MLitt/PgDip/PgCert Interdisciplinary English Studies

This class aims to provide students who are undertaking interdisciplinary research with a broad introduction to a range of methods and skills in humanities research, and to construct your own training pathway in order to gain specific expertise in a various methodologies or skills.

This class will engage students with literary and historical materials, and with theoretical work from animal studies and ecofeminism. This will inform discussions about the place, meaning and function of meat eating and meat avoidance, and debates about human-animal relations, from the early modern to the modern world.

As well as philosophical and religious work you'll read a range of primary materials, including literary works from A String of Pearls (aka Sweeney Todd) to Roald Dahl’s Pig; from Swift’s Modest Proposal to Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, via Dracula, and develop skills in textual analysis and critical and theoretical engagement.

This class is designed to engage students with recent research on sexuality in a global context.

This continues to be a controversial topic with key global institutions and organisations from churches to the UN being unable to forge an internal consensus about the protection and acceptance of LGBTQ lives.

Through looking at non-fiction writing, this class will introduce students to key issue in the field through the perspective of writers who travel across real and gender/sexual border and boundaries.

This class critically applies the linguistic theory of communication, and theoretical approaches to culture, to a range of problems in intercultural communication. We explore what a culture is, and whether cultures differ systematically. We learn about the linguistic theory of communication, and approaches to discourse and conversation, and speech acts, including ways in which these differ between cultures.

We consider how face and politeness can be theorized, and how they differ between cultures. We look at how languages differ, and whether differences in language lead to differences in thought. We look at the self, and identity, and their relation to culture and cultural difference, and we see how mobilities relate to intercultural communication.

This class is relevant for those who aim to teach English to speakers of other languages who need to understand issues around intercultural communication. It is also relevant to those studying literature who want to understand how communication works, particularly in the culturally complex situations in which literature can arise.

The placement option provides students with the opportunity to put their learning and research into practice in a real-world environment, conducting a piece of research according to a brief provided by the placement organisation in consultation with the module convenor. On successful completion of the module, the student will have:

• gained experience in putting their Interdisciplinary English Studies learning and research training into practice outside the academy
• gained experience in delivering a piece of research to a client's brief
• gained experience in negotiating the demands of two different institutions (the university and placement provider)
• demonstrated an ability to critically reflect upon their research practices and outputs

Graduates in English possess skills in written and spoken communication, working independently and thinking critically (HEA Student employability profiles), and this class offers an opportunity to put those skills to work in a real world context.

This Masters option explores online fanfiction and fan communities and investigates how they work with and transform key popular texts and genres from British literary history. We will study reading and writing practices and consider questions of adaptation across cultures, in relation to texts and themes which may have a global presence across different forms of media. Fan studies is a growing area within media/cultural studies, and fanfiction studies is developing as a new field of exploration for literary scholars. We will read cutting-edge as well as canonical critical works in fan studies, and consider through this class how this field is developing and what new directions are emerging for research and scholarship.