Over the two decades, CREW has, through its PhD programme, trained a talented generation of new scholars, several of whom have gone on to publish articles and books in the field of Welsh Writing in English.


Current and Recent PhD Topics:

Clare Davies: Tradition and Tragedy in the Work of T. S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, and Cornel West

Daniel Gerke: Raymond Williams and European Thought

Adrian Osbourne: The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas

Alexandra Jones: Disability in Coalfields Literature: A Comparative Study c. 1880-1948 (Completed 2016)

Charlotte Jackson: Reservoirs and Reservations: Imagining 'Indians' in Welsh Writing in English (Completed 2015)

Georgia Burdett: Representing Disability in Contemporary Welsh Writing in English: apathy, empathy, evolution (Completed 2014)

Kieron Smith: BBC Wales and National Culture: The Poetry and Documentary Films of John Ormond (Completed 2014)

Gareth Evans: Welsh Writing in English: Case Studies in Cultural Interaction (Completed 2013)

Sarah Morse: The Black Pastures: the significance of landscape in the work of Gwyn Thomas and Ron Berry (Completed 2010)

Louise Parker: Shadows, Struggles and Poetic Guilt: Glyn Jones 1905-1995 (Completed 2010)


Past subjects covered have included:

  • Autobiographical writings in Wales
  • Studies of figures (such as Aneirin Talfan Davies) seminal to the development of a bridge between the Welsh and English language cultures of Wales.
  • The social and cultural dimensions of the twentieth-century English-language theatre of Wales
  • The construction of masculinity in Wales’s English-language fiction of the first half of the twentieth century.
  • The study of ‘elective’ Welsh writers such as Robert Graves.
  • The cultural constructions of place in twentieth-century Welsh Writing in English.
  • The dialogue between English-language poetry and the Welsh-language poetic tradition.
  • The cultural dynamics of Emyr Humphreys’ fiction.
  • A review of the history of Wales’ English-language literature through the lens of writing produced in the region of Neath-Afan.
  • An exploration of Welsh Writing in English in the light of the paradigms developed by Postcolonial studies.