The MA and PhD community at UEA is a large one. We have around 30-40 students enrolled on the Literature PhD at any one time and a further 30 students enrolled on the Creative and Critical Writing PhD. Here are some of our current students and their projects:

Roger Ashton-Griffiths
Roger Ashton-Griffiths took a BMus at Lancaster University and joined English National Opera as a singer before stepping sideways into film and television, in which media he has become a well-established character actor. He took an MA in Fine Art at the University of East London, expecting to make video, but ended up casting bronze and carving oak instead. He has written for stage and screen, including the two short films he has directed, and has freelance experience in an editorial role for a number of non-fiction publishers. His critical component involves research into English novels about South Asia, and his PhD novel is about three generations of a Sri Lankan family in Britain.

Chris Astwood
Chris Astwood is a poet from Bermuda. Emerging as part of the island's spoken-word scene, he was encouraged to pursue poetry seriously by various local artists. He gained his B.A. (Cum Laude) w/Honours in English and Creative Writing from Knox College in the USA, and earned an M.A. w/Distinction in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of East Anglia. Chris' literary influences include Caribbean, British, and American poetry, and ‘non-literary' language like popular song and bureaucratic jargon. Ranging from brief lyrics to extended surreal narratives, his own poetry tends to focus on representing and articulating aspects of his native island and culture. He remains a keen performer, with many organized readings and countless open-mic sessions to his name. Most recently, he was one of a handful of Bermudian poets invited to perform in the 2009 Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts. In 2011, Chris was a programme co-facilitator for the Chewstick Foundation's ChewSLAM workshops, helping Bermudian youths to hone their writing and performance skills in a series of free weekly workshops. Chris is now back at UEA, pursuing a Ph.D. in Critical and Creative Writing that examines the relationships between strictures of aesthetics/analysis in postcolonial discourse and strategies for self-definition/transcendence of these strictures through the production of poetry within so-called postcolonial spaces. His poems have appeared in magazines such as UM-UM, Iota, The Caribbean Writer, Other Poetry, andMimesis. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k14PkcJcz4

Jim Goar
Jim Goar received an MFA from Naropa University and is currently studying Jack Spicer's The Holy Grail for the critical component of his Ph.D. at UEA. In 2010, Reality Street brought out his first full length collection, Seoul Bus Poems. A second book, The Louisiana Purchase (2011), is available from Rose Metal Press.  He edits the journal, past simple.

Jonathan Gibbs
Jonathan studied Modern Languages at the University of Leeds and recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at UEA. As a freelance journalist he has reviewed books for The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement. Stories have appeared in the Pulp Faction anthology ‘All Nighter' and from the online publisher Shortfire Press. He presented a paper, ‘The Other Side of The Mirror: Strategies in Fictitious Biographies' at 2009's Postgraduate Biography Conference: ‘History, Mystery & Myth'. His PhD consists of a novel and a critical essay. ‘Randall, or The Painted Grape' is about the Young British Artists of the 1990s, and partly takes the form of a biographical memoir of the fictitious artist, Randall. His critical essay treats ekphrasis and the use of artworks in prose fiction, concentrating on the novels of Don DeLillo.

Ruth Greenberg
Ruth is a screenwriter as well as a produced playwright, a published short story and copy writer, and a teacher of creative writing at UEA.  Ruth received a BA (First Class Hons) in English Literature in 2003 and an MPhil in Creative Writing in 2004, both from Trinity College, Dublin.  After returning to London, Ruth worked in script development for the UK Film Council, while independently writing and developing a number of her own original screenplays.  She embarked on a Ph.D in Creative Writing in 2008.  Ruth's research script is a dystopian Western set in Britain, 2053; her critical element is a feminist thesis, ‘In it for the Kill: Competitive, Violent Female Heroes in Popular Cinema'.

‘UEA's Ph.D program has provided me with invaluable professional support and guidance.  My two expert supervisors have enabled me to take my script through the full development process from first pitch to final draft.  And, no less important, my research has given me the opportunity to identify and interrogate a series of critical questions that influence and inhabit my work as a screenwriter.'

Sandy Goldbeck-Wood
Sandy is a doctor, a writer and an editor. She studied German and Norwegian language and literature in Cambridge, medicine in Bristol, and has an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies from Essex. She works in gynaecology and psychosexual medicine, and is a writer and speaker on psychosomatic sexual health. Formerly an editor at the British Medical Journal, she is an editorial consultant to Germany's national medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt, and edits the Institute of Psychosexual Medicine's journal, IPMJ. She has exhibited art in the first international Raw Arts Festival (London 2007), Contemporary European Outsiders (Oxford 2008), and Cambridge Open Studios, and written poetry regularly for 10 years, some of which has been published in national newspapers, medical journals and poetry magazines. She has received three commendations and won 3rd prize in this year's Hippocrates Prize. She is working towards a first poetry collection as part of her PhD at UEA.

Sandy works at the intersection between medicine and the humanities, especially poetry. She is interested in the consonances and dissonances between the different languages, cultures and research methodologies of medicine, psychology and the humanities, and in what gets lost for us all if these worlds and languages become lost to each other.

She has presented at SOAS on Analysis, Art and Healing, at the Warwick University Hippocrates Forum on Poetry and Healing (2010), and Sex and Poetry (2011), and written an MA thesis on Articulating the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Rawness In Visual Art. She is currently working on a PhD thesis called Embodiment in Poetry and Medicine: balancing conscious and unconscious elements in creative writing.

Nathan Hamilton
Nathan received his 1st Class BA (Hons) in English & American Literature and MA with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. His PhD thesis is currently entitled Albion & Ariston - UK Poetics Since the 1950s. Other research interests include an AHRC-funded Knowledge Catalyst project between the Writers' Centre Norwich and UEA developing online writing platforms for creative and critical writing.

Alongside his PhD, Nathan is a publisher and poet. He runs Egg Box Publishingand is chairman of the board of directors for Inpress representing over 40 independent UK publishers. His poetry and criticism have appeared, in print and online, for The Guardian, The Spectator, The Rialto, Five Dials, The Manhattan Review and The Wolf. He co-edits the popular antholog-zine series for emerging poetry, Stop Sharpening Your Knives and is currently compiling a groundbreaking new anthology of young poets for Bloodaxe entitled Dear World And Everyone In It, due 2012. He also tweets and occasionally blogs.

James Midgley
James received a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing: Poetry, both from the UEA. His poems have appeared widely in literary journals such as The Kenyon Review, Magma,Poetry Review, The New Welsh Review, The Rialto and The Warwick Review. Work has also featured in a variety of anthologies including, most recently, The Salt Book of Younger Poets. In 2008 he received an Eric Gregory award from the Society of Authors. The critical component of his project is entitled The Efficacious Properties of Poetry as Charm.

Priscilla Morris
Priscilla read Modern Languages and Social Anthropology at Jesus College, Cambridge, and gained post-grad diplomas in Print Journalism and English Language Teaching for Adults.  She has taught English in London, Brighton, Bath, Barcelona and Rio de Janerio.  She returned from Brazil to do the MA in Creative Writing (Prose) at UEA in 2008, and then went on to do a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing.  The creative part is a novel about a painter who loses his life's work during the siege of Sarajevo.  The critical section looks at Adorno's concept of art as resistance and Susan Sontag's wartime staging of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, amongst other things.

Meryl Pugh
Meryl Pugh was educated at Queens' College, University of Cambridge and the Institute of Education, University of London.  She left her career as a secondary school teacher after ten years in order to take up a Jerwood / Arvon Young Poet Apprenticeship at the end of 2003 and since then has worked as a freelance educator in museums, a school library manager, a sales officer for a poetry magazine and a library assistant at a large university library.

Short-listed for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Prize in 2005, she is a Hawthornden Fellow and has given creative writing workshops in schools, prisons and museums, as well as for the Arvon Foundation's Under 18s Week at the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, Lumb Bank.   Arrowhead Press published her first pamphlet, Relinquish, in 2007.  Her second, entitled The Bridle, came out with Salt Publishing at the end of 2011.  She graduated with Distinction from the MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2008 and is in her first year of the Creative and Critical Writing PhD.  Her research centres around the persistence of the the lyric 'I' in contemporary, British poetry.

Iain Rowley
Iain received an MA in Creative & Critical Writing at the University of Sussex - where he had the good fortune to study under the tutelage of Keston Sutherland and Peter Abbs.  He was granted AHRC funding to begin his PhD at UEA in 2010, and was awarded an AHRC/Kluge Scholarship to carry out research at the Library of Congress during the autumn semester 2011.  He wishes to signal an appreciation of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at UEA for cultivating a research milieu conducive to the cross-pollination of variegated disciplines, so vital for the development of compositional practices that engage lines of flight from majoritarian linguistic territorialisation. 

Iain's thesis, tentatively titled ‘Midwife of the Anarchic Trace:  Towards a Poetics of Becoming-with-Woman', will assume the form of an epistolary novel interweaving lyric verse, narrative prose, and critical exegesis.  His inquiries centre on the following question:  What ethical implications arise from the cultural devaluation of midwifery for health care and philosophic-poetic creativity?  The project will unfold a figuration of the midwife that is informed by the following components:  A critique of Levinas's phenomenology of Eros, Plato's discussions of the maieutic enterprise, Deleuze's perspectives on the writer-as-symptomatologist, Jungian/post-Jungian conceptions of the 'anima', and post-structuralist feminist articulations of ethico-political agency; a reanimation of certain mythological representations of the birth attendant; an exploration of maternity across artistic works ranging from Novalis's Henry of Ofterdingen to Mina Loy's Love Songs, the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky to the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman; the construction of a historiography of midwifery and the determining factors in the normalisation of a technocratic paradigm of childbirth in the West; idiographic insights gathered from discussions with persons working in the field of maternal and newborn health; and an experiential investigation into Holotropic Breathwork.

Anna de Vaul
Anna received her BA in History, with minors in Classical Studies and Latin, from Western Washington University and her MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing from Cardiff University. The creative portion of her thesis is a novel entitled Transplant. It deals in part with the trauma of the Vietnam War, and in the spring of 2010 Anna spent three months in Vietnam as part of her research. The critical portion of her thesis explores various aspects of place in fiction, particularly the use of portrayals of place as social commentary in fiction of contemporary America. Her research interests vary but currently include dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, the American and British social novels and their evolution, literature of the Soviet gulag, Indian fiction, and the gothic and uncanny. Anna has taught creative writing workshops in locations around the world, including the USA, the UK, The Netherlands, and India. Her writing has appeared in various journals including Wasafiri.

Naomi Wood
Naomi Wood read English at the University of Cambridge and then completed her Masters in Creative Writing at UEA in 2007. Her first novel, The Godless Boys, was published in April 2011 by Picador to critical acclaim. It was shortlisted for the Amazon Rising Star Award and the Newton First Book Award. The film option has also recently sold. Her second novel, to be submitted as part of her PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at UEA, looks at the lives of the Hemingway women and their tempestuous relationship with the author. Her critical thesis investigates the representations of these women within historical fiction, criticism and other creative work.  Her PhD is fully funded by the AHRC, and Naomi recently completed a five-month residency as a Kluge Scholar at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 2011.