The Masters by Research like other research degrees contains no taught element and offers you the opportunity to pursue a research project without entering into the commitment of a PhD. The programme is intended both as an award in its own right or as a progression route to a PhD. The programme can be studied one year full-time, or two years part-time and is assessed by a written dissertation of up to 40,000 words.
We welcome applications for research in all areas of English studies. Academic staff in the Department currently supervise over 80 research students.
All members of staff are active researchers and their interests as a whole encompass all the varieties of Anglophone culture not only in Britain, but in the US and elsewhere. This variety is reflected in the range of topics currently being studied by students, from poetry to drama, novels to films, medieval manuscripts to the internet, and from creative and life writing to the study of panoramas and magic lantern shows. It is also reflected in the number of research and reading groups organised by students and staff and by the number of conferences, talks and guest lectures that take place each year.
At the heart of the Department’s diversity is a common commitment to the intellectual development and welfare of all our postgraduate students and to cultural history and theory in their broadest sense. There is a special emphasis in the Department on interdisciplinarity – the deployment of approaches from disciplines such as history, sociology, politics, economics and linguistics alongside the theories and practices belonging to literary, film and cultural studies. It is this mix that enables the Department, its academic staff and its graduate students to offer supervisory expertise in social theory, gender studies, feminist theory, popular culture and film studies as well as in transatlantic and post-colonial studies and all forms of literature from the medieval to the contemporary.
