Welcome
The study of English at the University of St Andrews has a long and distinguished history that is sustained in the scholarly, critical, and creative dynamism of today's School of English.
In the present day, the School enjoys an international reputation as a centre for both academic research and literary creativity. Amongst UK institutions, the School of English has recently been ranked 2nd in the Guardian University Guide and the Complete University Guide.
The School's richest inheritance, however, is its collegiality: we pride ourselves on our friendliness, and on our common enthusiasm for great literature.
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REF 2014: UK Research Excellence Framework 2014 Results
The School of English has been ranked third in the UK, and first in Scotland, in the most recent league table of research intensive departments (2014). With over 90% of our staff submitted, 86% of our research has been rated world leading and internationally excellent. In the previous research assessment exercise (2008) we were also ranked in the top ten, making the School one of the UK's consistently outstanding research departments.
New Book Publications
Professor Neil Rhodes' Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England has been published by Oxford University Press. Common explores the relationship between the Reformation in the first half of the sixteenth century and the Renaissance in the second, and addresses the question of why the Renaissance arrived so late in England through analysis of the 'common' in its double sense of something shared and something base.
Professor Don Paterson’s new book, The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre, is an investigation into how poetry works through close consideration of its music, manner of making meaning and rhythm and is published by Faber.
Dr Augustine's book Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics and Culture in England 1639-1689 is a study of how literature responds to conditions of political uncertainty, and rewrites much of what we thought we knew about the English civil war and Restoration literature. It is published by Manchester University Press.
