Postgraduate English, Durham University’s online peer-reviewed literary journal, has been publishing postgraduate research biannually since the year 2000 and is one of the longest-running online postgraduate literary journals in the world. In recent years the journal has received reprint requests from academic publishers.

The journal aims to provide a space for postgraduate students and early-career researchers (including those currently institutionally unaffiliated) to showcase their work and receive feedback from established academics. While the journal is based in the UK, we seek to cultivate an international range of contributors and judge submissions primarily for strength of argument and fresh insight over a fixed writing style.

To mark the launch of our journal’s AI policy, we are centering our Spring 2026 issue around AI and social media in English studies. We encourage submissions from postgraduate students and early career researchers considering the influence of AI and social media on our field from a variety of perspectives, such as (but not limited to):

On AI and Literature:
- The literary value of AI-generated texts (or lack thereof)
- AI’s transformative impact of the literary landscape
- The value of the humanities in the age of AI
- Goodbye to the em dash – being afraid of writing like AI
- Representations of AI in contemporary and historical literature
- Posthumanism, cognition and literary studies
- The ethics of AI use in relation to literature (from perspective of copyright, the environment etc.)
- AI and algorithmic reading practices (such as distant reading with machine learning, AI-aided stylometry etc.)
- The use of AI for book editing
- AI and accessibility (both in terms of disability and language accessibility)
- AI in the archives: using AI for transcription and/or translation assistance
- AI and academic dishonesty
- The relationship between the ‘publish or perish’ model and AI use in academia

On Social Media and Literature:
- The impact of social media algorithms shaping the demand for and production of modern books
- Fanfiction and intellectual property
- The relation of contemporary social media to pre-modern literary practices of continuation, adaptation, reworking and shared narrative worlds
- Platform moderation and ownership of user-generated literary content
- The transformation of authorship/authority in networked literary communities
- Social media metrics/followers as a prerequisite for literary success of fledgling authors
- The shifting role of literary agents and publishers in the age of digital visibility
- Tensions between artistic integrity and self-branding
- Inequalities of access, visibility and algorithmic amplification

Submission Guidelines:
We invite postgraduate students and early-career researchers to submit papers of 5000–7000 words, or book reviews of 1000–2000 words by the 10th of July 2026 (5pm UK time), for consideration for the journal’s 48th edition. The book reviews can cover any theme related to literary studies. We will also consider work with an interdisciplinary focus. Submissions must follow the MHRA Style Guide. If submitting a book review, please contact the editors in advance with details of the book you wish to review.

Submissions should be sent as an anonymised Word document to the current editors, Mara Watling and Kenzie Casper Scott, at pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk. Submissions should also include a cover sheet in a separate document, detailing the author’s name, institutional affiliation (if any), ORCID id if you have one, and a 200–300 word abstract that indicates five keywords for indexing. Please note our full guidelines and editorial process on our website.

All submissions should be accompanied by a completed Author Submission Document, found on our website.