researchers in english literature

• Schools & departments

Projects, centres, networks and publications in English and Scottish Literature.

Research in English Literature, and the benefits it has brought to a range of partners and beneficiaries, have received outstanding endorsements in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021) – the UK’s system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions.

In Times Higher Education, English at Edinburgh is ranked fifth in the UK (out of more than 90 institutions) for the overall quality of its publications and other outputs, the impact of its research on people’s lives, and its supportive research environment.

Over 90 per cent of our research and impact is classed as world-leading and internationally excellent by Research Professional. 69 per cent is graded at the world-leading level – the highest of the REF’s four categories.

We have received this standout evaluation for research that ranges across literary history from the later Middle Ages to the present day, and is at the forefront of interdisciplinary fields including Digital and Environmental Humanities and studies of the history and future of books and material culture. Our submission covered collaboration with researchers in disciplines as varied as Education, Economic History, Informatics, and Astronomy.

We are particularly pleased that our research environment has been assessed as 100 per cent world-leading for the support we give to postgraduate and early career researchers, our research facilities, and our partnerships and collaborations within and beyond the University.

Browse Edinburgh Research Explorer for staff profiles, research outputs and activities

Selected research centres and networks.

Research centres and networks range from formal collaborations to informal groups of researchers working together on a theme or challenge.

A number are based in - or are affiliated with - English and Scottish Literature; others are based elsewhere in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), the University of Edinburgh, or the wider academic community, but involve our staff and students.

The groups provide opportunities for researchers at all career stages to work together with partners and stakeholders in organising events, workshopping publications, engaging audiences outside the academy, and exploring ideas for future projects and funding bids.

Here are just a few of our current groups, and significant networks that are no longer live but have left a legacy of networking and collaboration...

Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

Spanning a range of disciplines in European, Islamic, American and Asian studies, including medieval literatures and cultures, the Centre brings together around 70 researchers across the University of Edinburgh.

Take me to the Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies website

Diaspolinks

Bringing together specialists in the fields of anglophone and francophone diasporas, this international network is unique in comparing the various diasporic communities’ responses to issues of identity, belonging and relocation in the specific contexts of British/French and Canadian immigration policies.

Take me to the Diaspolinks website

Digestive Modernisms

An informal interdisciplinary network meeting in-person and online, this group brings together researchers, artists, and writers interested in the gastronomics of modern literature and life. Spanning diverse critical contexts, from the medical humanities to posthumanism, Digestive Modernisms looks at food, diet, and gut health in modernist literature, art, culture and philosophy.

Take me to the Digestive Modernisms website

A collaborative initiative at the University of Edinburgh, Edition  supports new research in all aspects of the history of the book, from traditional forms of bibliography, codicology and textual editing to the latest theoretical and digital innovations. Launched in 2024, it continues the legacy of the Centre for the History of the Book (CHB) which was active at the University of Edinburgh between 1995 and 2020. Edition's website hosts selected CHB video and audio resources. ​​​​​

Take me to the Edition website

Ethical Pressures on Thinking

Growing out of conversations started in a group on Emotionally Distressing Research, this is a forum for researchers experiencing the ‘pressure on thinking’ from the ethical dilemmas their research gives rise to. Involving researchers from across the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, including English and Scottish Literature and elsewhere in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC), it embeds ethical reflection in research culture and collaboration.

Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC)

Founded in 2008, SWINC builds connections between researchers working in the field of 19th century Scottish studies and fosters public awareness of the richness and diversity of Scottish culture in the period. The network supports early career researchers, including current holders of ARHC Studentships and Marie-Curie Fellowships, and runs workshops, lectures and other events, a number of which are associated with the 250th anniversary of Sir Walter Scott in 2021.

Take me to the SWINC website

Selected research projects 

Beauty in the struggle and say their names: art of the black freedom movement.

Dr Hannah Jeffery’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the understudied role of Black muralism in the Black Freedom Movement. In the first of two recent projects, Beauty in the Struggle, she sought to uncover the empowering, educational, and self-affirming role Black-created interior mural art played in segregated public spaces in the USA, from enslavement to the early-twentieth century. In particular, the project explored how Black artists resurrected inspiring Black and African diasporic memory, history and culture to transform the interiors of segregated public buildings into sites of protest, creating visual platforms for Black liberation.

Drawing on unexplored archival materials,  Beauty in the Struggle focused on the work of Charles White, Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, Robert Scott Duncanson, William Edouard Scott, and John Biggers.  Say Their Names brought the research into the 21st century, and widened its scope beyond interior art and the USA to the commemorative street art which has marked a new age of international muralism since the death of Oscar Grant in 2009. For this project, Dr Jeffery created an online digital archive and curriculum tool preserving all known Black Lives Matter murals across the world.

Funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship: September 2020 to August 2023 (Beauty in the Struggle), and by a Small Research Grant Award from the British Academy: September 2021 to June 2023 (Say Their Names)

LLC team: Dr Hannah Jeffery ( Principal Investigator; Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow )

The British empire, colonialism, and cultural responses to famine and food crisis

The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a number of devastating famines in British colonies, resulting in a huge body of literary and artistic work and journalistic debate around their ‘man-made’ nature. While the Irish literary case, for example, is relatively well known, the same cannot be said of literary-cultural responses to the Indian famines, including the 1943 crisis in Bengal. Over a number of projects, Dr Sourit Bhattacharya is recovering famine works, and administrative and periodical sources by Indian and British writers and critics, including influential Scots. A key aim is to maximise visibility of events that were much debated at the time, but are now rarely discussed, despite having influenced anticolonial mobilisation and postcolonial food crisis debates.

This body of work aims to catalyse extensive, long-term research that historicises contemporary debates on neo-colonialism and global food crisis, and indigenous responses to them. Outputs will include an online literary bibliography of the Bengal famine, annotations of major works, and a short film on famine survivors. The projects variously include archival fieldwork in Britain and India, and collaboration with an international team of researchers, library professionals, and curators to form a Network on the British Empire, Scotland, and Indian famines. The Network will host academic conferences in Edinburgh and Guwahati, an authors’ workshop and knowledge exchange programme in Edinburgh, and a public engagement event in Kolkata.

Keep up to date with the Network on its website

Funded by a Research Incentive Grant from the Carnegie Trust: July 2021 to November 2022, and by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Network Award: March 2022 to March 2024

LLC team: Dr Sourit Bhattacharya (Principal Investigator)

The Carlyle Letters

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866) were prolific Scottish writers who corresponded with many of the outstanding cultural and political figures of their time in the UK, Europe and North America. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke-Edinburgh edition is one of the major editorial projects in Victorian studies of the last half-century.  Started by C.R.Sanders of Duke University, in co-operation with John Butt in Edinburgh, it has since amassed an archive of over 10,000 surviving letters, mostly in manuscript, the core collections being in the National Library of Scotland and Edinburgh University Library.  

Since the publication of the first four volumes in 1970, the project has produced 48 (of 50) fully-edited, annotated and indexed volumes.  Drawing on multiple scholarly collections, w ork proceeds simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. The publishers are Duke University Press in the USA, advised by academics from around the world. Other research papers have regularly appeared, and the project has  held a number of conferences and published a free digital archive, the Carlyle Letters Online.

Search the Carlyle Letters Online by date, recipient, subject, or volume

Funded by  the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy,  the Binks Trust,   the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and private donations.

LLC team: Professor Kenneth Fielding, Professor Ian Campbell,  Aileen Christianson, Dr Jonathan Wild, Dr Katherine Inglis,  Jane Roberts, Liz Sutherland

Disability-Led Theatre in Scotland: Birds of Paradise's History and Practice

Founded in Scotland in 1993, Birds of Paradise is today one of the most successful disability-led theatre companies in the world. Drawing on her previous research, including her award-winning book on Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, Dr Hannah Simpson is working with the company to record its 30-year history, articulating their practice and ideology for the benefit of other theatre makers. The project’s main output will be a book published in the Palgrave Theatre and Disability series, released in multiple formats and shared with industry audiences in a series of events. Along the way, the researchers will contribute opinion and feature pieces to the industry and wider press.

As well as Bird of Paradise’s Robert Softley Gale (Artistic Director) and Máiri Taylor (Executive Director), the book is being co-edited by Judith Drake who has worked with the company over the course of her PhD on disability theatre in Scotland. In particular, Part One of the book - which explores Birds of Paradise’s production history - will capitalise on Drake’s work with the company archives, as well as an analysis of some of its particularly influential productions. The second part of the book will offer step-by-step, tried-and-tested practical guidance for other theatre companies, artists and venues. Aimed at developing their own accessible practice, the guidance will cover all aspects of the theatrical performance journey, from the rehearsal room to the auditorium. 

Read Hannah Simpson’s Guardian article on disabled actors and Richard III 

Funded by the LLC Research Fund and LLC Impact Fund: November 2023 to July 2024

LLC team:  Dr Hannah Simpson (Principal Investigator); Judith Drake

Exhibiting the Written Word

Are there challenges or difficulties unique to the task of exhibiting books and manuscripts? What kinds of pressures and demands do librarians and curators face? How do policies and frameworks aimed at connecting archives, libraries and museums with the communities around them shape our approach to staging such exhibitions? Beginning with a workshop, and culminating in an advisory report that remains widely used, Exhibiting the Written Word brought academics, librarians and curators together to find out.

Exhibiting the Written Word was led by the Making Our Connections team comprising researchers from the University of Edinburgh (including the Centre for Research Collections) and the National Library of Scotland. Together with the core team, participants included the British Library, National Galleries of Scotland, National Trust for Scotland, Trinity College Dublin, University of Ulster, Edinburgh Napier University, Dublin City Library and Archive, Scottish Poetry Library, Seven Stories children's book centre and the Wordsworth Trust.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): February 2011 - August 2011

LLC team: Professor James Loxley (Principal Investigator)

LitLong: Edinburgh

A unique exploration of the possibilities of big data for literary research, LitLong is a project to digitally map the ways in which Edinburgh has been used as a setting by myriad writers. Over two key phases, it has mapped around 47,000 excerpts from more than a million books made available by the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the Hathi Trust, collectively spanning five centuries of writing. The project brings together researchers in literature, informatics and the digital humanities at three Scottish universities to text mine and analyse narratives. Its interactive map of literary Edinburgh has two visual interfaces: a website; and a free-to-download app.

Since 2014, LitLong has been embedded in Edinburgh’s UNESCO City of Literature digital and on-site programming, with character-led walking tours being a particularly popular addition to the city’s cultural offer. Through foregrounding marginalised voices, including on Wikipedia, the project has also inspired new work by over 80 of the city’s contemporary poets and prose writers whose work is published in the Umbrellas of Edinburgh anthology. Latterly, its methods have been adopted by Edinburgh International Book Festival and its partner Jalada Africa to map a series of transcontinental journeys and trace trajectories of African writing in English.

Visit the LitLong: Edinburgh website [external]

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): January 2014 - March 2015; January 2017 - January 2018

LLC team: Professor James Loxley (Principal Investigator), Dr Beatrice Alex (Chancellor’s Fellow)

Marshall Islands Project (MAP): Exploring experiences of displacement through the arts

Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear bomb tests across the Republic of the Marshall Islands, forcing many communities into open-ended exile, including over 2,300 miles away in Hawaii. Led by Professor Michelle Keown (LLC) and Dr Shari Sabeti (Moray House School of Education and Sport), the Marshallese Arts Project (MAP) aims to better understand the Marshallese experience of displacement, and to explore how strategies of resilience that remain within the community might be deployed to build educational and socioeconomic capacity in the future.

Collaborating with artists Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Solomon Enos and Christine Germano, the project team ran a series of participatory arts workshops with school-aged children to generate new understandings of the unique historical trajectories and community development needs of Marshall Islanders. Raising international awareness of the effects of America’s enduring nuclear legacy in the Pacific, the project has led to the publication of the first Marshallese graphic novel, a video performance poem, improved pedagogical approaches in participating and other schools, and an anthology of poetry by children who have demonstrated significant personal growth through MAP.

Visit the MAP website [external]

Funded by an ESRC/AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund award: November 2016 - April 2018; AHRC Follow-on Funding: December 2018 - March 2019, and an EPSRC Global Impact Accelerator Account: February 2019 - January 2020.

LLC team - Professor Michelle Keown (Principal Investigator)

Our Bondage and Our Freedom: The Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family and their Intergenerational Fight for Social Justice

As a world famous African American author, activist and philosopher, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) is often presented as an exceptional individual working in isolation.  Our Bondage and Our Freedom  breaks new ground by reinterpreting Douglass’ activism and authorship in relation to that of his wife Anna Murray, daughters Rosetta and Annie, and sons Lewis Henry, Frederick Jr and Charles Remond Douglass, as well as hundreds of other 19th century African American freedom-fighters on both sides of the Atlantic.

The project has involved recovering, digitising and interpreting over 1,000 documents, artworks and artefacts, and making these available to new audiences through four site-specific exhibitions, an award-winning book, free digital assets such as the National Library of Scotland’s 'Struggles for Liberty' learning resource, talks, walking tours, interviews and a documentary. Working collaboratively, the team of US and UK partners has helped educators, curators, and archivists  to interpret  the Douglass family’s intergenerational fight for liberation and to  share  the lives and works of nineteenth-century African American freedom-fighters  with  US and UK audiences in their thousands.

Read about our collaboration with the National Library of Scotland on Struggles for Liberty  

Funded by the  Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC):  August 2018 - January 2020

LLC team - Professor  Celeste-Marie Bernier (Principal Investigator), Professor Andrew Taylor

Picturing Finance and The History of Financial Advice

Through two projects on the culture of finance – Picturing Finance and The History of Financial Advice – Dr Paul Crosthwaite's research has brought humanities approaches to bear on economic questions, helping us better understand the abstract, and often mystifying, domain of money, investment, credit and debt. Involving the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Southampton, and galleries and other partners across the UK, the projects have used literary and cultural methodologies to explore  the integral importance of visual culture to finance and to a critical questioning of some of its assumptions and practices.

Picturing Finance’s co-curated exhibition 'Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present' reached around 70,000 people, producing acclaimed new work by commissioned artists, and receiving excellent reviews from the public and media alike.  Free digital resources from both projects, including an app, MOOC, and eight quality-accredited lesson plans, have improved financial literacy - a relatively new addition to the National Curriculum, and one that has rapidly increased in importance as Britain prepares to meet the twin economic challenges posed by Brexit and the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Watch or listen to the research team talk about Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance on vimeo

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): March 2013 - September 2014; January 2016 - May 2019

LLC team - Dr Paul Crosthwaite (Co-Investigator)

Realising the healing potential of applied theatre

Working within the field of Applied Theatre, Nicola McCartney has developed a unique, research-led methodology that helps people affected by conflict or inequality to better interpret and address their life circumstances through dramaturgy. Her research has underpinned the significant international expansion of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre’s flagship education project Class Act which, between 2016 and 2019, developed 55 new plays by 120 young people working with various cultural practitioners in Russia, Ukraine and India.

In addition to Class Act and her own plays, Nicola worked with Dritan Kastrati, who was smuggled from Kosovo to the UK as a child and then spent many years in the care system. Their award-winning, co-written play How Not to Drown (2019) is a piece of physical theatre interweaving interviews with Kastrati’s own writing. In October 2020, McCartney was named as lead artist on the National Theatre Scotland project, Care in Contemporary Scotland, A Creative Enquiry. Involving local authorities, carers and cared for young people, this project enables her to continue her work on the positive impact of creative responses to experiences of the care system.

Watch or listen to the trailer for Holding / Holding On, a filmed reading of a work in progress script for Care in Contemporary Scotland 

Watch or listen to theatre critic Mark Fisher talking about How Not to Drown as part of Made in Scotland 2019

Funded by various bodies including Traverse Theatre, the British Council, BBC (Emerging Artists Award), and National Theatre Scotland

LLC team: Nicola McCartney

Scotland and Russia: Cultural Encounters Since 1900

Scotland and Russia have a long tradition of mutual engagement and influence, going back to the Middle Ages and still thriving today.  Drawing on the expertise of scholars, creative practitioners and the general public,  Scotland and Russia: Cultural Encounters Since 1900 explores the full spectrum of these connections: from passive consumption of each other’s culture to ethnographic reflection upon it; from creative transformation of each other’s cultural products to professional collaboration in the creation of joint cultural capital.

In addition to three collaboratively-hosted academic conferences covering music, theatre, literature, art, politics and history, the project has organised concerts, a performance workshop, and talks by visiting speakers. Its website hosts an extensive cultural archive of textual, audio and visual materials - some newly translated and all brought together for the first time.

Visit the Scotland and Russia website [external]

Funded by the University of Edinburgh Challenge Investment Fund:  2014-2015, by the  Universities of Aberdeen and Dundee, and by the  Royal Society of Edinburgh Arts and Humanities Research Network Award: January 2015 - December 2016

LLC team: Dr Anna Vaninskaya (Principal Investigator), Dr Rania Karoula (Research Assistant)

Technicities of Illusion: Dynamism and deception in post-war literature

Since the mid twentieth century, a rapid rise in optical technologies has made the textual and the visual more intimately bound than ever. This project explored the ways in which post-war literature has contemplated the perceptual challenges posed by movement, optical illusion, and new media. In thinking about the implications of the kinetic in literature, it asked how motion is expressed, and what impact this had had on the ways we experience or 'read' the world.

Technicities of Illusion traced the lineage of technological literacy in the arts through archival collections of optical devices, artworks, digital design and literary responses. Reappraising the work of authors, sculptors, filmmakers, and designers, it identified the literary strategies that developed in Britain and America in the post-war period to keep pace with a culture increasingly driven by technological enhancement and the rapid flow of information. In doing so, Natalie Ferris built a new history of the ways we manage and visualise information, deepening our understanding of how we read, think, create, and write now. 

Listen to Natalie talk about the work of experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose on the TLS Voices podcast

Funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship :  October 2018 - September 2021

LLC team: Dr Natalie Ferris (Principal Investigator)

Travel, Environment, Sustainability: A literary and cultural history of Irish and Scottish coastal routes

Coastal Routes offers the first comparative study of a neglected archive of Romantic travel writing that explores the deep history of human-environment relationships along the environmentally fragile Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Scotland. Combining approaches from the Environmental Humanities, Archipelagic Criticism and Geocriticism, it examines the ways in which tourists construct landscapes as a resource; considers changing attitudes and values; and demonstrates how environmental narratives grew up around particular locations.  

Coastal Routes thereby contributes to the UN’s 2030 Sustainability Agenda in relation to sustainable development of marine resources as well as consumption and production patterns. Uncovering lost environmental understandings captured in travel writing from 1770 to 1840 allows critical reflection on contemporary practices and future directions.  Project outputs include a Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts on ‘Ecologies of the Atlantic Archipelago’ and a one-day workshop on ‘Scotland’s Coastal Romanticisms’ (hosted by Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC) and The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities).

Listen to Anna talk about 'The Beach Today' project with artist Christina Riley at the Scotland's Coastal Romanticisms workshop

Funded by a  Marie Sk łodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship:  September 2020 - August 2022

LLC team: Dr Anna Pilz ( Marie Sk ł odowska-Curie  Fellow), Professor Penny Fielding (Supervisor)

Writing the North

The Northern Scottish islands of Orkney and Shetland have both a rich literary history and an active community of poets and novelists at work today. Exploring the many continuities between the historic and the contemporary is challenging, given the location of the islands, and the geographic dispersal of the many people who can contribute to the process, including literary historians, museum professionals, writers, and their audiences. Bringing these groups together,  Writing the North  unlocked a range of archival and contextual material - shedding light on forgotten writers, and inspiring new work. 

Arising out of Professor Penny Fielding's earlier AHRC Fellowship on Shetland and Orkney literature and the literary record of visitors to the islands, t​​​ he project involved a major six-week exhibition bringing together two collections at Shetland Museum and Archives. Associated activities and events included an animation, lesson packs for schools, digital resources, and a series of creative 'dialogues' resulting in "Archipelagos", an anthology steeped in Shetlandic and Orcadian history. Beyond Scotland, the project has acted as a model for preserving and celebrating minority languages and dialects, including through connections with Hudson’s Bay Company Archives in Manitoba, Canada. Although Writing the North has formally ended, related activities such as writing workshops, continue.

Visit the Writing the North website [external]

Funded by  Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC):  May 2013 - June 2014

LLC team: Professor  Penny Fielding (Principal Investigator), Robert Alan Jamieson, Dr Alex Thomson

Postgraduate research and supervision

Doctorate-level study is an opportunity to make an original, positive contribution to research in literature and related fields.

As the oldest department of English Literature in the UK, based in one of the largest and most diverse Schools in the University of Edinburgh, we are the ideal place for PhD study.

We also offer a one year Masters by Research degree, which is a good stepping stone between undergraduate and doctoral study.

Our interdisciplinary environment brings together specialists in all periods and genres of literature and literary analysis. Given the breadth and depth of our expertise, we are able to support students wishing to develop research projects in any field of Anglophone literary studies.

Find out more about postgraduate study in English and Scottish Literature

Read our pre-application guidance on writing a PhD research proposal

Beyond the books

Beyond the Books is a podcast that gives you a behind-the-scenes look at research in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures and the people who make it happen. 

To date, hosts Ellen and Emma have talked to the following researchers from our community in English and Scottish Literature:

• Series 1: Episode 1 - Rachel Chung, PhD candidate in English Literature
• Series 1: Episode 2 - David Farrier, Professor of Literature and the Environment
• Series 2: Episode 2 - Anna Kemball, PhD candidate in English Literature

Browse all episodes of Beyond the Books

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Journal › Top Scopus Indexed Journals in English Literature

Top Scopus Indexed Journals in English Literature

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 15, 2020 • ( 0 )

1. English Historical Review -(OXFORD) (https://academic.oup.com/ehr/pages/About)

2. ASIATIC: IITUM Journal of English Language & Literature ( https://journals.iium.edu.my/asiatic/index.php/AJELL )

3. English for Specific Purposes ( https://www.journals.elsevier.com/english-for-specific-purposes )

4. The Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE) ( https://www.aate.org.au/journals/english-in-australia )

5. English in Education (Wiley) ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/17548845 )

6. English World-Wide | A Journal of Varieties of English ( https://benjamins.com/catalog/eww )

7. European Journal of English Studies– Taylor & Francis Online ( https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/neje20/current )

8. Journal of English for Academic Purposes – Elsevier B.V. ( https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-english-for-academic-purposes )

9. Journal of English Linguistics- SAGE Journals ( https://journals.sagepub.com/home/eng )

10. Research in the Teaching of English-NCTE ( https://www2.ncte.org/resources/journals/research-in-the-teaching-of-english/ /)

11. The English Classroom – Regional Institute of English ( http://www.riesielt.org/english-classroom-journal )

12. World Englishes (Wiley Blackwell) ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1467971x )

13. English Language & Linguistics – Cambridge Core ( https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-language-and-linguistics )

14. English Today-The International Review of the English Language-Cambridge Core ( https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/english-today )

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Literatures in English

Subject librarian.

Rebecca Wingfield

About the literatures in english collection.

Stanford Libraries’ collections of literatures in English support the study and teaching of all periods of literary history from the Middle Ages to the present. We collect contemporary fiction and poetry, literary criticism, academic journals on literary studies, and digital resources related to English literature from around the world, including the United States, Canada, the Anglophone Caribbean, Great Britain, Ireland, Africa, and South Asia. Stanford’s Special Collections hold several notable rare books and archival collections, including the Felton collection of British and American literature, the papers of John Steinbeck, and the papers of several notable postwar American poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov. The curator of American and British Literature provides research consultations, instruction sessions for classes, and helps students and faculty access materials related to literary studies in English.

Cecil H. Green Library

Further resources.

• Literature in English
• Modern Language Association of America (MLA) international bibliography
• Literature online
• Early English books online (EEBO)
• American fiction, 1774-1920

Department of English and Related Literature

English research

Field-defining research covering a wide range of periods, regions, languages and disciplines.

Our researchers have a unique approach to what literature is, what it does, how we read it, and how we write about it.

We cover the whole spectrum of English literary studies, including Africa, Australasia and the US. Our research expertise extends to the literature and language of other cultures  – from ancient Greece to modern Pakistan.

The Research Excellence Framework 2021

• We’re a top ten research department according to the Times Higher Education’s ranking of the latest REF results (2021), and 98% of our research is rated 3* and higher.

Learn more about the 2021 REF results

Research strengths

The focal points of our research are our four major schools: Medieval, Renaissance, Eighteenth Century and Romantics, and Modern.

All staff and postgraduate researchers belong to at least one school, which creates the ideal environment for collaboration and discussion. The chronological range of our collective expertise enables opportunities for large-scale collaborations, and many staff members conduct research that crosses the historical boundaries of the schools. 

 Our researchers also work on a series of featured research projects .

Renaissance

Eighteenth Century and Romantics

Impact and engagement

Our research is underpinned by our belief in the intrinsic aesthetic and social value of literary texts, whether as agents of social and political change or of historical understanding.

We work closely with arts organisations, councils, schools and other partners to ensure our research contributes positively to society and culture.

• Remembering the Reformation
• Challenging perceptions of Dickens
• Writing by Muslims in South Asia and Britain

The Humanities Research Centre , based in the Berrick Saul Building, is an interdisciplinary hub for arts and humanities research.

Research centres

We are involved in a number of interdisciplinary research centres:

• Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies
• Centre for Medieval Literature
• Centre for Medieval Studies
• Centre for Modern Studies
• Centre for Narrative Studies
• Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies
• Centre for Women's Studies
• Humanities Research Centre

Meet our research students

Writers at York

Writers at York is a lively programme of readings and workshops, bringing exciting new voices and some of the most important contemporary writers to York.

Our recent events have featured poets Denise Riley, Alice Oswald and Seamus Heaney, playwright David Edgar, novelists Graham Swift, Emma Donoghue, J. M. Coetzee, Booker-shortlisted novelist (and York PhD student) Fiona Mozley, and many others.

Explore our upcoming and past events

One of our recent events saw Dr Alexandra Kingston-Reese in conversation with New Zealand's  Eleanor Catton, a prominent contemporary novelist.

Publications

See our recently published books and articles as well as forthcoming work.

Research degrees

Push the boundaries of knowledge in our supportive and stimulating environment.

Fellowships and Postdoctoral Research

Benefit from a dynamic research culture and excellent facilities.

Academic visitors

We welcome scholars who wish to work with us for up to one year.

• Aug 17, 2020

A guide to research in English literary studies

Updated: Jun 26, 2022

This guide introduces you to basic resources for doing research in English literary studies. Some of these resources are geared towards the British eighteenth century, which is my area of specialization, but some cut across periods and fields. You will probably be familiar with some of them, but others may be new to you. You will find this guide helpful whether you are writing a seminar paper, getting started on your dissertation, or need more advanced tools for locating primary and secondary sources.

Primary Sources

◾ Sources that used to require visits to distant archives are increasingly available on digital databases that you may be able to access through your university library. If you are looking for titles published in Britain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, search for the English Short Title Catalogue ( ESTC ), the most extensively bibliography of primary sources in early modern Britain. The ESTC will help you find titles, but in order to locate the actual texts you should visit other databases that store sources. Two marvelous ones are Early English Books Online ( EEBO ) and Nineteenth-Century Collections Online ( NCCO ).

◾ If your field is the British eighteenth century, then your database of choice is Eighteenth-Century Collections Online ( ECCO ) . It holds more than a hundred thousand digitized texts from the eighteenth century, all of them text searchable. The reason why ECCO is so useful is that most texts published in the eighteenth century do not exist in modern editions. This includes not only hundreds and hundreds of novels that were never republished, but also journalism, book reviews, philosophical treatises, sermons, almanacs, diaries, political pamphlets, and so on. Once you get a sense of what your dissertation will be about, spend some time on ECCO doing keyword searches. This does not necessarily involve finding new sources to write chapters about (even though it can involve that); you may simply be interested in what eighteenth-century reviewers were saying about the novel or poem you are reading, or in how people wrote on the issues you are tracing (sensibility, women’s lives, commerce, elections, slavery, the imagination, human nature, and so on). You are very likely to find exciting sources you did not know about but which may be perfect for your purposes.

You may be able to access ECCO through your library website, as long as they have a subscription. There are also other eighteenth-century repositories you should consider, including Eighteenth-Century Journals (which holds rare journals printed between c.1685 and 1835) and the 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection . For additional resources, consult the website of the Lewis Walpole Library (a rare-book library specializing in the British eighteenth century): https://guides.library.yale.edu/british18thc

◾ If you are doing work on the Enlightenment, here are a few websites containing reliable versions of important primary sources: the ARTFL Project ( https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/ ) gives you access to the complete works of Voltaire ( Tout Voltaire ) and to the full text of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie . Both are in French. For an ongoing English translation of the Encyclopédie , consult The Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert ( https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/ ). And for the complete works of David Hume, you can use Hume Texts Online ( https://davidhume.org/ ).

◾ If you read French and are looking for French-language materials, the closest equivalent to ECCO is Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France ( https://www.bnf.fr/en/gallica-bnf-digital-library ).

◾A different way of looking for potentially useful primary sources would be to consult the catalogs of presses that publish in our field. The Broadview Press has been publishing lots of previously unavailable eighteenth-century works (both fiction and nonfiction) in annotated editions. Check their website for a full list of titles: https://broadviewpress.com/product-category/english-studies/ .

◾Two final words about primary sources: (1) If you are working with sources available in modern editions, then keep in mind that not all modern editions are equal. Amazon sells lots of “print-on-demand” editions which you should avoid by all means: they are carelessly copied from online texts and may be distorted or miss important passages. It is also prudent to avoid editions by popular presses such as Signet or Vintage. Instead, work with editions prepared by an eighteenth-century scholar. Publishers like Oxford, Penguin, Norton, and others clearly identify the editor who prepared the text and the critical apparatus. Prefer these editions. And then, (2), in the case of highly canonical authors there often are modern editions considered to be the “standard” edition. These are viewed as the best extant editions of your source, and journals often expect you to use (and to quote) that particular edition in your articles. For example, if you are working on Samuel Johnson, the standard edition is the one published by Yale University Press; the standard edition for Henry Fielding is The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding , while for Jane Austen it is The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. (If you are working on Austen, make sure to consult Jane Austen in Context , one of the volumes of the Cambridge Edition.) In most cases these are very expensive editions you may not be able to afford, but the library should have them. What I usually do is to begin work with a good paperback edition and then check out the standard edition when I sit down to write.

Secondary Sources

This is where you may feel paralyzed, since there is so much out there to know about. Where do you even start? Most students start by checking the library, asking people for recommendations, and consulting the bibliographies included in modern editions of primary sources. Those are all good methods, but there are better gateways into the world of secondary sources — ones that will make sure you are not missing the crucial article that came out just last year. You probably already know about databases such as Jstor and Project MUSE , which serve as aggregators for important journals in English. Jstor is good but Project MUSE is better, as it gives you access to more recent scholarship and often features abstracts of articles. But there are other resources out there, including the following:

- Bibliographies of English studies. These give you access to comprehensive lists of the existing scholarship on any given topic, and they exist both online and in print. The most important one in our field is the MLA International Bibliography , which you can learn about here . It is essentially an advanced search engine focused on scholarship in the field of modern languages and literatures. Online bibliographies like the MLA and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature ( ABELL ) have the advantage that they are regularly updated. But you may also consult printed bibliographies, many of which offer annotations on titles, giving you a sense of an article’s or book’s contents before you dive into reading it. Book-format bibliographies usually include the word “bibliography” in the title, so they should be easy to search for (an example is Barry Roth’s An Annotated Bibliography of Jane Austen Studies , 1973-83 ). The advantage of such bibliographies is that they save you a lot of time — you can quickly gather which books and articles you need to read and which ones you can safely skip. While useful, however, they inevitably get dated and must be used alongside more current material.

- Yearly reviews . These serve a different role than bibliographies. You can use them to get a sense of what is available out there, but they tend to be less comprehensive than a proper bibliography. Their advantage, however, is that they provide brief reviews of the listed items. The most comprehensive yearly review for secondary sources in English Studies is Oxford’s The Year’s Work in English Studies ( YWES ), available at https://academic.oup.com/ywes . Once a year YWES publishes a 1,500-page volume, fully available online, reviewing relevant books and articles in all periods of British and American literature, organizing them by section. There are sections, for example, entitled “Old English,” “The Eighteenth Century,” “The Victorian Period,” and “American Literature to 1900.” You can go straight to the section that matters for you and search for reviews on the author/source you are interested in. This serves as a shortcut into the world of secondary literature, allowing you to read many reviews at one sitting and deciding which articles/books you should read in full and which ones you can safely skip.

If you are doing work in the eighteenth-century, then make sure to also use The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats ( https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/567 ), available on Project MUSE. The Scriblerian reviews all articles and books on canonical eighteenth-century authors including Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, and Henry Fielding.

- Surveys of recent studies: These are different than either bibliographies or yearly reviews, in that they consider trends in the field. The best example is the yearly “omnibus” essay published by SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 covering recent developments in four different fields: “The English Renaissance” (Winter), “Tudor and Stuart Drama” (Spring), “The Restoration and Eighteenth Century” (Summer), and “The Nineteenth Century” (Autumn). Once a year, SEL invites a major scholar in each of these fields to survey approximately 100 books published the previous year and write a long review essay. The essays discuss individual books but focus on describing the state of the field and identifying trends in the scholarship. Reading (or even browsing) a few of these essays will give you a good sense of the conversations currently taking place, and may help you decide where you belong and who your interlocutors are. You can then compile a list of sources you want to consult more directly.

A different type of survey, organized by topic, is published by the online journal Literary Compass , which regularly publishes articles covering scholarship on themes such as gender studies, ecocriticism, memory studies, literature and technology, secularism, and so on.

- Metacritical studies. Just as there are studies of literary history, there are studies of studies of literary history. A good example is the Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism series, published by Palgrave ( https://www.macmillanihe.com/series/readers-guides-to-essential-criticism/14520/ ). If you are working on the rise of the novel, for example, I can’t recommend highly enough Nicholas Seager’s The Rise of the Novel: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism. It surveys, in brief and informative chapters organized chronologically, the main books written on the rise of the novel both before and after Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), separating them by topic (feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and so on). The same series features books surveying decades of scholarship on Gothic fiction, Virginia Woolf, postcolonial literature, children’s literature, Jane Austen, literature and science, Shakespeare, and a lot else.

- You probably already know the Cambridge Companion series: these are collections of essays targeted at students and scholars seeking an entry into a new subject.

- Dedicated online journals. If you are doing work on Jane Austen, make ample use of the online version of Persuasions , the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America ( http://jasna.org/publications/persuasions-online/ ). Make sure, in particular, to check the bibliographical essays, which cover the year’s output in Austen studies. If you are working on Defoe, make sure to check Digital Defoe ( https://digitaldefoe.org/ ).

This list is far from exhaustive, and is limited by my knowledge of the field. If you are working outside of traditional British literary history, consult a professor who specializes in your field and ask them for similar resources. For example, my colleague Dr. Margaret Galvan recommends this page to students looking for scholarship on comics. Other fields very probably benefit from field-specific bibliographies, aggregators, review journals, digital databases and other resources you may not know about. It's worth asking.

Three important reference works

This should go without saying, but if you are planning to quote definitions from a modern dictionary, the dictionary to quote is the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ). The OED has several advantages over more popular dictionaries: it is incomparably more comprehensive, it provides rich etymological information on every entry, and — most importantly for our purposes — it provides quotations to illustrate how words were used in past historical periods. It shows, for example, how the word “novel” changed meanings over the course of the centuries.

If, by contrast, you are looking for how a word was defined in the eighteenth century, you can use the OED in conjunction with Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which the University of Central Florida is currently in the process of digitizing: https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/ .

Another source you need to know is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ( DNB ) . Also available through library subscription, the DNB is the source to go if you need a biography of a British figure. Unlike popular sources such as Wikipedia, the DBN is written by experts — thus the entry on Jane Austen is written by the influential Austen scholar Marilyn Butler, while the entry on Daniel Defoe is written by Defoe’s most important biographer, Paula R. Backscheider. The entries often consist in summaries of the standard biographies with updated information.

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• Published: 03 November 2021

The role of literary fiction in facilitating social science research

• Bryan Yazell   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2263-3488 1 , 2 ,
• Klaus Petersen 2 , 3 ,
• Paul Marx 3 , 4 , 5 &
• Patrick Fessenbecker 6 , 7  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  261 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Scholars in literature departments and the social sciences share a broadly similar interest in understanding human development, societal norms, and political institutions. However, although literature scholars are likely to reference sources or concepts from the social sciences in their published work, the line of influence is much less likely to appear the other way around. This unequal engagement provides the occasion for this paper, which seeks to clarify the ways social scientists might draw influence from literary fiction in the development of their own work as academics: selecting research topics, teaching, and drawing inspiration for projects. A qualitative survey sent to 13,784 social science researchers at 25 different universities asked participants to describe the influence, if any, reading works of literary fiction plays in their academic work or development. The 875 responses to this survey provide numerous insights into the nature of interdisciplinary engagement between these disciplines. First, the survey reveals a skepticism among early-career researchers regarding literature’s social insights compared to their more senior colleagues. Second, a significant number of respondents recognized literary fiction as playing some part in shaping their research interests and expanding their comprehension of subjects relevant to their academic scholarship. Finally, the survey generated a list of literary fiction authors and texts that respondents acknowledged as especially useful for understanding topics relevant to the study of the social sciences. Taken together, the results of the survey provide a fuller account of how researchers engage with literary fiction than can be found in the pages of academic journals, where strict disciplinary conventions might discourage out-of-the-field engagement.

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Introduction

Interdisciplinary research has become the buzzword of university managers and funding agencies. It is said that researchers need to think out of the box, be innovative and agile, and—last but not least—be curious about other disciplines in order to solve the complex challenges of the modern world. The tension inevitably generated by calls for more interdisciplinary work between university administrators on the one side and researchers on the other risks obscuring a fundamental question: what exactly is new about interdisciplinary research in the first place? For all the handwringing about interdisciplinarity, there is no clear consensus about what the boundaries of a given discipline are in the first place. Debates have waged over the last several decades about the divisions between the sciences and the humanities, their origins, and possible methods for rectifying them. Perhaps most famously, British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow identified “two cultures” in the academy separated by “a gulf of mutual incomprehension” ( 1961 , p. 4). According to Snow, “literary intellectuals” and “physical scientists” not only distrusted each other’s pronouncements, but fundamentally saw the world differently ( 1961 , p.4, 6). Although this assessment has been influential in framing these respective disciplines for decades, its presentation of a binary division between the hard sciences and the arts does not account for the fields of study with overlapping interests and, at times, borrowed methodological tools: the social sciences and literature departments.

The social sciences and literary studies share an indelible link by virtue of their twinned emergence as academic disciplines in the early twentieth century. Both disciplines in the broadest sense share a keen interest in understanding and describing human behavior and social relationships. However despite—or perhaps owing to—these similarities, the disciplines have historically identified themselves in terms of opposition. On one side, Émile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, published in 1895, defined the discipline in terms of positivism and quantitative study. On the other side, foundational literature scholars such as Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis understood literary study as a crucial component to the project of invigorating the national culture: to identify among the mass of popular culture the most elite examples of art. Critics in this early school of literary study therefore understood literature less as a mirror of society and more as a way to access what is best about cultural ideals or humanistic achievement (Arnold, 1873 ; Leavis, 2011 ). In this early context, social scientists were more interested in making society itself the object of study. While the features of each respective field have undoubtedly changed dramatically over the past century, this underlying division regarding the “science” in the social science persists. If the social scientist and literature scholar can speak with some degree of shared comprehension, they nonetheless are beset by disciplinary boundaries that make the task of mutual exchange harder than it might otherwise appear.

The decision to better document the uses of literature within the social sciences was born from an overarching drive to understand literature’s impact on researchers that often escape notice. After all, literary scholars are in general familiar with (if not thoroughly informed by) the works of sociologists, economists, and political scientists. Moreover, they are likely to be comfortable both with using the toolset of the social sciences in their own work and, more to the point, citing sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Bruno Latour. Over the last decade, for instance, several prominent literary scholars have advocated for a descriptive model for analyzing literary texts modeled on the social sciences (e.g., Love 2010 ; Marcus and Love, 2016 ). This relatively recent turn to the social sciences does not begin to consider, of course, the much longer history of literary scholars drawing critical concepts from the Frankfurt School (such as Theodor Adorno or Jürgen Habermas) or, more significantly, the works of Karl Marx. All of which is to say, one can easily expect references to sources broadly associated with the social sciences when reading a literary studies monograph.

However, if it is clear that literary scholars are familiar with prominent works by social scientists, it is much less apparent if the reverse is true. In an essay in World Politics, the political scientist Cathie Jo Martin outlines the profound insight literary sources can offer the field. Novels and other literary fiction provide “a site for imagining policy”, help define shared group interests, and create narratives that legitimize systems of governance (Martin, 2019 , p. 432). Elsewhere, Nobel prize-winning economist Robert J. Shiller calls for greater engagement with literature and fiction in Narrative Economics (2019). However, as we show below, cases of social scientists explicitly acknowledging literary sources are few and far in between. Rather than articulate yet another call for better dialog between the disciplines, we instead seek greater insight into the way social scientists are already referring to, engaging with, or simply using literature in their field as researchers and teachers. As explained in detail below, this task is not as straightforward as it may seem.

Our project proceeded in two steps. The first was a qualitative study of social science articles that included references to literary authors drawn from the collection of social science journals cataloged on the JSTOR digital library. The evaluation of literary references captured in our study (outlined below) made it possible to track the proliferation of literary sources across social science research and to create a loose typology of these uses. For the second step, we developed a survey for social science researchers to elaborate on how, if at all, their work engages with works of literary fiction. Before going into the field, the survey was tested and discussed with a small number of academics to ensure that the items capture the concepts of interest. The survey was then sent electronically to 13,784 researchers at all stages (from PhD students to full professors) from the top 25 social science departments as ranked in 2019 by Times Higher Education (World University Rankings).

If academic departments are guardians of their disciplines, then this sample of prominent departments might reflect the international standard for their respective fields. In other words, researchers attached to these institutions may be more inclined to protect conventions than to go against the grain. In contrast, we can imagine that scholars at smaller schools, colleges, or cross-disciplinary research centers might be more inclined to engage with other disciplines. Focusing on the former institutions rather than the later, our survey finds hard test cases for our questions about the use of literary references in social sciences. Finally, by calling attention to the different forms of influence literature may (or may not) assume, the survey made it possible to dwell in more detail on how social scientists esteem literary fiction as a tool for understanding social concepts.

Before conducting our survey, we first developed a typology of what we term uses of literature within the social sciences. This typology is the result of an ongoing project seeking to understand how literature might already play a role in the social sciences, no matter how small this role might appear at first glance. Our investigations were further motivated by the distinct lack of sources on the subject. While there are a number of prominent cases that call for social scientists to incorporate the insights of literature into their research (e.g., Shiller, 2019 ) and teaching (e.g., Morson and Schapiro, 2017 ), there are hardly any that demonstrate how (and where) they might already be doing so. For those of us who wish to expound on the value of not only literature per se but the study of literature specifically, a thorough account of how experts in an adjacent field like social science might already incorporate literary objects in their scholarship is a critical starting point. The absence of a generalized account of the field therefore required us to generate our own.

To do so, we first devised a plan to comb through the entire catalog of published social science articles on JSTOR, which spans nearly a century’s worth of material. Our goal at this point was to identify and categorize where and how social scientists refer to literary fiction in their published work. As will become clear, this approach’s limitations—namely, its reliance on a pre-determined list of searchable terms—set the groundwork for our survey, which was designed to account for surprising or unexpected responses. Nevertheless, the survey provided valuable insight into the more fleeting references to literary fiction in published social science research.

A brief account of this JSTOR project is useful for contextualizing the results of our social science survey. First, it was necessary to generate a delimited archive of social science articles that use, in some shape or another, literary sources. For the sake of producing an adequate number of sources, we composed a list of search terms that consisted of 30 prominent Anglophone authors, along with two famous literary characters, Robinson Crusoe, and Sherlock Holmes (Fig. 1 ). To determine these search terms, we cross-referenced popular online media articles (including blogs, short essays, and user forums) that offered broad rankings of, for example, the most important authors of all time. To best address the historical breadth of the JSTOR catalog, the names were edited down further to focus on authors who published before the middle of the twentieth century. It goes without saying that this initial list was far from exhaustive. Instead, it was intended to produce a large enough body of results in order for us to further generate a working typology of literary references as they appeared in the articles. Footnote 1 Second, we conducted a qualitative analysis of these articles alongside the rough typology of uses Michael Watts, Professor of Economics at Purdue, outlines in his study of economics and literature—the only workable typology we found.

Chart displays search terms (author name or fictional character name) and their corresponding total number of appearances across all social science articles on JSTOR. Figure shows 19 most popular results from the compiled search term list.

According to Watts, economists who engage with literature to any degree tend to do so according to four different categories: 1. eloquent description of human behavior; 2. historical evidence conveying the context of a particular time or place; 3. Alternative accounts of rational behavior that complement or challenge economic theory; 4. Evidence of an antimarket/antibusiness orientation in esthetic works. ( 2002 , p. 377)

When viewed alongside the JSTOR articles, however, the limitations to Watts’s typology were apparent. Most immediately, the emphasis on what one might call deep or sustained engagements with literature means that his typology will not capture those more fleeting uses of literature that make up the vast majority of literary references in the social science archive. Once one recognizes these limits, it becomes clear that any categorization or typology of literature in social science must be sufficiently flexible enough to capture the many and often surprising ways that the disciplinary fields might intersect. Of course, this latter point is underscored by the fact that Watt’s original typology is concerned with economics only. By expanding our search to include the social sciences in general, we allow for a wider scale for evaluating literature’s usefulness as seen by, for instance, political scientists, social theorists, and behavioral economists. After reviewing the JSTOR set of articles, we expanded on Watt’s initial typology to produce a more encompassing categorization of literary uses that better accommodated the range of literary references as they appeared in the archive. Ultimately, we determined that an expanded typology of uses of literature as they appear in published social science articles must include several more categories, never mind the four in Watts’s initial outline:

Literature as argument

Causal Argument/Historical data: marks studies that see literature as an agent of historical change along the lines of something a historian of the period can recognize.

Alternate Explanation: notes studies that see literary writers as rival social theorists whose arguments warrant proper countering.

Philosophical Position: refers to studies that associate an author with an argument that is developed or sustained across that author’s body of work.

Literature as context

Historical Context: designates studies that use information from literary texts as a way of characterizing a particular historical period, without claiming that the work was an agent of change in the period.

Biography: refers to studies that cite biographical details of an author or literary source as a way of situating concurrent historical events.

Literature as metonym

Cultural Standard: names studies that refer to literary texts as a cultural metonym, for example using Shakespeare as a way of referring to Renaissance England or to Western Culture as a whole.

Parable: designates studies that refer to a literary object that has lost its original literary contextualization and now stands in for something else entirely (e.g., Robinson Crusoe as a parable for homo economicus).

Literature as decoration

Literary effects/style: accounts for those literary texts that are evoked subtly via an author’s style or phrasing.

Decoration: names instances when the references to a literary text appear merely decorative and play no significant role in the argument.

Nonfiction quote: denotes direction quotations attributed to authors outside their published works.

Literature as Inspiration: marks moments in which a literary text plays no direct role in the argument but inspired the scholar’s thinking.

Literature as Teaching Tool: acknowledges instances where scholars use literary texts within the classroom or to help explain a concept.

As this expanded typology suggests, our initial assessment of the JSTOR articles highlights literature’s wide range of applications within the social sciences (Fig. 2 ). Moreover, it jumpstarts a dialog on what, exactly, constitutes a use of literature within this field. After all, it seems significant that a great portion of literary references as captured in the JSTOR survey are essentially non-critical uses—pithy quotations from authors or famous literary epigrams—when viewed from the perspective of literary studies. Nonetheless, to account for these references to literature is to acknowledge something of the role literary fiction per se plays, if not in the entire field of social science research, then in the academic conventions of social science publishing.

Chart shows the proportion of literary typographies across JSTOR’s social science catalog from among our compiled search term list. The presented types originate from our expanded typography based on Watts’s categorisations.

At the same time, our attempts to expand this typology ran into several hurdles of its own. First and foremost, our ability to generate search results from the JSTOR archive was limited by the terms we used: because any search for “literature” or “fiction” produces too many non-applicable and generalized results, one must enter specific search terms (e.g., William Shakespeare; Virginia Woolf) to produce relevant results. Along similar lines, our typology can only take shape in view of these limited sources; it is after all possible that an author or literary text that did not appear on our initial list has been received by social scientists in ways that confound expectations beyond even our expanded typology.

Finally, our reliance on both pre-conceived search terms and archived research articles prevents us from evaluating the newest trends in both literature as well as social science research. As our survey results below demonstrate, there is ample evidence that literature produced within the last twenty years has an outsized impact on those social scientists who acknowledge literary fiction as an influence in their work. The conventions of academic publishing in non-literary fields, however, might prevent researchers from likewise acknowledging these contemporary examples in their published material in favor of more familiar, canonical examples. In view of the affordances and limitations to our initial JSTOR study, we decided to approach the subject of literature and social science from another direction: by going directly to the source.

If publications are the end products of academic work, the product does not always reflect all details of the research process. Nobody leaves the scaffolding standing when the house is completed; likewise, the notes, readings, and other sources of inspiration that lay the foundation for an article or academic monograph often go unacknowledged. To be sure, simply searching for references to literary fiction in the published text of these sources is likely to return some results—for instance, the frequent conflation of the homo economicus model with the protagonist of Robinson Crusoe, albeit in a manner that elides any reference to Daniel Defoe, the author (Watson, 2017 ). As the example of Crusoe suggests, the small pool of literary sources that appear in the text of social science articles cannot adequately account for the wide range of influences literature might have at all stages of research. To better capture these invisible or unacknowledged uses of literature in the social science, we decided to simply ask social scientists themselves. The survey asked a few simple questions on their use (or not) of fictional literature in any stage of their academic work. The survey questions are included in the supplementary material as supplementary note . We received 875 responses at a response rate of 7 percent, a number which we deemed acceptable for allowing us to detect some overall patterns. Given the use of THE rankings, the sample is dominated by North American and European social science departments. The sample includes all career stages: Ph.D students (35 pct.), postdocs and assistant professors (20 pct.), and tenured staff (42 pct.). It includes the four major social science disciplines: economics (20 pct.), sociology (31 pct.), political science (26 pct.), psychology (19 pct.), whereas a small group (4 pct.) identified with other disciplines. A full demographic breakdown (Table S.1) is included in the supplementary material .

Discussion: what do social scientists say?

To be clear, not all social scientists use literature in a manner conforming with our typology above or even consider literature a factor in their work life. In the survey, we focused on the non-explicit uses of literature and the considerations behind their uses. In other words, the survey is meant to supplement our findings from the study of social science journals from the JSTOR digital library. The survey should not be taken as a test of the above-mentioned categories developed from the empirical study of academic publications. Still, it is possible to glean some points of overlap between the two approaches. Several of these categories can be easily applied to responses from the survey, especially the categories relating to literature’s inspirational value or its usefulness as a teaching tool. At the same time, other categories that feature heavily in the published articles—especially “literature as decoration” and “literature as metonym”—were hardly mentioned at all in the survey responses. The gap between what social scientists say about literature and what appears in social science articles reiterates the value of the survey, which captures some of the underlying motivations for using literature (or not) that otherwise would not come across in view of published academic work.

Even considering the general self-selection bias—i.e., respondents who react positively to the idea of using literature are also more likely to participate in the survey—93 percent agreed that “Literature often contains important insights into the nature of society and social life”, while only 2 percent disagreed. However, it is one thing to acknowledge that literature offers general insights into life and quite another to affirm that literature plays a role in individual research biographies. To address this issue, we posed the question if “Reading literature played a role in the formation of your research questions or the development of your research projects.”

We were somewhat surprised to learn that this was the case for almost half of the respondents (46 precent agree or totally agree), and only a third (34 percent) rejected this premise (Table 1 ). Looking at the comments in the open sections shed light on this. For some researchers there was a very clear link. For example, one respondent explained: “Toni Morrison and other women of color (Ana Castillo, for example) greatly enriched my understanding of the role of gender in society (I am a man).”

Raising the bar even higher, we then asked about publications. Publications are arguably the most delicate matter in our survey. After all, publications can make or break careers inasmuch as they factor into promotions and tenure reviews. In response to our publishing question (“How often do you quote or in other ways use a work of fiction in your publications”), 25 percent recorded occasionally using literary fiction in some form and an additional 13 percent affirmed doing so often or very often. In other words, almost 40 percent of the respondents acknowledge using literary sources in their publications (Table 2 ).

However, it must be stressed that these uses vary in form and substance. Based on our qualitative assessment of a subset of social science sources (outlined above), we found that explicit engagements range from the superficial (e.g., brief quotations of famous quips or observations from literary sources), the decontextualized (e.g., Robinson Crusoe functions only as a model of economic behavior), to more sustained engagements with the arguments or ideas presented in literature (e.g., Thomas Piketty’s references to Jane Austen and Balzac in Capital in the Twenty-First Century). In other words, a great many of these applications of literature do not resemble the type of work one finds in literature departments. Moreover, the depth or method for engagement is rather unsystematic.

Of course, publications and research only constitute part of the work academics do at the university. Our survey also asked about teaching in order to capture other literary uses that published papers are unlikely to acknowledge. As noted above, Robinson Crusoe appears in textbooks on microeconomics in the figure of the homo economicus. Elsewhere, there are several examples of sources who call for incorporating literary fiction in the teaching of the social sciences in order to benefit from the imaginative social logics embedded in, for instance, science fiction novels (e.g., Rodgers et al., 2007 ; Hirschman et al., 2018 ). As our survey demonstrates, most of the respondents use or have used literary sources as pedagogical tools: less than a third (30 percent) never do so, most do so at least sometimes, and a few (12 percent) frequently use literature in their teaching (Table 3 ).

If we had expanded the category from literature to art in a wide sense (including, for example, movies, television series, paintings, and music) we suspect the numbers would have been significantly higher.

Finally, our survey provides some insight into what characterizes social scientists who use literature in their work. We generally find only small differences between disciplines within the field of social science, with economists marginally more skeptical of literature’s usefulness in the classroom than researchers in sociology, political science, and psychology (Table 3 ). This confirms earlier findings. A survey from 2006 showed that 57 percent of economist disagreed with the proposition that “In general, interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained by a single discipline.” For psychology, political science, and sociology the numbers were 9, 25 and 28 percent respectively (Fourcade et al., 2015 ).

Larger contrasts appear when considering the career stage of the researchers. We find a very clear general pattern of early-career, non-tenured researchers expressing more skepticism regarding literature’s insights compared to tenured and more senior researchers (Table 4 ). This pattern is most apparent when the respondents consider the use of literature in their own publications. A striking 75 percent of PhD students and 78 percent of postdocs have never quoted literature in their publications, compared to 48 percent in the senior professor group.

Arguably, this gap might simply reflect the much larger publication portfolio expected of senior professors in relation to early-career scholars, but the same pattern holds when we asked more general questions on the importance of literature.

This last point casts into relief some of the internal and generational gaps existing between senior researchers and junior and early-career researchers facing an increasingly precarious academic workplace. For early-career researchers, there is little immediate benefit to working outside established borders when recognition and professional assessment (such as promotions and tenure) still largely derive from work within disciplinary camps (Lyall, 2019 , p. 2). At the same time, stepping into uncharted territory requires one to navigate disciplinary traditions, departmental gatekeeping, and new methodologies. These professional limitations are what observers have in mind when they call interdisciplinary research risky at best (e.g., Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015 ) and “career suicide” at worst (Bothwell, 2016 ).

Rather than ascribing literary interests to some form of academic maturity, then, we suspect this gap between early and later-stage researchers partly reflects how disciplines work. In general terms, it is easy to imagine how the institutional pressures on early-career researchers can translate to a stricter adherence to disciplinary guidelines. Facing an unstable job market and competing for a limited pool of external funding, these scholars are highly dependent on the recognition of their peers and will tend to be more risk-adverse with respect to publications. As noted above, explicit signals of inter- or cross-disciplinary interests may sound appealing in the abstract (and may be promoted by international funding agencies) but they face much more skepticism within academic departments and hiring committees. As a result, using literature in academic publications—and perhaps explicitly cross-disciplinary research in general—is a luxury that only the more professionally-secure researchers can afford.

This explanation might account for the lack of explicit references to literary fiction in social science research, but not the absence of more indirect literature-research relationships. For example, 39 percent of PhD students “totally agree” that one can “learn a lot about what humans are like from literature” as opposed to 60 percent of associate professors and over half of professors. While outside the bounds of our current project, this generational gap may also be evidence of the diminishing presence of literature departments on university campuses after successive years of administrative funding cuts and public pressure against humanities-oriented education in general (Meranze, 2015 ). Fewer literature classes may result in as scenario where even advanced degree holders in an adjacent field like social science may be less studied in literature than their more senior colleagues.

What is the social scientist reading list?

There is no shortage of arguments for those in the social sciences to read literary fiction. As noted in the introduction above, there are a handful of social scientists in fields like sociology and economics who emphasize not only the general value of reading literature but also the profound insights literature can offer their research. However, beyond acknowledging the need to read in general, the question remains: which books to open, and which pages to turn? As is perhaps unsurprising canonical examples of realist fiction, with their aspiration to represent the breadth of the social world, are often the first to come to mind. Critics interested in bridging the gap between literature and economics, for instance, tend to hold up nineteenth-century novels as key examples of the relevant insight fiction might offer (Fessenbecker and Yazell, 2021 ). This preference for major classics was also confirmed by the participants in our survey, who cited such canonical novelists as George Orwell and Leo Tolstoy with high frequency (Table 5 ). The full list of literary recommendations for “understanding society better” includes novels and authors and spans different national literary canons, with authors associated with novels far eclipsing other forms of literature.

The above list of frequently referenced authors comes with few surprises. Anglophone—and especially US—literature and writers dominate, which reflects of the high number of US and UK universities on our list of top departments in the field of social science. All authors except Homer, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Eliot, and Twain belong to the twentieth century. The most contemporary authors are women—Adichie and Atwood the only living authors within the top twenty—in contrast to the heavily-canonized, uniformly male authors in the top five positions. These more recent authors to different degrees push back against the conventions of the realist novel. Atwood’s speculative fiction and the fantasy and utopian fiction of LeGuin thus demonstrate the range of novelistic genres cited in the survey responses.

The list also suggests something of the formative power of the standardized literature curriculum. Books typically assigned in US high schools are heavily represented on the list of recommended texts below, which includes The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird (Table 6 ). The uncontested most recommended read for social scientists is the British novelist and essayist George Orwell. The specific recommendations include his most best-selling books, 1984 and Animal Farm, which together form the two most recommended titles according to the survey respondents.

Conclusion: the uses of trivia

To briefly summarize, we set out to study the way social scientists use literature in two broad ways. First, we compiled a dataset comprising a century’s worth of scholarship in the social sciences. Second, we conducted a survey of a large number of contemporary working social scientists. A qualitative review of the dataset revealed a number of different ways social scientists have used literature; these uses were categorizable into six broad categories, several of which contained discernible sub-categories. The survey reinforced parts of this analysis while diverging in intriguing ways. Almost all the surveyed social scientists agreed on the cognitive value of literature, and almost half (46%) reported that literary works had played important roles in their own intellectual biographies. Yet some common uses of literature in the dataset received virtually no mention in the self-reports and the survey revealed suggestive evidence of the impact of institutional structures on whether and how scholars use literature. Ultimately the analysis points towards the value of further research. Both the list of uses compiled from the dataset and the list of works compiled from the survey are necessarily limited in scope and would benefit from a more comprehensive consideration of social scientists and their research.

But by way of conclusion, it is worth responding to the worry that much of the data collected here is somewhat less than consequential—the collection of an offhand reference here, a novel read in grad school there—and to that extent cannot answer our opening question about the nature of interdisciplinarity. Or, perhaps more soberly, it does answer the question, but simply in the negative. There is in fact not much of a meaningful use for literature in the conduct of the social sciences, and one of the pieces of evidence for the argument is the limited use such scholars have made of it thus far. Such an objection is wrong in two ways, one rather boring and one relatively more interesting. The boring objection is simply the observation that the history of a discipline does not predict its future: it would not be at all surprising to see a discipline change as a new archive of material or a new method of analysis became available to it. Indeed, this is often precisely what leads disciplines forward. The more interesting objection is the implicit premise that interdisciplinary scholarship must make its interdisciplinarity overt and extensive, and that a new interdisciplinary connection must be innovative.

We reject both halves of this second premise. The kind of interdisciplinarity we have traced here is light and casual, using a quotation here or there, and there is little that is new about it: it has been with the social sciences for much of their history. However, interdisciplinarity need not be utterly novel to be worth explicating, theorizing, and defending. Against the model of interdisciplinary development that considers the key question to be the difficulty and complexity of bringing two disciplines together, we want to highlight how easy it really is. If it were to become ordinary practice to read a novel and a piece of literary criticism that addressed whatever issue a given social scientist happened to be working on, this would for many social scientists simply normalize and bring to awareness the way they already work. Moreover, rather than shaming social scientists for not using literature more, we submit a better way to evoke greater respect for and greater use of literature and criticism is to highlight the ways in which they already do. Carrots, as they say, rather than sticks.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Rita Felski, Anne-Marie Mai, and Pieter Vanhuysse for their helpful feedback during the design of the survey. Thanks are also due to JSTOR for making available their digital archive and to the nearly 1000 colleagues who responded to the survey and, in some cases, provided additional comments by email. Research in this article received funding by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF127) and the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (internal funds).

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Bryan Yazell

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Bryan Yazell & Klaus Petersen

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Klaus Petersen & Paul Marx

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Yazell, B., Petersen, K., Marx, P. et al. The role of literary fiction in facilitating social science research. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 261 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00939-y

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Welcome to the Tisch Library guide to resources for the undergraduate study of literature in English. Use the table of contents to find definitions, topic overviews, books, articles, and more that will help you with your research. 

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Reference sources--like dictionaries and subject encyclopedias, provide overviews of topics and descriptions of concepts and ideas. They can also provide definitions, statistics, and other details. You can use this type of source to help narrow your research topic, find data to support your thesis, and identify keywords and main ideas to use as search terms.

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Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

Cite this Scribbr article

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Research competency guidelines for literatures in english.

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Association of College and Research Libraries Literatures in English Section

Originally implemented, October 2004 Revised and approved, June 2007

Replaced by  Companion Document to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Research Competencies in Writing and Literature , November 2021

"Research Competency Guidelines for Literatures in English" was first developed for use within the Literatures in English Section (LES) of ACRL. Although based on framework of the "ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education" (2000), these guidelines address the need for a more specific and source-oriented approach within the discipline of English literatures, including a concrete list of research skills. The original list was compiled by Anne Jordan-Baker (Elmhurst College). The guidelines were further developed by the ACRL Literatures in English Section Ad hoc Committee on Literary Research Competencies.*

On December 10, 2001, the draft guidelines were posted to LES-L, the electronic discussion group, for comments. A revision based on those comments was discussed at the 2002 ALA Midwinter Meeting. The guidelines were also published in the fall 2002 issue of "Biblio-Notes", the LES newsletter, and readers were encouraged to submit comments. A draft based on all information and comments to date was posted to the LES-L group for further review on April 12, 2002. A final draft was presented at the 2002 ALA Annual Conference and was approved by the LES Executive Committee. An updated version of the 2002 draft was distributed to the LES-L members and the Information Literacy Advisory Committee as well as posted on the ACRL Web site. At the 2005 ALA Midwinter Meeting, a hearing was held and the document was further revised to reflect the advice received.

The "Research Competency Guidelines for Literatures in English" draft has been under review and revision during the years in which ACRL was developing policies and procedures for subject-specific information literacy standards. Because of the independent development of these guidelines and ACRL policies, the format and framework of guidelines do not follow the current patterns of information literacy standards. The guidelines draft document has served primarily to facilitate the collaboration of teaching faculty with subject librarians to create effective teaching structures for literary research. An ACRL roundtable discussion at the 11th National Conference is just one example of many in which the subject librarians have shared their success in using the guidelines to improve communication with the faculty they serve.

ACRL Literatures in English Section Planning Committee Chair Kathleen Kluegel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign January 2007

* ACRL Literatures in English Section Ad hoc Committee on Literary Research Competencies (1999-2001)

Heather Martin, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Chair; Austin Booth, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Charlotte Droll, Wright State University; Louise Greenfield, University of Arizona; Anne Jordan-Baker, Elmhurst College; Jeanne Pavy, University of New Orleans; Judy Reynolds, San Jose State University

Purpose of the Guidelines

• To aid students of literatures in English in the development of thorough and productive research skills
• To encourage the development of a common language for librarians, faculty, and students involved with research related to literatures in English
• To encourage librarian and faculty collaboration in the teaching of research methods to students of literatures in English
• To aid librarians and faculty in the development of instructional sessions and programs
• To assist in the development of a shared understanding of student competencies and needs
• To aid librarians and faculty in the development of research methods courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels

Because teaching methods, course content, and undergraduate requirements vary by institution, librarians and faculty may apply these guidelines in different ways to meet the needs of their students. For guidelines on helping students develop general research skills, librarians and faculty may refer to the "ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education" at www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.htm .

Introduction

Most research in literary studies begins with the text, whether it is a paperback novel, the electronic text of a poem on an author’s Web site, or an illuminated manuscript in a library’s collection. Educators encourage students to gain a deeper understanding of a text by exploring the context of the writing and the interpretations of others, and by developing and supporting their own interpretations. Limited only by their imaginations, students face almost endless opportunities for interpretation of a text.

Research plays an indispensable role in the textual discovery process for students. Good research skills help the literary explorer learn more about the author and the author’s world, examine scholarly interpretations of the text, and create new studies and interpretations to add to a body of knowledge. Sometimes the goals of textual discovery and interpretation can get lost in the minutiae of database searching and conforming to specific citation styles. However, it is important for librarians and other educators to remember these goals when helping students develop the research skills necessary for literary exploration.

Outcomes for Undergraduate English or American Literature Majors

I. understand the structure of information within the field of literary research:.

I.1 Differentiate between primary and secondary sources

I.1.i. Learn to discover and use primary source materials in print and in digital repositories, e.g., ECCO and EEBO

I.2 Understand that literary scholarship is produced and disseminated in a variety of formats, including monographs, journal articles, conference proceedings, dissertations, reference sources, and Web sites

I.3 Learn the significant features (e.g., series title, volume number, imprint) of different kinds of documents (e.g., journal articles, monographs, essays from edited collections)

I.4 Differentiate between reviews of literary works and literary criticism

I.5 Understand the concept and significance of peer-reviewed sources of information

I.6 Understand that literary texts exist in a variety of editions, some of which are more authoritative or useful than others

I.7 Understand the authorship, production, dissemination, or availability of literary production. This includes understanding the meanings and distinctions of the concepts of editions, facsimiles, and authoritative editions

II. Identify and use key literary research tools to locate relevant information:

II.1 Effectively use library catalogs to identify relevant holdings at local institutions and print and online catalogs and bibliographic tools to identify holdings at other libraries

II.2 Distinguish among the different types of reference works (e.g., catalogs, bibliographies, indexes, concordances, etc.) and understand the kind of information offered by each

II.3 Identify, locate, evaluate, and use reference sources and other appropriate information sources about authors, critics, and theorists

II.4 Use subjective and objective sources such as book reviews, citation indexes, and surveys of research to determine the relative importance of an author and/or the relevance of the specific work

II.5 Use reference and other appropriate information resources to provide background information and contextual information about social, intellectual, and literary culture

II.6 Understand the range of physical and virtual locations and repositories and how to navigate them successfully

II.7 Understand the uses of all available catalogs and services

III. Plan effective search strategies and modify search strategies as needed:

III.1 Identify the best indexes and databases

III.2 Use appropriate commands (such as Boolean operators) for database searches

III.3 Identify broader, narrower, and related terms or concepts when initial searches retrieve few or no results

III.4 Identify and use subject terms from the MLA International Bibliography and other specialized indexes and bibliographies

III.5 Identify and use Library of Congress subject headings for literature and authors

IV. Recognize and make appropriate use of library services in the research process:

IV.1 Identify and use librarians and reference services in the research process

IV.2 Use interlibrary loan and document delivery to acquire materials not available at one's own library

IV.3 Use digital resource service centers to read and create literary and critical documents in a variety of digital forms

V. Understand that some information sources are more authoritative than others and demonstrate critical thinking in the research process:

V.1 Know about Internet resources (e.g., electronic discussion lists, Web sites) and how to evaluate them for relevancy and credibility

V.2 Differentiate between resources provided free on the Internet and subscription electronic resources

V.3 Develop and use appropriate criteria for evaluating print resources

V.4 Learn to use critical bibliographies as a tool in evaluating materials

VI. Understand the technical and ethical issues involved in writing research essays:

VI.1 Document sources ethically

VI.2 Employ the MLA or other appropriate documentation style

VI.3 Understand the relationship between received knowledge and the production of new knowledge in the discipline of literary studies

VI.4 Analyze and ethically incorporate the work of others to create new knowledge

VII. Locate information about the literary profession itself:

VII.1 Access information about graduate programs and specialized programs in film study, creative writing, and other related fields, and about workshops and summer study opportunities

VII.2 Access information about financial assistance and scholarships available for literary study and related fields

VII.3 Access information on careers in literary studies and use of these skills in other professions

VII.4 Access information on professional associations

Altick, Richard D., and John J. Fenstermaker. The Art of Literary Research . 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1993.

Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association. "Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education." Chicago, IL: ACRL, 2000. 22 March 2007 www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.htm

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers . 6th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 2003.

Grafstein, Ann. "A Discipline-Based Approach to Information Literacy." Journal of Academic Librarianship 28 (2002): 197-204.

Jones, Cheryl, Carla Reichard, and Kouider Mokhtari. "Are Students’ Learning Styles Discipline Specific?" Community College Journal of Research & Practice 27 (2003): 363-375.

Leckie, Gloria J. "Desperately Seeking Citations: Uncovering Faculty Assumptions about the Undergraduate Research Process." Journal of Academic Librarianship 22 (1996): 201-208.

Literary Research: LR. College Park, MD : Literary Research Association , 1986-1990.

Literary Research Newsletter. Brockport, N.Y.: Literary Research Newsletter Association, 1976-1985.

Pastine, Maureen. "Teaching the Art of Literary Research." Conceptual Frameworks for Bibliographic Education: Theory into Practice . Ed. Mary Reichel and Mary Ann Ramey. Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1987. 134-44.

Reynolds, Judy. "The MLA International Bibliography and Library Instruction in Literature and the Humanities." Literature in English: A Guide for Librarians in the Digital Age . Ed. Betty H. Day and William A. Wortman. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2000. 213-247.

Oxford Research in English is now online

Oxford Research in English  is an online journal run by a team of graduates at the Faculty of English. They are delighted to announce that the latest issue of  Oxford Research in English is now online! Read on to find out more, or download the latest issue here .

A message from the Oxford Research in English team:

The latest edition of Oxford Research in English  features stellar work by our friends in the community who presented at last year's English Graduate Conference, on the theme of Boundaries and Transgressions. These presentation papers were subsequently expanded as full-length research articles or features. 

From a comparative perspective on spatiality in Julian of Norwich's writing and the medieval Shrine Madonna to the anger as gender-contingent in the Íslendingasögur, it is a very exciting issue full of fresh research perspectives and robust approaches.

Click here to read:  https://oxfordresearchenglish.wordpress.com/current-issue/  

Issue 10 is a bit of a milestone for a publication that began in 2014 with humble beginnings, and the team would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to all our peer reviewers (past and present) who have generously volunteered their time and expertise. Many thanks as well to everyone who has cheered us on.

English Literature: A Guide to Resources: Primary Sources

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• QS World Rankings by Subject 2024

Trinity’s Arts and Humanities top of table in latest QS World University Rankings by Subject

Trinity’s Arts and Humanities continue to excel in this year’s QS World University Rankings by Subject, with English Language and Literature top of the table in 21st place globally.

Trinity has five subjects in the top 50 globally in the latest ranking, with three from the Arts and Humanities: English Language and Literature (21), Performing Arts (40) and Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies (49).

Trinity’s English Language and Literature continues to rise in the ranks moving up one place from 2023, making it the highest-ranked place to study English literature in the European Union.

The Arts and Humanities contribute significantly to Trinity’s overall standing in the top 100 subject areas globally with Archaeology, Classics and Ancient History , History , Modern Languages , Philosophy , Education , and Law .  

Both Performing Arts and Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies have climbed the table significantly, improving their ranking from top 100 to top 50 globally. Overall Trinity College ranks 52 nd for Arts and Humanities subjects globally.

Speaking about the latest rankings, Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub said: “The rankings clearly show the high calibre of Trinity staff, students and research in the Arts and Humanities generally, while the particular distinction of the School of English confirms Trinity’s worldwide leadership in the study of language, identity, communication, and humanity.”

The QS World University Rankings by Subject are scored over five indicators including academic reputation, employer reputation and faculty research (citations). 

Find out more about the Trinity’s Arts and Humanities Schools here on our ‘partner’ page here. 

Aoife King, Communications Officer | Trinity Long Room Hub | [email protected] | 01 896 3895

AI-Based Research Tools

Your librarian.

Introduction: Conducting AI Powered Research

AI tools for research can help you to discover new sources for your research assignment or literature review! These tools will synthesize information from large databases of scholarly output with the aim of finding the most relevant articles, thereby saving researchers' time. As with our research databases or any other search tool, however, it's important to:

1) always evaluate results/output;

2) not rely on any one tool for all of your research,

as you will risk missing important information on your topic of interest. 

As always, if you have questions about using these tools for your research, please contact your friendly Rider librarian!

Disclaimer:  Rider University Libraries do not have subscription access to the AI-powered tools listed below. The guide serves solely as an informational resource. It is recommended that you assess these tools and their usage methodologies independently. 

• ELICIT IS AN "AI-POWERED RESEARCH ASSISTANT" - useful for finding papers, filtering study types, automating research flow, brainstorming, summarizing and more.
• Elicit is a research assistant using language models like GPT-3 to automate parts of researchers' workflows.
• Currently, the main workflow in Elicit is Literature Review--if you ask a question, Elicit will show relevant papers and summaries of key information about those papers in an easy-to-use table. 
• Access the Elicit FAQ here.

Research Rabbit

• RESEARCH RABBIT IS A CITATION-BASED MAPPING TOOL that focuses on the relationships between research works. 
• Bills itself as the "Spotify for Papers" !
• It uses visualizations to help researchers find similar papers and locate other researchers in their field. 
• Research Rabbit uses multiple databases, but does not name them (more information can be found on the FAQ page).
• Keep up with the latest research related to your collections using the "Personalized Digests" feature.

• PERPLEXITY   IS A SEARCH ENGINE THAT SEARCHES  Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide AI-generated answers (much like ChatGPT)
• Billed as "an alternative to traditional search engines, where you can directly pose your questions and receive concise, accurate answers backed up by a curated set of sources."
• It has a conversational interface, "contextual awareness" and "personalization" to learn your interests and preferences over time. 
• Using an "advanced search engine, it processes your questions and tasks it then uses predictive text capabilities to generate useful responses, choosing the best one from multiple sources, and summarizes the results in a concise way."
• Access the Perplexity FAQ here.

• CONSENSUS  USES LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS  (like Elicit) to help researchers find and synthesize answers to research questions, focusing on scholarly authors' findings and claims in each paper.
• Bills itself as the "ChatGPT of research!"--simply type in your research questions and off you go!
• Consensus provides helpful guidance on question prompts for different question types.
• Example topics are provided in browseable format
• Access the Consensus FAQ here. 

Semantic Scholar

• SEMANTIC SCHOLAR  PROVIDES BRIEF SUMMARIES  of the main objectives and results of papers. (It supplies underlying data for several of the other tools above).
• "We index over 200 million academic papers from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls."
• "Accelerating Scientific Breakthroughs Using AI"
• Developed by the Allen Institute for AI
• Access Semantic Scholar's FAQ here.

More AI Research Tools!

To learn about additional AI research tools, check out these research guides!

• AI Research Tools (Rutgers University Library)
• AI Research Tools (Georgetown University Library)
• Selected AI Based Literature Review Tools (Texas A&M University)
• Last Updated: Apr 9, 2024 8:34 PM
• URL: https://guides.rider.edu/aitools

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March 27, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

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English dominates scientific research—here's how we can fix it, and why it matters

by Elea Giménez Toledo, The Conversation

It is often remarked that Spanish should be more widely spoken or understood in the scientific community given its number of speakers around the world, a figure the Instituto Cervantes places at almost 600 million .

However, millions of speakers do not necessarily grant a language strength in academia. This has to be cultivated on a scientific, political and cultural level, with sustained efforts from many institutions and specialists.

The scientific community should communicate in as many languages as possible

By some estimates, as much as 98% of the world's scientific research is published in English , while only around 18% of the world's population speaks it. This makes it essential to publish in other languages if we are to bring scientific research to society at large.

The value of multilingualism in science has been highlighted by numerous high profile organizations, with public declarations and statements on the matter from the European Charter for Researchers , the Helsinki Initiative on Multiligualism , the Unesco Recommendation on Open Science , the OPERAS Multiligualism White Paper , the Latin American Forum on Research Assessment , the COARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment , and the Declaration of the 5th Meeting of Minsters and Scientific Authorities of Ibero-American Countries . These organizations all agree on one thing: all languages have value in scientific communication.

As the last of these declarations points out, locally, regionally and nationally relevant research is constantly being published in languages other than English. This research has an economic, social and cultural impact on its surrounding environment, as when scientific knowledge is disseminated it filters through to non-academic professionals, thus creating a broader culture of knowledge sharing.

Greater diversity also enables fluid dialogue among academics who share the same language, or who speak and understand multiple languages. In Ibero-America, for example, Spanish and Portuguese can often be mutually understood by non-native speakers, allowing them to share the scientific stage. The same happens in Spain with the majority of its co-official languages .

No hierarchies, no categories

Too often, scientific research in any language other than English is automatically seen as second tier, with little consideration for the quality of the work itself.

This harmful prejudice ignores the work of those involved, especially in the humanities and social sciences. It also profoundly undermines the global academic community's ability to share knowledge with society.

By defending and preserving multilingualism, the scientific community brings research closer to those who need it. Failing to pursue this aim means that academia cannot develop or expand its audience. We have to work carefully, systematically and consistently in every language available to us.

The logistics of strengthening linguistic diversity in science

Making a language stronger in academia is a complex process. It does not happen spontaneously, and requires careful coordination and planning. Efforts have to come from public and private institutions, the media, and other cultural outlets, as well as from politicians, science diplomacy , and researchers themselves.

Many of these elements have to work in harmony, as demonstrated by the Spanish National Research Council's work in ES CIENCIA , a project which seeks to unite scientific and and political efforts.

Academic publishing and AI models: a new challenge

The global academic environment is changing as a result the digital transition and new models of open access. Research into publishers of scientific content in other languages will be essential to understanding this shift. One thing is clear though: making scientific content produced in a particular language visible and searchable online is crucial to ensuring its strength.

In the case of academic books, the transition to open access has barely begun , especially in the commercial publishing sector, which releases around 80% of scientific books in Spain. As with online publishing, a clear understanding will make it possible to design policies and models that account for the different ways of disseminating scientific research, including those that communicate locally and in other languages. Greater linguistic diversity in book publishing can also allow us to properly recognize the work done by publishers in sharing research among non-English speakers.

Making publications, datasets, and other non-linguistic research results easy to find is another vital element, which requires both scientific and technical support. The same applies to expanding the corpus of scientific literature in Spanish and other languages, especially since this feeds into generative artificial intelligence models.

If linguistically diverse scientific content is not incorporated into AI systems, they will spread information that is incomplete, biased or misleading: a recent Spanish government report on the state of Spanish and co-official languages points out that 90% of the text currently fed into AI is written in English.

Deep study of terminology is essential

Research into terminology is of the utmost importance in preventing the use of improvised, imprecise language or unintelligible jargon. It can also bring huge benefits for the quality of both human and machine translations, specialized language teaching, and the indexing and organization of large volumes of documents.

Terminology work in Spanish is being carried out today thanks to the processing of large language corpuses by AI and researchers in the TeresIA project, a joint effort coordinated by the Spanish National Research Council. However, 15 years of ups and downs were needed to to get such a project off the ground in Spanish.

The Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia, on the other hand, have worked intensively and systematically on their respective languages. They have not only tackled terminology as a public language policy issue, but have also been committed to established terminology projects for a long time.

Multiligualism is a global issue

This need for broader diversity also applies to Ibero-America as a whole, where efforts are being coordinated to promote Spanish and Portuguese in academia, notably by the Ibero-American General Secretariat and the Mexican National Council of Humanities, Sciences and Technologies .

While this is sorely needed, we cannot promote the region's two most widely spoken languages and also ignore its diversity of indigenous and co-official languages. These are also involved in the production of knowledge, and are a vehicle for the transfer of scientific information, as demonstrated by efforts in Spain.

Each country has its own unique role to play in promoting greater linguistic diversity in scientific communication. If this can be achieved, the strength of Iberian languages—and all languages, for that matter—in academia will not be at the mercy of well intentioned but sporadic efforts. It will, instead, be the result of the scientific community's commitment to a culture of knowledge sharing.

Provided by The Conversation

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: surveyagent: a conversational system for personalized and efficient research survey.

Abstract: In the rapidly advancing research fields such as AI, managing and staying abreast of the latest scientific literature has become a significant challenge for researchers. Although previous efforts have leveraged AI to assist with literature searches, paper recommendations, and question-answering, a comprehensive support system that addresses the holistic needs of researchers has been lacking. This paper introduces SurveyAgent, a novel conversational system designed to provide personalized and efficient research survey assistance to researchers. SurveyAgent integrates three key modules: Knowledge Management for organizing papers, Recommendation for discovering relevant literature, and Query Answering for engaging with content on a deeper level. This system stands out by offering a unified platform that supports researchers through various stages of their literature review process, facilitated by a conversational interface that prioritizes user interaction and personalization. Our evaluation demonstrates SurveyAgent's effectiveness in streamlining research activities, showcasing its capability to facilitate how researchers interact with scientific literature.

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Becoming an English language teacher over lines of desire: Stories of lived experiences

• Open access
• Published: 31 October 2023

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• Nashid Nigar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7110-3694 1 ,
• Alex Kostogriz 1 &
• Laura Gurney 2  

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Beyond the notion of decision-making of career choice just being rational, this article proposes the primacy of ‘affect’ in the decision to become teachers over time. The article explores the becoming of immigrant English language teachers as an identity formation process, focusing on the lived experiences of 16 English language teachers since early childhood, mostly prior to their migration to Australia. Findings of the hermeneutic phenomenological narrative analysis of the teachers’ reflective accounts revealed two lines of becoming and their intersections—the line of becoming an English language learner and the line of becoming an English language teacher through decision-making for career choice. The histories of their initial professional decision to ‘become’ English teachers demonstrate the interplay of socially produced desires and personal investment in professional learning and capabilities since early childhood. Through unravelling the assemblages within which their desires to become teachers were fomented and strengthened through embodied lived experiences over a long period of time, we argue that the concept of English teachers’ ‘desired becoming’ informed their initial and long-term decision about career choice. This notion provides a window into the teachers’ decision-making of career choice in terms of the formation of their professional identities as an interplay of the affective and the rational. Embracing and appreciating the combined role of the affective and the rational in teachers’ becoming is important to consider in future research in this area as well as for teacher recruitment and retention, hence potentially addressing critical teacher shortages.

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Becoming an English teacher

How one makes the decision to choose a career may not always have a straight-forward answer. Some may choose a career based on self-concept, interest, motivation, and aptitude, or by analysing available opportunities and the values attached to these. According to social cognitive career theory, variables of self-efficacy shape career aspirations and trajectories (Lent et al., 1994 ). It has been argued that one’s interest in and selection of a future career emerge through the accumulative formation of beliefs, capacities, abilities and values (Lent et al., 1994 ). From the perspective of motivation theory, people choose careers based on their internal and external ‘needs’. Motivation theories of work (Locke & Latham, 2004 ) suggest that workers rationalise career decisions based on the motivational factors, drivers and triggers that shape their work roles and commitments. From these perspectives, career choice lies in the individual’s expectations for success in a profession and the value they assign to that profession (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000 ).

In the teacher education field to date, research concerning career choice—most of which is quantitative—has principally focused on internal and/or external motivational factors contributing to teachers’ decision-making about career (Heinz, 2015 ). This research tradition aims to establish causal relationships between factors, drivers, triggers, and decision-making. Self-beliefs, prior experiences and other socio-cultural influences may contribute to teachers’ career decisions (Heinz, 2015 ). Most research has been conducted via the FIT-Choice test (Richardson & Watt, 2006 ), underpinned by expectancy value theory to understand motivational influences which contribute to professional choice (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000 ). Motivational factors have been classified as intrinsic, altruistic and extrinsic (Heinz, 2015 ; Yüce et al., 2013 ). Intrinsic motivation involves passion for the profession, aptitude in teaching and personal fulfilment (Lovett, 2007 ; Manuel & Hughes, 2006 ; Yüce et al., 2013 ). Altruistic motivation is the intention to make a difference in communities and society (Chong & Low, 2009 ). Extrinsic motivations include job security (Jungert et al., 2014 ; Lam, 2012 ), high salary or reliable income, and long vacations (Lai et al., 2005 ; Lam, 2012 ; Struyven et al., 2013 ). Other factors of relevance are prior teaching and learning experiences (Heinz, 2011 , 2013 ), initial teacher education (Manuel & Hughes, 2006 ), demographic characteristics (Yüce et al., 2013 ), and considering teaching as a fall-back career (Cross & Ndofirepi, 2015 ).

A literature search on ‘becoming a teacher’ appeared mostly to focus on the initial decision-making of becoming a teacher and remaining in the profession. Similar to the literature already reviewed, this group of literature predominantly emphasises the working of the mind alone to become a teacher, especially motivation, informed decision-making, rational choice, etc. (e.g., Bruinsma & Jansen, 2010 ; Caires et al., 2012 ; Simonsz et al., 2023 ; Thornberg et al., 2023 ; Wolf et al., 2021 ). However, some research highlighted the role of the long-term embodied lived experiences in career decisions to become teachers. A study of 102 students conducted over time in the Australian rural context examining what it meant for them to become teachers in terms of their goals and aspirations found that the graduates’ deep values attached to their teacher education, credentials and initial professional experiences over years informed their desire to establish themselves and remain in the profession. Nonetheless, their convictions often wavered due to the contractual status of their profession (Plunkett & Dyson, 2011 ). A US study on a white science teacher’s becoming (identity) revealed how the social texts of her teacher education programme interplayed with her lived experiences of ‘her midwestern small-town childhood and a professional life in science’ (Gomez et al., 2007 , p. 2107). The study found the white teachers’ ‘ideological becoming’ was not complete and stable through teacher education and initial experiences but her becoming evolved in the critical reflexivity and fluidity of her understanding of herself and her students: ‘that collisions with ideas she has not before considered continue to disrupt and unsettle her thinking and practices’ (Gomez et al., 2007 , p. 2131). Although the findings of the two studies indicate that embodied lived experiences over time impact teachers’ career choice and remaining in the profession, it is problematic that the central role of affect influencing the long-term trajectory of ELTs’ careers is still unexplored.

Additionally, notwithstanding the growing interest in the emotional aspects of teaching and teacher identity (Hargreaves, 2005 ; Kelchtermans & Deketelaere, 2016 ; Nguyen & Ngo, 2023 ; Oplatka, 2009 ; Song, 2016 ; Zembylas, 2015 , 2006 , 2021 ), research is yet to address broader socio-cultural constructs (Klassen et al., 2011 ), or to examine how multiple interplays of socio-cultural and other material forces might affect a teacher’s becoming with regard to their decision to choose teaching as a professional career. Little attention has been paid to the primacy of affect in one’s decision to become a teacher (Kövecses, 2004 ) as an integral part of identity formation. Indeed, the primary role of affect is central in informing the career choice by their embodied lived experiences over time. For teachers to continue developing and remain in the profession, it is essential to deeply engage with their evolving professional identity formation process, even though it is inherently fluid and never truly complete. In order to address the issue of how a teacher chooses their career, develops their identity and remains in the profession, it is crucial to understand the pre-eminence of affective lived experiences that permeate a teacher’s decision in becoming a teacher as an identity formation.

To gain deeper understanding of the subtle influences of affective elements of lived experiences in the process of identity formation and developing as an English language teacher (ELT) before and after migration to Australia, we adopt a Deleuzian frame. We argue that becoming a teacher is not only based on rational choices responsive to internal and external motivational factors, but also on the socio-materially produced desires that underlie choices and decision-making (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 ). As we argue below, English language teachers’ (ELTs) decisions are rationalised only after affective encounters—inter-subjective and inter-objective—as they engage with the material–semiotic–affective staging of events over time in their lives. The lived experiences enmeshed with embodied elements of affect make meanings guide actions, and the ‘meaning’ itself emerges as a new emotion, making further actions possible and actual (Sampson, 2022 ). According to Deleuze ( 1994 ), human subjectivity is better represented relationally and dynamically as becoming (rather than being) in the continuous process of differentiated repetitions. Becoming is always in a process of movement, making new meanings using the repertoire of real and abstract—materials of the world and ideas that encircle the lifeworld.

In this paper, we examine the complexity of the factors that may shape ELT becoming (Trent, 2012 ) over time. We discuss the findings of a study exploring how 16 teachers became ELTs in and through various situated practices and gathering of emotional experiences since early childhood. We frame the process of becoming a teacher as non-linear over an individual’s life. In this process, motivational factors that influence teachers’ decision-making emerge as a result of socio-material affect in their lives. That is, the desire to become a teacher is affective in that it drives the bodily capacity to make decisions, melding in this process ‘personal aspiration; spiritual endeavour; social mission; intellectual pursuit; the desire for connectedness; and a belief in the power of ideas and relationships manifested in education to alter the conditions of their own and others’ lives for the better’ (Manuel & Hughes, 2006 , p. 20). In this sense, the affective origin of desire flows through one’s motivation, which ‘in itself implies emotion’ (Du Toit, 2014 , p. 6). Embodied desiring refers to the body’s capacity to project itself as always more than itself . The significance of this study is its provision of a decentred perspective on participants’ decision-making to become ELTs by considering the dialectical relationship between the affective and the rational in ‘the dynamic of human life’ (Vygotski, 1965 as cited in Rieber & Aaron, 1987 , p. 333). The career decisions of ELTs arise from a blend of embodied lived experiences and rational thinking. Both Spinoza and Vygotsky shared a similar perspective on this, with Vygotsky noting that “consciousness is the experience of experiences (soznanie est’ perezhivanie perezhivanii)”, which aligns closely with Spinoza’s definition of consciousness as “the idea of the idea…” (Sévérac, 2017 , p. 80).

Desire and becoming

In this research, the decision-making about career choices as part of the immigrant English teachers’ becoming is conceptualised as a form of ‘desired becoming’—that is, as the ‘will to power’ which is sublimated into their desires to influence and benefit others, and into a creative activity of ‘self-overcoming’ or ‘self-mastery’ (Nietzsche, 2002 , 2008 ). In social life, power is associated with education and knowledge (Foucault, 1980 ), and desiring power thus can be linked with the desire to be educated (i.e., power to ) and to educate others (i.e., power over ). Thus, we shift the focus from pre-formed desires and the workings of reason to explore the socio-material and political becoming and the flows of desire that precede (and result from) the formation of subjects and objects. In this way, becoming an English language teacher can be traced historically to the flows of desire in and across socio-material assemblages .

According to Deleuze and Guattari ( 1983 ), an assemblage is a constellation of bodies and things that are coded by taking a particular form and occupying a particular territory. An assemblage connects material bodies and things on a horizontal axis, forming socio-material relations that become represented and meaningful as a social order(ing) of bodies, actions and reactions. One’s becoming implies a vertical axis of movement across assemblages, involving a ‘flight’ of desire across their territorial boundaries. A translation from the French agencement , assemblages are productive comings-together which channel affect , or the ‘capacity to affect or be affected’ (Fox & Alldred, 2015 , p. 401). Content comprises the machinic assemblage of bodies and actions, ‘an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988 , p. 88), whereas expression is the collection assemblage of enunciation —’of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies’ (p. 88). Expression within assemblages become semiotic systems or regimes of signs , whereas content becomes pragmatic systems of actions and passions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988 , p. 504).

De-centring desire from the subject, while exploring decisions to become a teacher, means attending to how desire as a life force is immanently networked with other forces that are together constitutive of the social production of that desire. According to Deleuze and Guattari ( 1983 ), socio-material assemblages have ‘machinic’ rather than organic relations between the constitutive elements and, hence, there is no desire without ‘desiring-machines’ and their connective desiring production. Deleuze and Guattari ( 1983 ) differentiate in this regard between unconscious desire and preconscious social investment. While unconscious desire has to do with pre-personal creative desire, preconscious social investment is concerned with values, beliefs, and intentions.

The analysis of how socio-material assemblages may produce the desire to become an ELT responds to the differentiation between ‘the unconscious libidinal investment of group or desire, and the preconscious investment of class or interest’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 , p. 343). In this study, unconscious desire allows us to comprehend a free-floating desire to learn English, while preconscious social investment captures the influence of beliefs about teaching English and teaching as a career choice. The analytic also includes the affective vectors of molar and molecular lines (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988 ) that map the entanglement of participants’ desires in debilitating and enabling ways. Molar lines relate to the subject’s embodiment of the rigid segmentations of socio-cultural apparatuses (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988 ; Foucault, 2013 ), such as ‘native-speakerism’. Molecular lines refer to ‘a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988 , p. 90), such as relational experiences. The functions of molecular lines can be viewed as thrusting unfolding of possibilities to ‘become’ and ‘becoming’ against the ‘pre-existing, molar, arboreal’ (Rogers et al., 2014 , p. 22) structure that inhibits the process of becoming.

Undertaken as part of a larger project, the study was informed by hermeneutic phenomenology and the innovated hermeneutic phenomenological narrative enquiry. In hermeneutic phenomenology, the researcher and participants engage with the research process intimately and deeply, but the researcher still seeks to interpretively understand the multi-layered meanings of the experienced phenomena in terms of their commonality of occurrence among participants (van Manen, 1990 ). In this study, recursive interpretations and the uses of narrative techniques were the core means to gather and interpret the complex patterns of the lived phenomena (Nigar, 2019 ).

Sixteen participants (see Table 1 ), all of whom lived in metropolitan centres in Australia at the time of data collection, participated in the study. Amongst them, four participants—Ling Ling, Becca, Quang and Raphael—had started their formal English teaching career in Australia. The others began in their countries of origin but some taught in other countries of residence too, such as United Arab Emirates (Janaki) and Uganda (Mahati). Two of them taught English to international students in their countries of origin, namely, Frida and Mandy. The interviews were conducted by the first author of this manuscript. Her emic (insider) view lay in her familiarity with some of the historical and current global contexts of research into English language learning and teaching, and almost 10 years’ of English language teaching experience. Considering her as ‘one of them’, the participants felt comfortable in telling her their stories (see Guba & Lincoln, 1994 ). From the etic (outsider) perspective (Olive, 2014 ), however, the researcher was conscious of her beliefs and assumptions, and how they might influence the interpretation of research data.

Fifteen participants flexibly wrote narratives online over a period and then took part in one-on-one interviews (one participant was only interviewed). The narratives focused on their experiences of English learning and choosing their career. The interview prompts elicited information about their family, linguistic, cultural, educational and geographic backgrounds; their English language learning experiences; their motivations to become ELTs; how they obtained their first English teaching positions; and how they remained in the profession. In addition to the online narratives and interviews, relevant data were also collated from responses to other prompts used in the main project, such as emails. The research (project ID 19107) was approved regarding ethical measures by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee. Prior to signing the consent forms, all participants were informed of the voluntary nature of the research participation and their full anonymity.

A hermeneutic phenomenological narrative method (van Manen, 1990 ) was adopted to sequence and analyse the data through recursive analyses and uncover the themes. The analysis aimed to reconstruct socio-material assemblages within which participants had interacted, based on the participants’ narration of their life events (Bruner, 1990 ). In the following sections, we present the various assemblages of desiring production which were constructed from the data; however the figure does not represent the complex and non-linear process of interactions and influence of the assemblages (Fig. 1 ).

Final themes and subthemes

Assemblages of desiring production

The participants had often ‘unconsciously’ internalised the desire to become proficient in English under the influence of more knowledgeable others (Fleer, 2021 ; Vygotsky, 1978 ). As they initially encountered the language and then began their formal education, their embodied emotional experiences and their echo in their reflections ( perezhivanie ) of English and English language learning worked as affective-volitional forces for them to become proficient users of the language (Vygotsky, 1999 ). The participants’ embodied and desired selves, shaped through these experiences, impacted their later career decisions. In what follows, we address different kinds of assemblages within which the participants operated—families, school education, culture, and higher education—and through which their desires for English were activated and mediated. They interacted with these assemblages at different times. Furthermore, the size and duration of the assemblages, and the ways in which they (re)formed participants’ desires, were quite variable.

Family assemblages

In their pre-school years, the participants’ desires for English were kindled by affective intersubjective relations and cultural objects and artefacts (Anning et al., 2008 ; Fleer et al., 2017 ). The roles of significant others (Fleer, 2021 ), including parents and family members, contributed to their internalisation of a passion and imagination for the language and teaching. They were exposed to English through a wide variety of popular cultures, educational materials, and practices in family settings. These included electronic media, books, and games, replete with sensory-motor impacts. Participation in activities mediated by English and associated forms of cultural artefacts, which were perceived as affective experiences (Michell, 2016 )—engaging and experienced as enjoyable—drove them further to desire English proficiency.

Although formal language learning started for the participants in school, most were exposed to English in their early childhood. Twelve participants said that in their early childhood or primary school years they were also exposed to popular culture in English: literature, music, film, and television. Oksana recalled that her parents ‘listened to the Beatles songs, and since the time I was born, I was exposed to that music, and I fell in love with the language’. Similarly, Becca wrote, ‘I’ve been exposed to English as long as I can remember, and I’ve always liked it. I liked the way it sounded, I liked its “coolness” (it was the language of movies and songs)’. As a child, Frida played English board games at home; she recalled, ‘I would usually play against my grandmother and my aunts, who all had a higher level of English than my 10-year-old self, so I learned to pick up new words from them’.

As Fleer ( 2016 ) pointed out, affective environments were produced by family members and practices—ordinary emotional experiences and ways of ‘being with’ or ‘becoming with’—that led the participants to pay attention to and desire English. However, while most participants’ immediate family members explicitly and actively encouraged their education in the language, some did not (e.g., Frida has an estranged father). Janaki’s learning was interrupted by a forced marriage when she was in high school, and Mahati was also subjected to attempts to be forcibly married by family members during her higher education. Janaki reflected, ‘[i]t was after my marriage that I completed bachelor’s degree in education and a Masters in English … through Distance Education’.

In family settings, popular media and early learning activities emotionally affected the participants, activating a passion to learn English and dialogically imagine their multilingual and multicultural self (Kostogriz, 2005 ). Their socio-culturally internalised sensory-motor experiences of cultural elements during early childhood (Fleer et al., 2017 ; Vygotsky, 1987 ) were later rationalised as their affective and passionate attachments to English.

School education as assemblage

Participants’ early desires for English were reinforced institutionally, resulting in strong interest and sometimes ‘love’ for the subject of English. At school, participants’ interest was mediated and intensified through interactions with curricula, pedagogies, teachers, teaching styles, and language policy, regardless of the medium of instruction. In school, they discovered new meanings associated with their developing English skills. They were inspired to invest in learning English as they sought ‘to make a meaningful connection between [their] desire and commitment to learn [the] language, and their changing identity’ (Norton, 2010 ). Their desire for English constantly shifted across institutional practices and beyond, together with their emotional responses to these, as in a socially mediated process children learn interacting with others (van der Veer, 2012 ).

Participants held mixed feelings about learning English at school, particularly in relation to how the language was taught. Learning English was not always enjoyable. Jasha, who reflected that she only enjoyed it when speaking activities were included in the lessons, commented:

…it was quite boring: boring texts to read, boring lessons on grammar, no listening, and no speaking. And boring teaching! … the antiquated Prussian system …learning …supposed to be a hard job, not fun.

However, some participants enjoyed communicative and translanguaging elements of learning with their peers and teachers (see also Aoyama, 2020 ; Cenoz & Gorter, 2020 ). Negative feelings, such as of ‘rote learning’ shifted into positives when participants experienced democratic ways (Soong, 2018 ) of language learning, such as through play, music and singing, and their sense of achievement in English learning grew.

Participants recalled feelings of pride and positive emotions (e.g., Ross & Stracke, 2016 ) in their language learning progress and the social recognition which accompanied their developing skills. As Jigna remembered, ‘my interest in English was reflected in my academic achievements which further encouraged me to embrace English in my educational choices’. Feelings of self-consciousness led high-achiever Carlos to feel embarrassed about achieving consistently strong marks in all assessment, to the extent that he began to deliberately make errors. However, this feeling of embarrassment had positive connotations for Carlos, and it drove him to feel empowered about his English skills. The sense of pride emanated from the energies of positive emotions through meaningful connection with pursuing language learning (Ross & Stracke, 2016 ).

Positive or negative relational experiences with teachers and the curricula also contributed substantially to the participants’ learning and future professional selves. Through lived experiences with different teachers, Jasha learnt how not to be unethical and partial in her teaching as well as how to develop an identity of English language and culture through her full immersion in her interaction with the teacher and the language. Jasha nostalgically reminisced,

When I was in Year 7, I think, I volunteered to accompany a teacher to a bookshop … The Picture of Dorian Gray. I asked her whether she could get an extra book for me, and she did. I consider this the beginning of MY English. This was the first time I realised that English could be alive and beautiful, that it can express feelings and send subtle messages. To this day I don’t dare to re-read The Picture of Dorian Gray in fear that the magic will disappear. The experience is too precious to lose, even today.

An ecstatic experience for child-Jasha, going to the bookshop with her teacher was an affective moment which was beyond her rationalisation. Many years later, the joy of reading and sensing English in the book was still precious for her.

Teachers and tutors were powerful sources of inspiration and reflection of English language teaching and learning experiences for most other participants too. Institutional practices created affective environments in which participants’ already embodied desires for English were reinforced through collectively produced affects. These embodied language learning experiences also reveal how participants’ everyday and scientific concepts acted dialectically (Vygotsky, 1987b )—for example, they could relate their everyday understandings of English (acquired through books and pop-culture) to the linguistic concepts taught in schools. The embodiment of desire and knowledge draws attention to educational institutions as assemblages that are situated in broader assemblages constituting the cultural-historical life of society. Now, we turn to cultural forces as assemblages.

Local and global forces as assemblages

All participants storied how their desires for English language and associated cultural forces were equally fostered by the influences of cultural-historical discourses and artefacts (Anning et al., 2008 ; Rogers et al., 2014 ; Somerville, 2011 ). Their desires were produced as collective affections at local and global levels. Multiple cultural-historical discourses (Turner & Lin, 2020 ), such as colonial history, English as a global language, and the prestige status and utility of the language generated affective intensity. For example, Jigna, who lived in post-colonial and multilingual India, narrated her relationship with English as complex and deeply rooted in her consciousness:

English comes naturally to me … It is and was the stamp of quality education … I was made aware of the archetypes of cultural-dom while trying to imbibe everything in English.

Mandy also believed that colonial histories had shaped the contemporary status of English in the Philippines. In the region, English is associated with job opportunities and income since their English-speaking workforces are employed by Business Process Outsourcings (BPOs), such as call centres. Global and neoliberal market forces are entangled with English (Pennycook, 2002 , 2007 ) and encounter numerous other educational, ideological and linguistic forces. For example, in Vietnam, Quang reflected on the ideology of native-speakerism and the notion of authenticity in language use, to which he was not only exposed, but also in which he was also complicit:

At first, my professional self was formed by the collective view that Vietnamese teachers are inferior due to our lack of exposure to authentic English language materials and communities. I accepted that as fact and even played a role in downplaying our own values and elevating that of ‘native speakers’. While believing that the ‘native speakers’ could do a better job, I propagated the idea to my peers without questioning the validity of such claim.

Living in war zones, with trans-generational violence, may have strongly influenced Jasha and Raphael to divert their desires beyond their local contexts. Raphael, while undertaking compulsory military training and service, was eager to interact with English-speaking tourists. The profound emotions generated by these interactions brought feelings of rest and diversion. Their affect around learning English included ‘a terrain ranging from emotion, to feelings, desire, love, hate, anger, boredom, excitement, frustration, violence’ (Albrecht-Crane, 2002 , p. 7).

The embodied socio-historical values of English drove the participants to embrace English learning further within complex flows of spatial–temporal and embodied relations. They conceptualised associated cultural tools (or skills in using English) as mediational and imaginative artefacts to mobilise across spaces (Marginson & Dang, 2017 ).

Higher education as assemblages

As adults, most participants became conscious of how their intellectual capacities could mediate their emotionally driven desires and that they could agentively drive their own actions and behaviours (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 ; Spinoza, 1994 , Vygotsky, 1930, 1982a as cited in Van der Veer, 1984 ). Perhaps their desires for English then coincided with those related to their emerging professional selves in the broader uses and practices of English and professional education. They most consciously opted to study English and related disciplines in universities. For example, similar to the influence over time of choosing the career in the study by Plunkett and Dyson ( 2011 ), Quang rationalised that he had chosen to study teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) because he was aware of his abilities and skills in English. However, he acknowledged that his embodied desires, influenced by a significant other, were still a strong contributing factor in his career choice:

My choice was also influenced by an English teacher I had, who was caring and knowledgeable; she most certainly fit into our Vietnamese vision of a teacher: wise, strict but caring, dedicated, who gives but asks for little in return. I of course aspired to be such a teacher.

Akin to the teacher in the study by Gomez et al. ( 2007 ), Frida’s rationalisation of choosing teaching as a career through passing a “Licensure Exam for Teachers” emerged from her deep-seated experiences of English learning as a child in the extended family, community libraries, a neighbour’s library and the church in “Quezon City”. Her other emotional attachments to decide to be an ELT were her higher education through the medium of English and working as an international ship crew. In fact, she fortuitously discovered her decision to be a teacher when she enjoyed teaching English to a crew member on the cruise, a ‘60-year-old Colombian musician’:

… it felt good to help out this person. This was my first conscious effort at helping someone learn survival English. When I returned to the Philippines after a few contracts abroad, I decided to get a job teaching English.

Within higher education, English became the medium through which to gain knowledge, be exposed to the world, become qualified for the teaching profession, and potentially migrate to English-speaking countries. Participants expanded their networks and opportunities, developing their English proficiency further and eventually becoming English language teachers formally. Some participated in cultural activities in English in and out of educational institutions; for example, Natalie entered university debate competitions, Raphael communicated with English-speaking tourists, and Carlos immersed himself in ‘ Cultural Inglesa’ (emphasis added).

As they became further exposed to different manifestations of the language, and their awareness of ideas around the language grew, some participants began to consider their English skills not yet advanced—or authentic —enough. In response, Becca and Jasha strove assiduously to learn what they called ‘real English’. In the pursuit of ‘real English’, Becca travelled across English speaking countries:

… my first contact with real communication in English occurred near Birmingham ... After that I spent another summer in New Jersey, USA when I was twenty-one … I think that the real break in my English studies came when I came to Australia.

Similarly, Jasha worked hard to bring her ‘English alive … and so I did work hard, mostly on the appropriateness of expressions, and intonation’. She believed ‘there was a real English somewhere out there, and it was my job to find it’. It is however not uncommon for non-native English speakers to have an ambivalent relationship with their so called ‘accented English’, as they might ‘want a NS English identity as expressed in a native-like accent’ (Jenkins, 2005 , p. 541). This may be due to the historical and global impact of the discourse of native-speakerism, its adjacent discourses and its associated ideological values and meanings (Holliday, 2018 ; Nigar et al., 2023 ).

Desires through traits, values, attributes, and investments

Personal traits (Parsons, 1909 ) and values (Kassabgy et al., 2001 ) are argued to be major contributing factors in career decision-making across professional fields (Judge, 1994 ; Jugović et al., 2012 ). These work as the ‘cycle of influence’ (Manuel, 2003 ) as the study by Manuel and Hughes ( 2006 ) reports: ‘personal aspirations to work with young people to make a difference in their lives; to maintain a meaningful engagement with the subject area they were drawn to; and to attain personal fulfilment and meaning’ (p. 5). Across assemblages of desiring production, participants’ perceived attributes and interests played an important role. Frida told of her ‘innate and genuine sense of wanting to help others’. Frida added that she ‘would like to pass on what knowledge’ she had gained ‘through work/life experience’ by teaching English ‘to those who wanted to learn it as a second language’. Becca related her own painstaking language learning and international student experiences to what her students were going through. Carlos emphasised the importance of making a difference to his students on the basis that English education could be a form of individual empowerment. Similarly, Raphael recollected,

I enjoyed helping people improve on their language … because I saw myself, still see myself as one of them, one of the migrants that have come here and found it hard. And if I made it, then I could help other people make it. So that was one of the motivations of becoming a teacher and helping people.

The participants wanted to make a difference (Lovett, 2007 ) in others’ lives by making use of their skills and knowledge. Their knowledge of English, personal attributes, and professional values, in congruence with professional cultures, contributed to their career choices (Judge, 1994 ). They imagined empowerment through the process of empowering others.

Becoming and staying a teacher

Through various networking opportunities, 13 of the participants who started teaching in their countries of origin and some who taught in non-native English-speaking contexts found their first employment serendipitously, without difficulty. Amongst them are Thi through her friend ‘Phuong’, Mahati through her ‘father’s friend’, Oksana through her ‘teachers’, and the rest through formal application processes. Indeed, compared to the Australian context (e.g., Nigar et al., 2023 ), participants remembered their first employment experiences in their countries of origin as accomplishments. Studies in settings in the United States (Mahboob & Golden, 2013 ) and the United Kingdom (Clark & Paran, 2007 ) also suggest that non-native English teachers’ employment is challenged by the so-called native-speaker selection criterion.

They recalled these first positions as accomplishments and described their teaching experiences as developmental, rewarding and fulfilling. Mahati was ‘very well respected [as a teacher] in India and in Africa’. Similarly, Oksana reflected that ‘Everyone respected me for being an English teacher at the age of 21, so I stay in the profession’. Thi said that her first few days working as a teacher ‘changed my life forever as I felt energised working with young children and a mix of local and expatriate teachers every week’. Becca summarised:

I finally got to do something that I actually enjoy and I’m very grateful for it. Every day when I step into the classroom, I think to myself how fortunate I am to be doing something that most of the time feels more like a hobby than a job.

All participants eventually migrated to Australia and obtained ELT positions there. Different lines of ‘desired becoming’ were at play: through migration, participants desired to improve their English, undertake further studies, or teach English to others. The accumulation of the ‘affectives’, in both unconscious desires and preconscious social investments, energised them to act and become mobile.

Finding employment as an ELT was not without its challenges. For example, Quang had completed a relevant undergraduate degree in Vietnam and two post-graduate degrees in Australia, but still it took him until the second year of his second post-graduate degree to get a paid teaching job. Becca, while an international student for seven years in Sydney, had ‘been kind of dreaming of, for the previous three or four years, doing a master of TESOL’. Ling Ling came to Adelaide as a high school student and moved to Melbourne to complete ‘a secondary education and arts degree, majoring in Japanese, Chinese and English translation’. However, despite the challenging landscape of securing employment, they were still positive about developing their English and ardently pursued their careers.

Participants’ decisions to remain in teaching also involved negotiations with challenges within their educational institutions. The commodification of English and prevalent native-speakerism appeared in a few teachers’ stories. Thi commented that, in the Vietnamese English teaching context, ‘the preference of native speakerism is still vastly dominant, which has a profound negative impact on the non-native teacher’s self-confidence and self-esteem’. Mandy was upset when ‘native English speakers (without any legitimate qualifications)’ were paid three times more than she was at her institution in the Philippines. While completing an MA TESOL in Sydney, Becca said,

…from the very first class of my master’s degree course, I was terrified of having to teach English to an actual group of real humans … It was all about me and my own grasp of English. Is my English good enough to teach it to others? Am I qualified enough to teach it to others? What if the students see right through my feelings of inadequacy? What if they catch me off guard and I won’t be able to answer their questions?

The findings above reveal that decisions to become ELTs for the 16 participants did not occur in teleological order or determinate ways. They transpired in ceaseless ideas of spatiotemporal assemblages of becoming users and teachers of English. Participants’ bodies were affectively invested as the intricate interactions of minutely assembled (Braidotti, 1993 ) socio-cultural and symbolic drives across the lines of becoming.

The participants’ decisions to become English language teachers were the products of ongoing interplays of socio-material desires related to learning English and becoming ELTs since early childhood. Their unconscious desires and preconscious social investments over time led them to rationalise their lines of becoming. Although the English language ‘desiring machine’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 ) functions somewhat differently in and across non-English speaking countries, the flows of desire it produced for the participants were connected to the ‘social machine’ of English language education. We argue that, in part, this connection can be understood as an intersection of a desire to gain power through learning English and a desire to empower others.

Since early childhood, the participants’ desires were produced repeatedly across molar lines of disjunctions and segments. In family assemblages of produced desires, they were exposed to English popular culture and English learning activities, and they discovered they were desiring the desires held by others. Their fascination with books, music, television programmes and movies implicate the symbolic simulated significations (simulacra) of the consumer cultures of capitalist society (Baudrillard, 1994 , 2016 ). The strategy of a captivating educational relationship (Sæverot, 2011 ) was evident when, at the age of four, Frida was given children’s books and nursery rhymes with pictures, was home-tutored in English by her grandmother and aunt, and was rewarded with her favourite treat when she wrote or counted in English. Frida’s desire was purposefully ignited ‘in the world of signs expressed in a pictorial language—an impact perception of a child prior to the language acquisition’ (Semetsky, 1999 , pp. 67–68).

Despite the seductive mechanisms of molar lines, most of the participants sensed molecular lines of desire operational in affective ‘self-mastery’. Molecular lines take their own directions, which may or may not culminate in change. Participants started to connect to the pleasures and serendipities of learning English, exploring the novelty of the culture they associated with it. As Jasha put it: ‘then I discovered the joy of Agatha Christie, followed by G.K. Chesterton—so many opportunities to see different layers and different contexts of English! And different registers!’. The power of desire, a productive force, affected Jasha in the perpetuation of an active flow of elation in encounters with those books. Others were affected and enthused in engagements with books, movies, comics, serials, and games.

Participants’ desires were coded in the school system too, a molar line of coding and encoding production, reproduction, and simulation. According to Deleuze and Guattari ( 1988 , pp. 75–76), ‘the compulsory education machine […] imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates … Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience’. Most participants’ desires were stratified and segmented within capillaries of the education system (Savat & Thompson, 2015 ): ‘techniques and practices, as an expression of control society, constitute the new sorts of machines that frame and inhabit our educational institutions’ (p. 273). Notwithstanding the major molarisation of the institution, miniscule pleasures associated with learning English were experienced as they engaged intimately with special language programmes, resources, teachers, and achievements. For example, Jasha and Janaki’s teachers had sparked a love of reading which would carry into the future. Sensations of care and secret bliss were evident when Jasha’s teacher purchased her a much-loved book. According to Sellar ( 2015 , p. 426), this may be described as ‘discovering the desiring-machines operating outside of representation and reaching the investment of unconscious desire in the social field’.

Participants felt empowered, taking pride in their developing English language and cultural skills by engaging with the resources and other opportunities they could avail. Hien, Natalie and Jigna were proud of their English skills and academic achievements from childhood since they stood amongst others. The flows became materialised in the cases of inmost locus of self-management, private self-talk (Flanagan & Symonds, 2022 ) and enjoyable interactions with others and objects external to them. The encounters of ‘“affect” address those resonances in their bodies and their relations to each other that conjured non-representational kinds of effects—intensities, sounds, sensations, odours, touches, remembrances’ (Albrecht-Crane, 2002 , p. 7).

Some participants were subjectified in the intricate and discrete ‘white walls’ of post-colonial and neoliberal ‘faciality’ of English. Globally, English is used in association with economic, ideological, socio-political and cultural forces (Shin, 2006 ). As discussed, native-speakerism and the notion of authentic language persist. Becca and Jigna pushed themselves to seek the real English at home and abroad. However, native-speakerism is divisive , and ‘the “native speaker” ideal plays a wide-spread and complex iconic role outside as well as inside the English-speaking West’ (Holliday, 2006 , p. 385). However, along molecular lines, participants ‘not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos’ (Deleuze, 1992 , p. 5). They de-territorialised and kept seeking individual and intersubjective effectuations of molecular desire lines in multiplicities. For Jigna in India, ‘English became the language’ of her ‘thoughts and logic’; she viewed the multicultural and multilingual context in which she found herself through the lens of translanguaging in productive tension and desire (Turner & Lin, 2020 ).

Growing up, teacher participants broadened the imagined communities of English language and culture (Pavlenko & Norton, 2007 ), which influenced their choice of English teaching as a career. For Mahati and Janaki, commitment to English language learning was a means of emancipation from patriarchal norms (Kobayashi, 2002 ; McMahill, 1997 ), so they persisted in infiltrating the imagined communities of their ‘desired becomings’ (Norton, 2000 ). Through cyclicities of molecularities, driven by the axiomatic values of the participants as ‘“i-for-myself”, “i-for-the-other”, and “the-other-for-me”‘ (Pape, 2016 , p. 279), the teachers imagined their selves in students’ selves, and in modulation, students’ selves in themselves. They desired their students to engage, experiment and connect (Mercieca, 2012 ).

Desire is always progressive since it is invested in social actions (Smith, 2011 ). Becca, Ling Ling, Quang and Raphael—as international students and immigrants—suffered as vulnerable workers (Colic-Peisker, 2011 ; Nyland et al., 2009 ); however, in ‘movements and rests’, they passionately pursued higher education and further training, and took pride in their academic achievements. They experienced culture shock and nostalgia, and they suffered emotionally. However, instead of collapsing into the ‘black hole’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 ), they developed adaptability in affective multiplicities. They developed and transformed educationally, professionally, interpersonally and interculturally. For example, Becca dedicated every opportunity to develop her English to ‘the next level and be fluent’. After commencing teaching, she built kindred relationships with students, engaged with creative pedagogies, and was even learning Spanish as she felt it would benefit her many students who were proficient in the language.

Deleuze and Parnet ( 2007 ) define a profession as a ‘rigid segment, but also what happens beneath it, the connections, the attractions and repulsions which do not coincide with the segments, the forms of madness which are secret, but which nevertheless relate to the public authorities’ (p. 125). The participants of this study were situated in striated educational policies and regulations, teaching standards and curricula, professionalism and hierarchies. They also described their desires at the site of affective interactions, at the cut lines, which were stirring, multiple, connective, incidental, approving and revitalising over time.

Their career choices to teach English language were rationalised neither as ‘one stop’ events nor in linear processes of motivations; rather, these decisions were impacted by complex circuitous interchanges between personal and socio-cultural elements. Their narratives suggest that their processes of becoming English teachers were driven by the force of desire that materialised in interactions of the sensuous and the rational, in their thoughts of themselves and others, as they pondered, enquired, engaged, and connected to find their own-other-selves in others. Empowered and transfigured by affects (Spinoza, 1994 ), individuals’ lives pass on; as the operations of other bodies are inextricably conjoined with their own, so bodies realise themselves in relation to their own parts (Leibniz, 1898 ).

Itermingled in the spatiotemporal processes of becoming teachers were relational intimacies and multiplicities— esprit de corps and their rotations (Deleuze, 2001 ), and their effectual impacts to be empowered and empower others.

A world already envelops an infinite system of singularities selected through convergence … however, individuals are constituted which select and envelop a finite number of the singularities that their own body incarnates. They spread them out over their own ordinary lines, and are even capable of forming them again on the membranes which bring the inside and the outside in contact with each other. (Deleuze, 2004 , p. 109)

We conclude that the concept of English teachers’ ‘desired becoming’ provides an aperture into the formation of their professional identities as an interplay of the affective and the rational. We invite all to embrace and appreciate that the combined role of the affective and the rational in teachers’ becoming is important to consider in future research in this area as well as for teacher recruitment and retention, hence potentially addressing critical teacher shortages. Exploring ‘affect and desire’ can illuminate not only the process of teacher recruitment and retention but also the decision to leave the profession, as well as overall job satisfaction. Including affective components in teacher education may have ‘an expansive power of ontological freedom’ and meaningful professional contribution (Kostogriz, 2012 , p. 397), that may also address professional interests and resilience. This implies that choosing teaching as a career should be conceived with recognition of the primacy of affective experiences, counteracting solely rationalised discourses of professional regulation and accountability: ‘rationalization and control that produce a number of social pathologies, such as alienated teaching and learning and reified social relations between teachers and students’ (Kostogriz, 2012 , p. 397). Future studies of desired becoming across different subject areas and settings of teaching might highlight the importance of affect in the work of teachers.

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Nashid Nigar & Alex Kostogriz

Faculty of Education, The Waikato University, Hamilton, New Zealand

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Nashid Nigar: 65 percent. AK: 20 percent. LG: 15 percent.

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The research (project ID 19107) was approved regarding ethical measures by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee. Prior to signing the consent forms, all participants were informed of the voluntary nature of the research participation and their full anonymity.

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Nigar, N., Kostogriz, A. & Gurney, L. Becoming an English language teacher over lines of desire: Stories of lived experiences. Aust. Educ. Res. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00662-4

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Received : 11 February 2023

Accepted : 20 September 2023

Published : 31 October 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-023-00662-4

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UG Coursework Unit

Credit points

Faculty & college.

Faculty of Education

Pre-requisites

96 Credit points in a Bachelor of Education course OR admission to the 1209001 - Master of Teaching

Unit description

Introduces students to a wide range of literature that provides insight into Aboriginal, multicultural and children’s experiences, including literary, visual and multimedia texts. It supports students to understand early language acquisition from 0-5 years and provides an introduction to related issues of child development. Additionally, students will gain an understanding of the teaching and learning of reading and writing in years K-6 and evidence-based approaches to teach and assess these skills.

Unit content

Module 1: Acquisition of Language 

Module 2:  Theories of Language Acquisition

Module 3: Children's  Literature and Diversity

Module 4: Literacy  - Reading Development

Module 5:  Literacy - Teaching Reading

Module 6:  Literacy - Teaching Writing

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2025 unit offering information will be available in November 2024

Learning outcomes

Unit Learning Outcomes express learning achievement in terms of what a student should know, understand and be able to do on completion of a unit. These outcomes are aligned with the graduate attributes . The unit learning outcomes and graduate attributes are also the basis of evaluating prior learning.

On completion of this unit, students should be able to:

demonstrate engagement with a wide range of texts including literary, visual and multimedia texts and study literature that gives insights into Aboriginal, multicultural and children’s experiences, for example texts from Australia and children’s literature

understand early language acquisition from 0-5 years and an introduction to related issues of child development

demonstrate an understanding of the teaching and learning of reading, the impact of electronic multimedia and digital literacies

demonstrate an understanding of the teaching of reading and writing in years K-6, including phonemic awareness, systematic phonics instruction, sentence structure, and evidence-based approaches related to how to assess reading and writing, particularly for students who are at risk of falling behind, and monitoring student progress in reading.

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Commonwealth Supported courses For information regarding Student Contribution Amounts please visit the Student Contribution Amounts .

Fee paying courses For postgraduate or undergraduate full-fee paying courses please check Domestic Postgraduate Fees OR Domestic Undergraduate Fees .

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Please check the international course and fee list to determine the relevant fees.

Courses that offer this unit

Graduate certificate in education (professional learning) (2025), master of teaching (2025), master of teaching (2024), bachelor of education (2024), bachelor of education (2025), any questions we'd love to help.