As a member of the postgraduate community, you are warmly invited to participate in and contribute to the wider research and social life of the department.

We hold regular research and reading events where scholars, creative writers and writing industry professionals come to the department to present their work. These termly events are opportunities to extend your knowledge in your research area and network with other scholars. You will also be invited to a wide range of public lectures and seminars – recent speakers include the novelist Sarah Perry and the critic and theologian Rowan Williams.

The department also hosts and supports a wide range of reading and discussion groups run by staff and students and open to all. These include a regular Landscape Writing Reading Group, a Culture and Medicine Seminar Series and a Contemporary Gothic Reading group. Off-campus, our students are closely involved in the regular reading series Stories at the Storey and The North West Literature Salon, as well as with the Lancaster Literature Festival and the Lancaster Words Festival.

We will also support you in sharing your own research through MA conferences and Creative Writing showcases, evening reading events and PhD Work-in-Progress sessions. Distance learning students in Creative Writing will participate in an annual summer school, where we provide a lively programme of visiting speakers, workshops and reading events as well as the opportunity to meet other students in the department and share your work. MA students in English Literary Studies have organised day conferences on a variety of themes, most recently Fantastika, Fictions of Corporeal Diversity and Eating Otherwise. These events attract colleagues from across the university and beyond.

Postgraduates who would like to get involved in editing and publication projects also have many opportunities. Student-run journals include Cake Magazine, which publishes poetry, flash fiction, reviews and interviews; Lux, which publishes interdisciplinary research from postgraduate students across the faculty; and Errant, our newest post-critical journal run by PhD and MA students in the department.

As a member of the postgraduate community, you will also be invited to attend special tutorials, seminars and master classes with our two distinguished Visiting Professors, Paul Muldoon and Mary Talbot. You will also have the opportunity to apply for an annual tutorial with a senior literary editor from the London Review of Books.