MA English Studies

This is a flexible and challenging masters course, delivered by a team of tutors with internationally recognised academic expertise in specialist areas.

MA English Studies allows you to build your own bespoke masters experience, selecting from a range of units to reflect your interests in the further study of English. Or you could choose to follow one of three bracketed specialisms, MA English Studies (Contemporary Literature, Film and Theory), MA English Studies (The Gothic) or MA English Studies (Postcolonial Studies).

Choose to study the course on campus full-time in one year or part-time over two. You could also take this qualification online via distance learning.

Students can choose to follow one of three specialist pathways, MA English Studies (Contemporary Literature, Film and Theory), MA English Studies (The Gothic) or MA English Studies (Postcolonial Studies). Or you may select freely from the full range of units to construct an MA English Studies experience reflecting your interests in the further study of English.

MA English Studies allows you to freely select units from the full range on offer from the Gothic, Contemporary Literature and Film and Postcolonial Studies pathways. The core units you'll take are 'Practices' and 'Dissertation' but the rest of your credits can be made up from any of the option units listed below.

MA English Studies (Contemporary Literature, Film and Theory) focuses on contemporary cultural practices and critical theoretical interventions. This pathway reflects research strengths of staff in contemporary literary and film studies, critical and cultural theory, memory and trauma studies, the critical medical humanities and queer, postcolonial and cultural disability studies.

MA English Studies (The Gothic) begins with the pre-history of the Gothic mode in the seventeenth century, explores its eighteenth and nineteenth-century incarnations and concludes with contemporary manifestations of the mode. Students study plays and novels, films and television, framed by socio-cultural perspectives and critical and theoretical analyses.

MA English Studies (Postcolonial Studies) explores the ways that migration, displacement and resettlement have affected and informed the work of postcolonial writers from the diaspora, focusing on identity, globalisation and the refugee. This specialist option also addresses traumatic postcolonial histories, drawing upon both western and non-western readings of trauma to consider the different ways writers and film-makers bear witness to traumatic events and experience from the cultural margins. This pathway reflects departmental research strengths in both Postcolonial Studies and Trauma Studies.