English Studies

All MA students submit a dissertation of 15,000 words.

The module sets out to introduce subject specific and professional skills 'in practice'. The module houses a research seminar series featuring papers/readings by leading academics and writers which you are required both to attend and to reflect upon via a range of exercises using social media platforms: blogs, Twitter, Slideshare, YouTube or Vimeo. You will also learn how to develop a web presence for your work (using LinkedIn and other platforms) and will work together to design, organise, publicise and manage an MA conference at which you will present your plans for your dissertation projects. The module also provides you with the skills you require to devise and complete an independent research project.

American Spaces is focused on a range of literary, cinematic and theoretical constructions of space, place, nation and the world in contemporary American culture. Topics include: the US-Mexico border, the New West, race and space, New Black Cinema, the ‘white savage’ and outsider spaces.

This module explores key debates in critical and cultural disability studies and the critical medical humanities with reference to a range of different historical and literary and cinematic case studies. Topics include the history of disability, and of specific diagnoses; disability, illness and the global south; biopolitics and contagion (plagues and pandemics); disability arts, health and social justice. You will read debates around the British Social Model and critical disability studies approaches, and work on the history of disability as a category, stigma, cripping, normalcy, ableism and care.

This module investigates games across media (inclusive of analogue and digital) as modes of narrative and storytelling.

This module explores the many ways in which postcolonial writers imagine the nation and construct the ‘native’ and originary identity in the context of decolonisation and globalisation. It examines how their work serves to forge and deconstruct a sense of national identity, exposing it as a site of contestation where notions of homeland and belonging are interrogated, unsettled and revised. From the Indo-Anglian historical novel to Caribbean diasporic writing, and contemporary satirical texts from multicultural Britain, this module explores both literary and cinematic representations of the nation and nationing, indigeneity, authenticity, ‘new ethnicities’ and resistant identities. 

Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture explores the reciprocal relationship between literature and culture with a focus on texts of the nineteenth century in an interdisciplinary context.

This module explores a range of literary, filmic, televisual and graphic novel texts that best exemplify the contemporary Gothic, including Gothic adaptations, neoliberal Gothic, digital Gothic, transnational Gothic, the New Weird and the ongoing evolution of figures such as the vampire and the serial killer, as well as the most significant debates within contemporary Gothic Studies.

What are our responsibilities when we bear witness to exceptional violence or the trauma of another? How does one find a language to speak the unspeakable? How do we mark disappearance? Are some lives more grievable than others? What are the similarities and differences in the ways people from across the world mark memory and mourning? These are some of the questions driving our exploration of postcolonial texts that address traumatic histories. This module draws upon both western and non-western readings of trauma to consider the different ways writers and filmmakers bear witness to traumatic events and experience from the cultural margins.

The module provides a historical overview of the rise of Gothic literature from the Renaissance to 1900, and an introduction to current debates in Gothic Studies. Topics to be covered include: Gothic Renaissance (Shakespeare and Jacobean revenge drama); eighteenth-century Gothic fiction (Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe); Gothic Romanticism (Dacre, poetry and visual art); nineteenth-century American Gothic (Hawthorne, Poe, Brockden Brown); Victorian Gothic (Emily Brontë, ghost stories, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells); critical consideration of debates in Gothic Studies about the Female Gothic, queer Gothic, the uncanny and the doppelgänger.

This module explores the many ways in which migration, displacement and resettlement have affected and informed the work of postcolonial writers from the diaspora focusing on identity, globalisation and the refugee. Opening with a consideration of critical approaches to the field, the module goes on to consider the impact of travel and displacement on the construction of identity and self, the role of imaginary homelands and cultural practices in the construction of diasporic and community identity, and ends with an exploration of the plight of the stateless person or refugee in contemporary literary and autobiographical writing.

Trauma, Literature and Film will critically analyse and explore the way that major human catastrophes and the resulting traumas of the modern and contemporary period are represented in literature and film.

This module explores key Gothic texts of the twentieth century and the critical debates that inform our understanding of them. You will study a range of British and American literary and filmic texts drawn from Gothic sub-modes (such as ‘the weird’ and the grotesque) against their historic and cultural context; developments in the representation of the monster (such as the vampire, the zombie and the serial killer); and the most significant debates in modern Gothic Studies.