when making decisions on applications, as part of the Faculty and University’s wider drive towards widening participation. Applicants whose first degrees are in other disciplines are always considered, provided they can give an account of how their interest in literary studies has developed. 

We welcome qualified UK, EU, and overseas applicants. Those for whom English is not a first language are required by the University’s Postgraduate Admissions office to provide evidence of competence in English. 

Applicants for the PhD must have previously taken an MPhil, MA or similar research foundation course.

All of our postgraduate courses require you to give a detailed description of the proposed topic of your dissertation. This enables us to be sure that we have potential supervisors for you and enables us to judge the level of your present knowledge of your field. It’s important that your proposal is well-written, well-structured and persuasive. Where possible, please draw on the support of your existing academic peers and mentors in order to get feedback on your proposal drafts, and give yourself enough time to revise the proposal until it is as strong as you can make it. 

An MPhil research proposal should be 500 words long, while a PhD proposal should be 800 words long. It needs to give those assessing your application an impression of the strength and originality of your proposed research, and its potential to make a contribution to knowledge. It should be written in clear, jargon-free prose. Grammatical mistakes and typographical errors give a very bad impression, so make sure you proof read it in advance, and/or ask someone else to check it too.

You can find more guidance on research proposals here. 

Many applicants submit their undergraduate dissertation, Masters dissertation, or similar extended piece of work. Our assessment of the critical skill, scholarly integrity, and originality of the written work carries great weight in the admission procedure.

In reaching decisions about offers, the Applications Committee also considers the Faculty’s commitment to sustaining its existing Faculty postgraduate research strengths, as well as expanding to include new areas of research.

Candidates should direct referees to the University’s general guidance for referees.

Candidates are also advised to indicate that their referees should take especial care with their ranking of the candidate within their current cohort. This information plays a role in the assessment process so it needs to be as accurate as possible. Referees should wherever possible base this answer on exact information (e.g. class lists or essay mark rank lists). Candidates for whom a referee has not provided an exact ranking, or no ranking at all, may be disadvantaged.

University guidance is found here.

In particular, please note the following:

• AI must not be used when writing personal statements and CVs. This prohibition covers the use of AI to help your use of English.
• In the case of research proposals, content generated by AI should be acknowledged.
• AI must not be used to impersonate or assist you during an interview, including to help your use of English.
• If you are interviewed, you should expect to be asked to confirm that you are not using AI.

Although the University allows acknowledged AI use in limited situations, overreliance on AI as an assistive tool for research and incorporating AI-generated text into academic work run against the Faculty’s values and can impede your development as an independent thinker and writer. Generative AI tools use plausibility to produce what may appear to be fluent prose, but they do not understand what they are generating and cannot deliver the types of scholarly insights that are the hallmarks of excellent work in our subject. They will frequently misrepresent or invent sources, flatten nuance, and introduce factual and interpretive errors. Reliance on such tools not only risks inaccuracies but weakens the habits of attention and critical thinking at the heart of the work we do in the Faculty of English. These habits are central to your intellectual formation and highly valued by employers. Use of AI tools will generate material that is of poor quality and will weaken your application’s chances of success.