PhD American Studies

About our programmes

Hull pioneered American Studies in Britain. After more than half a century, American Studies at Hull has one of the finest collections of American resources of any British university. This is a superb archive for postgraduate research students on our PhD courses. Our academic staff have distinguished national and international reputations for teaching and research, and, like the University of Hull as a whole, American Studies at Hull is known as one of the friendliest departments in the country.

One of our strengths is our ability to carry our research across disciplinary borders best illustrated through recent PhD projects such as 'How Can One Tell the Truth About My Lai?', which examined how historians, novelists, journalists, filmmakers, and the US Army sought to ‘explain' the notorious Vietnamese massacre of 1968. Another recent project drew upon cultural studies, gender studies and political history to analyse Cold War history to explore 'Masculinity and Myth in Marvel Comics, 1961-74'. Many of our successful PhD candidates have published books or have gone on to become lecturers at universities including Cambridge, Liverpool, Newcastle, Bangor, Manchester and Northumbria. Others have entered teaching, publishing, arts administration and broadcasting.

Research

Our academic experts welcome applications for postgraduate research across a broad range of topics.

Our principal areas of historical expertise include:

Gang culture and the incarceral society
History on film
Mexican-American history
African-American history
The Civil Rights movement
The Civil War
War and 20th-century American society

In literary and cultural studies, our main areas of research activity include:

Cinematic and televisual narratives
American gothic and horror literature and culture
Modern American poetry
Modernist and Postmodernist aesthetics
Race, gender and sexuality in contemporary American culture
20th-century visual art (painting, photography, sculpture and architecture)
Radical culture.