Facilities and Opportunities

Postgraduate students in the department are part of a lively and supportive research culture. Alongside their taught study, students have access to a wide range of opportunities, including an annual writing retreat, postgraduate conferences, specialist reading groups, and collaborations with leading literary and cultural institutions. They also benefit from connections with interdisciplinary research centres across the university.

Our students are encouraged to develop their work in conversation with others, whether through workshops, public events, cultural experiences such as the Hay Festival, or the department’s extensive library and archival resources. Together, these opportunities help create an intellectually ambitious environment in which postgraduate students can grow as researchers, writers, and members of a wider academic community.

Specialist Reading Groups

We offer support in setting up specialist reading groups of your own, to ensure that postgraduate students are given the chance to play an active part in developing the Department’s overall research culture. Contributions that build on the Department’s foundational research strands of ‘Creative Wellbeing’, ‘Place and Belonging’, and ‘Emotional Lives’ are particularly encouraged.  

Research Centres

Research students have the opportunity to engage with work fostered by specialist research centres, such as the Department’s Centre for Creative Wellbeing and David Jones Centre, and other cognate research centres within the University such as the Centre for the Movement of Peoples, the Centre for Material Thinking, and the Centre for Welsh Politics and Society.  

Staff/Postgraduate Research Seminars

You can be part of an engaging and interactive seminar series where staff, students, and guest speakers come together to share and showcase their research.  

Arts and Culture

An annual feature in our calendar are trips to the world-famous Hay Festival, plus you’ll have access to subsidised performances at Aberystwyth Arts Centre.  

Library Facilities

The Department is located in the Hugh Owen Building, which also houses the main University library, the Hugh Owen Library. As well as an eclectic rare books collection and the Horton Collection (over 800 items relating to Eighteenth and Nineteenth century children’s literature), research at Aberystwyth is supported by extensive resources including access to a wide range of electronic materials. 

The University is very fortunate to have the National Library of Wales – one of only five copyright libraries in the UK – located just five minutes’ walk from the campus. This is an exceptional resource for postgraduate study: the National Library holds roughly 6 million books as well as extensive collections of journals and newspapers - and the number is constantly growing.  It has incomparable collections of primary texts, including the Hengwrt MS of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, an internationally prestigious collection of Welsh writing in English, and a vast stock of Renaissance, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, and twentieth-century literatures. In addition, it holds extensive historical archives – comprising personal papers of public figures and organisations, church records, census data, legal and municipal records, printed material, sound recordings and electronic records – which range in date from the Middle Ages to the present day.