20 August

The student has to complete the digital form to submit the topics of their choice. The chosen topics must be from two different specialisations within the English programme. The first topic will usually become the actual thesis topic, unless it is impossible to find a suitable supervisor, or the topic cannot be approved. Both topics must be accompanied by a description of no more than 150 words and must include 3 secondary academic sources - examples of the topic description: Language Acquisition, Linguistics, Literature, and Philology.

For more information, see the tab “Choosing a topic” below.    

NB. The board of examiners shall only process requests that have been submitted via the form above and that meet the requirements listed above. The form must be fully completed; incomplete forms will not be processed.

1 September

The Board of Examiners will appoint your supervisor. The student contacts the appointed supervisor, takes part in the assigned thesis seminar, does more research, and starts writing. The student and supervisor will determine deadlines and consultation arrangements.  

1 October

You will need to hand in a Proof of Progress by sending an email to the Board of Examiners (excie-ba-eng-ba-duits@hum.leidenuniv.nl) with your supervisor in cc. The Proof of Progress can, for example, be your introduction. Please discuss with your supervisor what to hand in.

10 December

Submit the final version of your BA thesis to both your supervisor and your second reader by e-mail. You are requested to put BAthesis@hum.leidenuniv.nl in CC. This email address belongs to the exam board department of our faculty, and its inbox serves as a collection point of all BA theses written in our faculty. Please note: some supervisors and second readers may also wish that you give them a hardcopy of the thesis.

Your supervisor will upload your thesis to the thesis assessment system where it will automatically be checked on plagiarism. The supervisor and second reader will assess the BA thesis and give their feedback within four weeks after receiving it. 

If the grade is insufficient, the student will have two weeks to rewrite based on the feedback given.

15 January

You will receive the grade for your thesis if you have handed it in before the deadline.

30 January

Resit date. NB. This date can also be used by students who have not used the first deadline to hand in their thesis. However, a thesis handed in between 10 December and 31 January will count as a resit.

The student is not entitled to any further supervision on the current topic.

If the (revised) BA thesis is not submitted during the additional month or does not lead to a passing grade, the student has to write a new BA thesis, and the procedure will have to be started anew.

All extensions for the official deadlines must be approved by the Board of Examiners and are only possible in case of extenuating circumstances. Please contact your study advisor first.

10 January

The student has to complete the digital form to submit the topics of their choice. The chosen topics must be from two different specialisations within the English programme. The first topic will usually become the actual thesis topic, unless it is impossible to find a suitable supervisor, or the topic cannot be approved. Both topics must be accompanied by a description of no more than 150 words and must include 3 secondary academic sources - examples of the topic description: Language Acquisition, Linguistics, Literature, and Philology.

For more information, see the tab “Choosing a topic” below.

NB. The board of examiners shall only process requests that have been submitted via the form above and that meet the requirements listed above. The form must be fully completed; incomplete forms will not be processed.

1 February

The Board of Examiners will appoint your supervisor. The student contacts the appointed supervisor, takes part in the assigned thesis seminar, does more research, and starts writing. The student and supervisor will determine deadlines and consultation arrangements.

1 March

You will need to hand in a Proof of Progress by sending an email to the Board of Examiners (excie-ba-eng-ba-duits@hum.leidenuniv.nl) with your supervisor in cc. The Proof of Progress can, for example, be your introduction. Please discuss with your supervisor what to hand in.

10 May

Submit the final version of your BA thesis to both your supervisor and your second reader by e-mail. You are requested to put BAthesis@hum.leidenuniv.nl in CC. This email address belongs to the exam board department of our faculty, and its inbox serves as a collection point of all BA theses written in our faculty. Please note: some supervisors and second readers may also wish that you give them a hardcopy of the thesis.

Your supervisor will upload your thesis to the thesis assessment system where it will automatically be checked on plagiarism. The supervisor and second reader will assess the BA thesis and give their feedback within four weeks after receiving it.

If the grade is insufficient, the student will have two weeks to rewrite based on the feedback given.

14 June

You will receive the grade for your thesis if you have handed it in before the deadline.

1 July

Resit date. NB. This date can also be used by students who have not used the first deadline to hand in their thesis. However, a thesis handed in between 10 May and 1 July will count as a resit.

The student is not entitled to any further supervision on the current topic.

Your grade for the resit will be announced on the 31 August at the latest

If the (revised) BA thesis is not submitted during the additional month or does not lead to a pass mark, the student has to write a new BA thesis and the procedure will be followed from step 2 onwards.

All extensions for the official deadlines must be approved by the Board of Examiners and are only possible in case of extenuating circumstances. Please contact your study advisor first.

Dr. L. Fonteyn
    Usage-based linguistics; Grammatical variation; (Historical) Socio-linguistics; Register and genre variation; Internet Language

Dr. J.V. Jeffery
   Composition studies; genre studies; writing development; educational assessment

Dr. D. Smakman  
   Sociolinguistics; phonetics; language teaching & learning

Topic inspiration (these are examples, you are, naturally, free to compose your own topic):

• Analysing varieties of English
  • In the past, it has been shown that speakers of any language make different linguistic choices depending on the situation they find themselves in. Throughout your studies, you will have noticed that Academic English, for instance, is characterised by rather strict rules, which differ vastly from the structures and words you would use in English conversation. In the past, linguists have tried to demonstrate that the ways in which such situationally defined varieties of English differ linguistically can be explained when we look at language-external factors, such as the mode of communication, the directness of the channel of communication, the specificity and visibility of the audience, and so on. Yet, as the world around us and the ways in which we can communicate with each other change, new varieties of English emerge with them which yet remain to be described and analysed. In a thesis project, you can set out to collect a data set and study the linguistic features of new text types, such as blog posts, phishing e-mails, YouTube tutorials, twitter fleets, etc. 
• Changes in internet language
  • Relatively speaking, the internet has not been around for long, but it has left its mark on the English language. In a study from 2015, for instance, it was shown that younger people have started to assign different interpretations to punctuation marks in Instant Electronic Messages. Furthermore, by integrating images into text, the traditional grammatical rules of the English sentence appear to be altered. While such developments often trigger negative reactions about how English is becoming ‘unruly’, it is certainly not true that internet language is chaotic. In fact, it is bound by very strict rules as well, and fluent netspeak users have a clear understanding of what is and is not acceptable. In your thesis project, you can home in on an interesting linguistic phenomenon that is popular in some form of online language to determine how the phenomenon works (by collecting and examining data you find online), and investigate to what extent speakers of different ages find different versions of that phenomenon acceptable by setting out a questionnaire. 
• Language change: specific case studies
  • The number of specific linguistic constructions that have emerged or disappeared or changed somewhere over the past is virtually endless. Some interesting examples you could study are the following:
  • In informal language, speakers often use prepositions to express how they feel about something or someone (e.g., I’m over the drama, I’m into you, I’m (all) about electronic music). All of these expressions seem to have emerged in the 20^th century, and are in some way related to the literal, spatial use of these prepositions (e.g., I walked over the hill, I got into the car, she is running about the house). But do speakers of English still recognise the connection between the subjective use and the spatial use of prepositions? And if so, does that limit the types of objects that can be used with into, about and over in the subjective sense?
  • The second person pronouns you and your used to have a competitor: thou, thee, and thine. The latter forms were mainly used informally, whereas you was considered the polite form. When revealing this to present-day speakers of English, they may be surprised, as they would associate thou, thee, and thine with highly formal and archaic language. Possibly, thou, thee and thine started disappearing and subsequently became archaic forms, which speakers who are not familiar with the old system then reinterpreted as meaning ‘formal’ – but such a theory has never been tested.
  • It is believed that the grammatical rules we acquire as children cannot be changed during adulthood. Or can they? By focussing on a grammatical rule, the language of individual writers with a long and productive career, you may be able to contribute to one of the most vibrant, long-standing discussions in Linguistics.
• The Language of Science Communication
  • With false information and misunderstandings spreading like wildfire, it is undeniably becoming increasingly important of establishing a connection between academics and the general public. As such, academics are working actively on their science communication skills. However, it can be difficult to determine how certain scientific findings are best communicated. In a thesis project, you could examine and analyse texts produced by successful science communication authors to tease out the features that make their texts appealing to a general audience. Alternatively, it may be interesting to scrutinise news reports of scientific projects and discoveries that are deemed false or misleading and compare them to the original scientific report. That way, you may be able to determine whether issues of miscommunication may have been caused by complex or ambiguous language and suggest ways of preventing these issues in the future.
• Artificial Language
  • In recent years, language generation systems based on neural networks have made the news for writing texts that are not distinguishable from human-produced texts. In a thesis project you could set out to try such a language generation experiment yourself by training a model to generate Shakespearian sonnets and asking humans to evaluate whether the sonnet has been written by the bard himself, or a digital version of him. Such experiments allow you to evaluate the performance of a computer system, but also to reflect on which aspects of language and literature may be impossible for computers to grasp.

Dr. A.G. Dorst  
  Literary machine translation; computer-assisted literary translation; style in translation; metaphor in translation; gender in translation; corpus-based translation studies; literary translation; audiovisual translation; song translation; comics in translation

Mr. drs. A.A. Foster
   Terminology (especially legal terminology); translation studies (especially legal translation); English for Specific Purposes

Drs. K.L. Zeven  
   Translation studies; literary translation

S. Santos Ângelo Salgado Valdez Ph.D.
   Translation Studies, Translation Norms, Reception Studies, Translation Technology, Medical Translation, Audiovisual Translation

Past theses:

• Bilbo le hobbit - Daarheen en Weer Terug: A Comparative Analysis of the Dutch and French Translation of Tolkien's Work of Fiction
• President-Elect vs. Kersverse President: Translating Politics in Netflix's House of Cards
• All Shook Up: On the assessment of English to Dutch Song Translation by Applying Peter Low's Pentathlon Principle

Dr. E.D. Botma  
   Phonology; phonetics; morphology; historical linguistics; comparative linguistics

Dr. M.B. Elenbaas   
English syntax; English word formation; syntax-morphology relation; language change; (morpho-)syntactic change in English; comparative syntax; varieties of English

Prof. Dr. J. Grijzenhout
  Phonology, morphology, historical linguistics, comparative linguistics, first language acquisition, multilingualism

Dr. A.K. Lipták   
   Generative syntax; comparative syntax; morphology-syntax interface; English syntax; structure of elliptical sentences; information structure; syntax of digital registers; abbreviation in digital registers

Past theses:

• Dutch speakers' intuitions about stress in nonce words
• Time for /t/ - An Empirical Study of the Affricated Fortis Alveolar Plosive [ts] in RP English
• Artificial or Natural: An Investigation of the Syntax of Negation in Game of Thrones’ Dothraki
• The Use of English Luxury Loans in Dutch Adolescent's WhatsApp Messages
• Arabic speakers' pronunciation of English /p/ and /v/
• Stress assignment of French loanwords in English and Dutch
• The interpretation of Dutch and English nominal compounds by Dutch ESL learners
• The formal status of splinters in COVID-related neologisms

Dr. J.F. van Dijkhuizen   
   British literature, 1500-1800 (especially Shakespeare and other Renaissance playwrights, John Milton, John Donne, George Herbert, Edmund Spenser, eighteenth-century fiction); modern-day stagings and adaptations (including film) of Shakespeare and other Renaissance playwrights; literary theory; twentieth-century poetry.

F. Korovsky Moura MA
   British Literature (1700-1900), Victorian culture, 19th-century productions of Shakespeare, 19th-century American literature, 19th-century medievalism; Women's literature in the 19th century

Dr. E.J. van Leeuwen   
   British and American literature from the eighteenth century to the present; classic gothic, Romanticism, horror, science fiction and westerns. 

Prof. Dr. P.T.M.G. Liebregts     
   Literatures in English (fiction and poetry 1800-present, with an emphasis on the Modernist period, and on contemporary  literature); the Nachleben (appropriation/ translation) of classical culture in modern English-language literatures/cultures;  Film/TV adaptations of literary texts; Anglo-American film, esp. Orson Welles, Terrence Malick, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, and 1970s American cinema.

I do not supervise theses on children’s literature, young adult literature, and fantasy.

Dr. S.A. Polak    
   19th-21st-century American literature and culture; Graphic narrative, comics, and political cartooning; Digital media studies; Disability studies; Memory and identity; Play and media; Presidential image-making.

I do not supervise theses on children’s literature, young adult literature, and fantasy.

Dr. M. Newton   
British and Irish Literature (1800-1970) (especially Austen, Wordsworth, Keats, the Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Hopkins, Victorian and Edwardian children's literature, Wilde, Kipling, Conrad, the short story, Gothic and ghost stories, the literature of the Second World War, W. H. Auden, the Inklings, Karen Blixen, Muriel Spark, and Philip Larkin); British and American Film (especially Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, Carol Reed, Frank Capra, Ealing films, screwball comedy, film noir, Billy Wilder, Polanski, Gothic).

I do not supervise theses on Terry Pratchett, contemporary fantasy, and Disney Princesses

Dr. K. Rolfe
   British Literature (1500-1800); textual studies (editing); early modern news; early modern political writing; early modern medical writing

Jessie Morgan-Owens
American literature and culture, beginnings to 1900; photography, visual culture, and image studies; archival projects & understudied authors; race, gender, and feminisms in the American context; ecocritical and environmental writing

Past theses:

• Simple Men, Twisted Women: the Gendered Struggle for Power in Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel
• ‘I am the love that dare not speak its name’: The Queer Gothic of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray
• "No alternative routes, only unavoidable fates": The Limitations of Geographical Space in Zadie Smith's NW and Swing Time
• Transforming Ovid: Unstable Gender Identities, the Subversion of Categories, and the Liberation of Same-Sex Relationships in Ali Smith’s Girl meets boy
• Progressing Progressiveness: The Modernisation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women
• “Bound to Your Husband for Life”: Marriage and Female (In)depence in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
• Vampires and Socio-Political Anxieties: A Comparative Analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot

Dr. L.M.D. Caon   
   Old and (especially) Middle English language and literature; Middle English dialectology; history of the English language; palaeography; codicology and Middle English textual editing.

Dr. K.A. Murchison
   Literature in Old English, Middle English and Anglo-Norman (including vernacular chronicles, religious texts, women’s literature, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales), multilingualism in medieval England, book history, manuscript studies, medieval reading communities, and the theory and practice of scholarly editing (including digital editions). 

Dr. M.H. Porck      
   Old and Middle English language and literature; Anglo-Saxon culture and history; medievalism; fantasy literature (especially Tolkien) For an overview of theses I have supervised in the past, see here.

Dr. M.S. Gordon
   Early and Late Modern English; Early and Late Modern English grammar, morphology, lexis and spelling; historical sociolinguistics; sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics; language variation and change, the historical development of varieties of English, language ideologies and language attitudes, language standardisation, language and gender.

Past theses:

• “From Hildeleoma to Flame-Fang: A Comparative Study of Kennings in Translations of Beowulf”
• “B oþþe nān B: Beowulf, Bodvar Bjarki and Other Berserkers as Sources for Tolkien’s Beorn” 
• The Discriminatory Power of Language: A Socio-Historic Stylistic Analysis of Jane Austen’s Germanic and Latinate Word-Use
• Modal Verb use in the 19th Century Representation of Women