The MA in Queer History is a pioneering programme in one of the most exciting areas of historical enquiry, giving a voice to those who throughout much of history have been denied one.
This MA provides a comprehensive introduction to the themes and methods of Queer History as well as laying a solid foundation in general historical study. It offers a first-rate overview of important thought and methods from the fields of queer theory as well as the histories of gender and the body and sexuality.
This programme aims to historicise often binary categories, such as male/female, heterosexuality/homosexuality, active/passive, and uncover the processes through which these categories came to be seen as ‘natural’. It further pays close attention to questions of power, including how sexual orientation and race throughout history have often become interlinked in asymmetrical, oppressive ways.
Students conclude the programme with a 10,000 word dissertation on a topic of their own choice. The dissertation research is aided by access to the shared library and archival resources of the wider University of London and the city of London, one of the world’s queer capitals. Goldsmiths aims to build the Archive of Queer Life Histories and involve MA students in this process.
The emphasis of the MA is in the Early Modern and Modern periods. Both the Western invention of ‘homosexuality’ in the 1860s and the emancipatory movements, especially of the post-1969, post-Stonewall period, figure prominently.
You will take 3 core modules, as well as optional modules to the value of 60 credits.
Core modules
Optional modules
The programme will build skills in data gathering and analysis as well as effective written and spoken communication to prepare students for jobs in diversity administration in private business, government, National Government Organisations, the education sector and legal professions.
As opposed to primarily theory-oriented subjects the programme will lay a solid empirical foundation in queer history, arguably the best possible basis for sexual diversity jobs.
The MSc Applied Gender Studies degree at Strathclyde is a Master’s level course for those who wish to study how gender ‘works’ in relation to other structural inequalities such as race, sexuality, class and disability within society.
If you wish to pursue a career in the charitable, education, government or civil service or the heritage sectors then this course is ideally suited to you. It will also appeal to those who may already be working within an organisation with a strong interest in gender in society.
For those who are interested in pursuing a more research focussed option the MSc Applied Gender Studies can also be taken as a Research Methods route. This allows graduates to meet the criteria for ESRC funding, an important factor if you plan to go on to PhD study in the Social Sciences.
By completing this course you will develop the analytical and practical skills necessary to engage critically with contemporary gender issues including:
A key focus of this course is how these concepts can be applied within real-world contexts. You will have the opportunity to gain first-hand experience working on a research project with an external organisation from the feminist third sector and organisations committed to gender equality in arts, culture and sport.
Glasgow has a diverse range of key women’s and equalities organisations in the city. The University of Strathclyde has particularly strong links with the Glasgow Women’s Library, the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women’s lives, histories and achievements. You'll benefit from access to the unique archival collections held by the Library as part of this course.
Gender studies is a multi-disciplinary field dealing intersectionally with various social and cultural dimensions.
Reflecting this, the MSc Applied Gender Studies combines interdisciplinary core courses on gender theory, feminist research and the history of feminist thought, with optional classes within a range of disciplinary traditions.
Strathclyde has particular strengths in feminist and queer approaches within Journalism and Media Studies, English Literature, History, Creative Writing, Education, Politics and International Relations, Criminology and Social Policy.
This course comprises of three core courses:
These core modules focus on providing students with an interdisciplinary frame for the critical study of gender that is underpinned by feminist theory and acknowledges the ways in which gender informs – and is informed by – other structural inequalities.
Understanding how feminist theory, research and activism has developed over time is a key element of the degree, and our core courses include visits to Glasgow Women’s Library to learn about feminist archiving and work with their original collections.
Collectively, these courses equip students with a knowledge and understanding of key feminist debates about ontology, epistemology and methodology, and enable them to identify both commonalities and differences in the ways these debates have been taken up in different disciplinary contexts over time.
Students also take three optional courses chosen from a range of modules. These are updated annually and may include:
The Gender Studies Research Placement and Advanced Topics in Gender Studies options run every year. You'll also complete a Gender Studies dissertation. We're well placed to supervise projects aligned to a range of disciplinary interests and using diverse methodologies.
In addition to the MSc Applied Gender Studies, we also offer the MSc Applied Gender Studies (Research Methods) which is the recommended route for students intending to apply for a PhD in the Social Sciences.
Students on this programme take core modules Feminist Knowledge and Research, Advanced Topics in Gender Studies, Perspectives on Social Research, Quantitative Methods and Qualitative Methods.
Students following this route take only one of the optional courses listed above and similarly complete a dissertation.
The Research Placement option provides students with the opportunity to put their Gender Studies learning and research training into practice in a real-world environment.
Students conduct a piece of research according to a brief produced in consultation with the host organisation.
The course team have established links with potential placement providers - in Glasgow and beyond - from the feminist third sector and a range of organisations committed to gender equality in arts, culture and sport.
Examples of organisations we have links with include Women in Journalism, Engender, Glasgow Women’s Library, Zero Tolerance, Rape Crisis Scotland, Women’s Support Project, Scottish Football Association, The Parliament Project and the National Union of Journalists.
The core courses are delivered in weekly seminars where there is an emphasis on student participation and engagement.
On both Feminist Knowledge, Feminist Research and Feminisms – Continuity and Change, some of our classes are held at Glasgow Women’s Library.
The assessment is all in the form of coursework, with a range of assessments designed to allow students to demonstrate different research and writing skills.
All the core courses have more than one assessment point so that receiving and responding to feedback is built in to the course design. Optional modules are taught and assessed in a variety of ways.
On the Research Placement module, students will deliver their research in a form agreed in advance with the Placement provider so as to best meet their needs and provide the student with the opportunity to develop skills in delivering research in real world contexts.
The MSc Applied Gender Studies is a great route into working in the feminist third sector, or into equality and diversity work across a range of contexts.
We positively encourage part-time study and where students are already working in these areas there may be possibilities to conduct research for their placement and/or dissertation within their workplace.
This MA introduces you to recent debates on gender in the disciplines of sociology and media and communications studies, and to the interdisciplinary domains of feminist social and cultural theory.
Drawing on the internationally recognised and pioneering expertise of staff in the Department of Sociology and Department of Media and Communications, as well as the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR), the programme offers you the opportunity to develop cutting-edge critical skills in relation to cultural approaches to gender formation and gender theory.
As well as these theoretical and analytical points of orientation, the MA in Gender, Media and Culture aims to help you grasp the importance of epistemology and methodology for the evaluation of empirical investigations of gender formations.
The programme therefore introduces you to, and offers training in, the key socio-cultural methods for the study of gender in the contemporary world, including methods for the study of visual culture; the body and affect; and memory.
These two elements of the programme are brought together in a dissertation study, which involves tailored supervision in the application of research methods to a specific topic.
This programme relates to the following disciplines:
Core components of the programme will familiarise you with the wide range of debates integral to the fields of gender studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies. These include:
You complete one core module and one option module each term, as well as a dissertation module in the spring term. The first core module introduces key debates and developments in feminist theory, cultural theory and, in particular, feminist cultural theory. It introduces both early debates which defined these fields and contemporary developments and departures. More specifically, you will be introduced to social constructivist and post-structuralist perspectives, to ‘new materialism’, to debates on feminism and the critique of universalism; to key questions in relation to feminism and biology; to debates on psycho-analysis and the emergence of queer theory and its intersection with feminist theory.
The second core module examines the place of gender, affect and the body in feminist theory and feminist practice. The course offers you different angles on what has become known as “the affective turn,” placing a strong emphasis on the history of feminist contributions to the study of affect and emotion as well as the body. We ask how bodies are constructed, experienced and lived from a variety of feminist perspectives, attending to questions of corporeal difference, as well as the intimacy of bodies, spaces, objects and technologies. We also reflect on the significance of affect and the body for feminist and queer cultural practices, as well feminist and queer activisms. This module therefore offers instruction in some of the most cutting edge issues in contemporary feminist theory. A team of leading feminist scholars based in the departments of Sociology and Media Communications at Goldsmiths teach this module on the basis of their research specialisms.
There will be a series of dissertation workshops to help you plan and develop your dissertation, especially in regard to issues of methodology and method. Each student will be assigned a supervisor who will work with you to develop your proposal and undertake independent research.
Core modules
Option modules
You have 60 credits at your disposal, you can choose any 30 credit modules related to gender from postgraduate modules across the University. You can choose either a regular option (30 credits) or two ‘mini-options’ (2 x 15 credits).
For your other options, you can choose modules from either the Department of Sociology or the Department of Media and Communications as they co-convene the programme. You can also choose from the following departments across Goldsmiths:
Please note that not all modules are suitable for students from all academic backgrounds; you will discuss your choices with the Programme Convenor at the start of your degree.
Assessment
Assessment consists of coursework, extended essays, reports, presentations, practice based projects or essays/logs, group projects, reflective essays, and seen and unseen written examinations.
Graduates from this programme gain conceptual and methodological knowledge of the key concepts and debates in the study of gender and culture; the skills of critical analysis; the ability to distinguish and appraise a range of socio-cultural research methodologies; the skills to design and develop a research project; and the ability to recognise and account for sensitive ethical issues relating to research and representation.
The two core courses provide you with the necessary skills to understand the relationships between early debates in the fields of gender studies, feminist theory and feminist cultural theory, and the ability to critically engage with new developments in these fields. Furthermore, you will gain a critical appreciation of the role and place of the body and affect in the development of feminist cultural theory and gender theory, and the challenges that contemporary socio-cultural changes bring to the theorisation of the body.
Previous graduates have embarked on professional careers in social research, think tanks, the arts and cultural sectors, government and public administration, development, human rights, NGOs, and in media and communications globally. They have also progressed to PhD study.
Find out more about employability at Goldsmiths.
This pathway offers a historically wide-ranging, theoretically rigorous, and generically diverse grounding in twentieth-century literary culture. It examines modernism alongside non- and post-modernist writing, and situates all three in relation to politics, philosophy, and other artistic media of the twentieth century.
The pathway has a global outlook, asking how modernism may look from Cape Town, Dublin, or Kingstown, Jamaica, as well as from London, Paris or New York. It stresses the diversity of modern experience, and of literature striving to express the nature of ‘modernity’ itself.
The compulsory module, ‘Modernism and After’, tracks the central debates that run through modern writing and criticism. What is ‘modern’ and what comes after it? What counts as ‘art’? How have relations between ‘high’ and ‘low’ altered over time? How does writing relate to racial or gendered ‘otherness’? How has writing rethought the politics of freedom and containment? How does literature change with new recording and distribution formats? How can criticism deal with creativity? These questions open up the last 120 years or so of literary and cultural innovation, and frame the other modules you choose to take.
The Department of English has notable research and teaching strengths in the field of Modernist literature and culture, and is a leading centre of Modernist research in London and the UK. Staff working in Modernism at Queen Mary include Suzanne Hobson (author of Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics, 1910-1960 [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011]), Scott McCracken (currently editing the Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project, a major joint collaboration between Queen Mary, the University of Oxford, the University of Birmingham, and Birkbeck, and author of Masculinities, Modernist Fiction and the Urban Public Sphere [Manchester University Press, 2007]), Morag Shiach (whose extensive and wide-ranging work on the literature and culture of Modernism includes the important monograph, Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930 [Cambridge: CUP, 2004]), and Michèle Barrett (renowned authority on Virginia Woolf and the cultural history of the First World War). Other staff whose work touches upon the period include Sam Halliday, who works on science and technology in culture, and Peter Howarth, an authority on twentieth-century poetry.
Suzanne Hobson and Scott McCracken also co-organise the preeminent Modernist research seminar in London, the Modernism Research Seminar, at the Institute of English Studies.
Compulsory modules
You choose three modules from a list of options that changes from year to year (one can be from the range of modules offered across the MA English Studies curriculum). In 2017-2018 we hope to offer the following. If members of our specialist research staff win research funding it will mean that their module won’t run, so for that reason this list is indicative only.
You may, subject to availability and the approval of the School, take one of your option modules from across a range offered by other Schools in the Humanities and Social Science Faculty, or from other Colleges of the University of London.
In addition to taught modules, we run a range of research seminars to which all MA students are invited. Some of these are linked to our interdisciplinary Research Centres, such as the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, the Centre for Religion and Literature in English and the Centre for the History of the Emotions. Others are collaborations with other institutions, such as the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar. With visiting speakers from across the world, these seminars are an opportunity to meet other postgraduate students and members of staff and to learn about the latest developments in research.
You may also opt to take a cognate elective module offered by the Schools in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and by other Colleges of the University of London.
Critical Methodologies is a unique interdisciplinary taught course focused on the study and applications of critical theory.
Students get to explore some of the major modern schools of thought and contemporary theories and practices of interpretation, from Formalism and Structuralism through Barthes and textuality to queer theory, psychoanalysis and feminism, and materialist and postcolonial theories. The course also gives students the opportunity to follow their own interests from a wide range of optional modules across humanities and social sciences, all of which draw on the varied and lively research culture of King's in these fields.
Leads to careers in universities, the media, arts, teaching and journalism.
Our interdisciplinary course in Critical Methodology is built around a required module in critical theory. This will introduce you to the main debates in current critical theory through the exploration of a series of key texts. It explores theories and practices of reading, from Formalism and Structuralism through Barthes and textuality to queer theory, psychoanalysis, materialist and postcolonial theories. In addition to this required module, you will be able to choose from a list of modules linked to critical theory in a range of subjects. You will investigate and write a dissertation on a topic that links the required module to the material of one or more of your optional modules. This course is ideally suited to you if you have a humanities degree and are looking to prepare for PhD study, or if you want to pursue a career in teaching, journalism, the media and the arts.
For students with arts & humanities degrees who wish to further their knowledge of critical theory and its practice across a range of fields and/or to prepare for PhD study. To develop a knowledge of the broad implications of critical theory, and the skills of interpretation and analysis in relation to specific fields of study.
Teaching
If you are a full-time student, we will provide six hours of teaching each week through lectures and seminars, and we will expect you to undertake around 34 hours of independent study.
If you are a part-time student, we will provide two to four hours of teaching through lectures and seminars each week, and we will expect you to undertake between 16 and 18 hours of independent study.
For your dissertation, we will provide a further six hours of supervision.
Assessment
We assess the majority of our modules through coursework, typically a 4,000-5,000-word essay for every 20 credits. We will assess your dissertation through an oral presentation (10%) and a 12,000-word essay.
The English Literature MA pathway is ideal if you don’t wish to be confined to a specific period or disciplinary area. It asks fundamental questions about our ideas of literature and how these might have changed over time.
The pathway’s compulsory module, ‘The Production of Texts in Contexts’, opens up these questions by looking at a broad array of literature from a variety of historic periods. It considers how innovations in printing and publishing have affected writing, and asks to what extent political and social change conditions and defines authorial identities and practices.
Apart from the compulsory core module briefly described below, students taking the generic English Literature pathway can freely choose their remaining three modules from all the other existing pathways and thus sample different topics from different periods. Below are additional links to those pathways that allow you to see the rich variety of staff research interests and specialisms.
The Production of Texts in Context
The Production of Texts in Context is a trans-historical module that ranges across many different literary periods from the early middle ages to the present day. The module is team-taught so students experience teaching by ten to eleven different staff members, each of whom presents a topic related to their own particular interests and period specialisms. The teaching team and the topics represented vary from year to year according to staff availability, with recent topics including Ballad and Carol (Alfred Hiatt), The Making of Paradise Lost (Joad Raymond), The Eighteenth-Century Newspaper (Chris Reid), Victorian Serialised Fiction (Matt Ingleby), Experimental Writing and Early Twentieth-Century Publishing (Scott McCracken), The Coming of Age Novel in Global Literature (Charlotta Salmi), Book Prizes and Literary Production (Huw Marsh), and Contemporary Graphic Narrative (Sam McBean). For the essay assignment students pick a subject relating to one of the topics and can seek advice from the relevant staff member. There is also a designated member of staff who acts as module convenor, sits in with students on the weekly seminars, and is able to offer general help and guidance.
You also choose one of the following
Researching Modern Culture; London Panoramas: Research, Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century, or The Material Text, 1300-1700
You choose three modules from a wide-ranging list of options that changes from year to year.
In 2017-2018 we hope to offer the following. If members of our specialist research staff win research funding it will mean that their module won’t run, so for that reason this list is indicative only.
Students may also opt to take a cognate elective module offered by the Schools in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and by other Colleges of the University of London.
In addition to taught modules, we run a range of research seminars to which all MA students are invited. Some of these are linked to our interdisciplinary Research Centres, such as the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, the Centre for Religion and Literature in English and the Centre for the History of the Emotions. Others are collaborations with other institutions, such as the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar. With visiting speakers from across the world, these seminars are an opportunity to meet other postgraduate students and members of staff and to learn about the latest developments in research.
The MRes Theology and Religion is a research programme with some provision for taught modules.
Research expertise includes the study of Christianity, the Bible and Christian thought, including, for example, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Queer and Intercultural theologies; biblical hermeneutics; gender and religion; philosophy of religion and philosophical theology; and approaches to Hebrew Bible or New Testament studies drawing upon literary, ideological, reception-focussed, historical or cultural methodologies.
Times Higher Education ranked the Department of Theology and Religion second in the country for its performance in the latest Research Excellence Framework exercise.
This programme may be followed as an end in itself, but also provides an excellent foundation for subsequent doctoral research.
The programme comprises four components; a compulsory Research Methods in Theology and the Study of Religion module; two optional modules from the range available in the Department of Theology and Religion; and a 20,000-word thesis on a topic of your choice.
Your thesis can focus on any aspect of the study of Christian thought and theology or of Biblical Studies that interests you, but among the Department’s strengths are areas such as hermeneutics, contextual and intercultural theologies and other approaches to biblical interpretation; the Dead Sea Scrolls; contemporary and philosophical theology; Evangelical/Charismatic, queer, liberationist and Asian feminist theologies/approaches to the Bible and Theology; and historical, cultural-critical, reception-critical and literary approaches to the Bible.
As well as the taught modules you take on this programme, the department has a programme of research seminars, conferences and workshops which you can attend, so you’ll be able to gain insight from a range of academics and peers from across the department.
You will also become part of, and contribute to, the lively international community of the College of Arts and Law Graduate School, which offers dedicated research resources and a supportive working environment. Our team of academic and operational staff are on hand to offer support and advice to all postgraduate students within the College.
Your degree will provide excellent preparation for employment and this will be further enhanced by a range of employability support services offered by the University.
The University's Careers Network provides advice and information specifically for postgraduates that will help you to develop an effective career and skills development strategy, and to make the most of your time with us at the University. The College of Arts and Law also has a dedicated careers and employability team to deliver tailored programmes of careers events and local support.
You will have opportunities to: meet employers face-to-face at on-campus recruitment fairs; attend employer presentations and skills workshops; receive individual guidance on your job applications, writing your CV and improving your interview technique; and access to comprehensive listings of hundreds of graduate jobs and work experience opportunities.
You will also be able to access our full range of careers support for up to two years after graduation.
Postgraduate employability: Theology and Religion
Birmingham’s Theology graduates develop a broad range of transferable skills including: familiarity with research methods; the ability to manage large quantities of information from diverse sources; the ability to organise information in a logical and coherent manner; the expertise to write clearly and concisely and to tight deadlines; critical and analytical ability; the capacity for argument, debate and speculation; and the ability to base conclusions on statistical research.
Many of our graduates go into careers in churches of various denominations. Other students use their transferable skills in a range of employment sectors, including publishing, education and social work. Employers that our graduates have gone on to work for include: Church of England; Methodist Church; NHS; and University of Birmingham.
Communication and Media Studies at Lancaster is ranked first in The Times and the Sunday Times Good University Guide Subject Rankings, 2016. This degree provides students with the theoretical and methodological grounding they need to carry out independent research in media and cultural studies.
The course introduces you to the key texts, debates and thinkers in media and cultural studies, ranging from the work of classical cultural theorists through to contemporary writing on new media, globalised culture, science and technology studies, and queer theory.
You will be encouraged to reflect critically on the role of popular media in structuring our everyday lives. The course examines the role of media in reproducing, disseminating and challenging hegemonic power relations, as well as thinking through the ways in which gender, sexuality and ‘race’ are constructed in global media cultures.
This is not a vocational or practice-based degree. However, it is a degree that will teach you skills in critical thinking, independent research, and analysis highly relevant for development and innovation in the cultural and media sectors.
You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.
Core
Optional
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research.
Contemporary culture is characterised by nothing if not a reawakened interest in the Gothic, be that in the form of the current vogue for horror film, in the heightened preoccupation with terror and monstrosity in the media, the extraordinary success of writers such as Stephen King and Stephenie Meyer, or in manifestations of an alternative Gothic impulse in fashion, music and lifestyle.
As the countless adaptations and retellings of texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; 1831) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in our own day attest, the Gothic, though once relegated to a dark corner of literary history, has assumed a position of considerable cultural prominence.
The MLitt in The Gothic Imagination at the University of Stirling provides students with the unique opportunity to steep themselves in the scholarly appreciation of this mode, providing a rigorous and intensive historical survey of its literary origins and developments, and charting its dispersal across a broad range of media and national contexts. In so doing, the course equips its graduates with the necessary theoretical vocabulary to address, and critically reflect upon, the Gothic as a complex and multi-faceted cultural phenomenon, while also preparing them for further postgraduate research in the rich and vibrant field of Gothic Studies. In addition to these subject-specific objectives, the MLitt in The Gothic Imagination also provides its graduates with several invaluable transferable skills, including critical thinking, theoretical conceptualisation, historical periodization and independent research.
- Degree type: MLitt, Postgraduate Diploma, Postgraduate Certificate
- Study methods: Part-time, Full-time
- Duration: Full-time; MLitt-12 months, Part-time: MLitt-27 months,
- Start date: September
- Course Director: Dr Timothy Jones
- The MLitt in the Gothic Imagination consists of four core modules, two option modules, and a dissertation. Across these components, the course aims to provide students with a rigorous grounding in the work and thematic preoccupations of the most influential Gothic writers, both historical and contemporary. Supplemented by relevant historical and theoretical material throughout, the course aims to provide as rich and varied an exposure to the academic study of the Gothic as possible.
- The first two core modules seek to provide a searching historical overview of the genesis and development of the Gothic aesthetic, taking students systematically from the circulation of the term ‘Gothic’ in the political and aesthetic discourses of the late seventeeth and eighteenth centuries, through the late eighteenth-century writings of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Charlotte Dacre, and into the nineteenth-century fictions of writers such as Charles Maturin, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde.
- The second and third core modules, on Gothic in modern, modernist and postmodern writing, include texts by authors such as Gaston Leroux, Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, Djuna Barnes; Mervyn Peake, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison and Patrick McGrath.
- Option modules vary from year to year, depending on student interest and demand. Recent option topics have included the Gothic on the Romantic Stage; Nineteenth-century American Gothic; Transmutations of the Vampire; The Gothic in Children’s Literature; Monstrosity; The Female Gothic; Queer Gothic; and Gothic in/and Modern Horror Cinema.
- At the dissertation stage, students are encouraged to undertake independent, supervised research on any particular interest within Gothic studies that they might wish to pursue. Subject to the agreement of the course director, a creative writing dissertation may be undertaken at this stage.
If English is not your first language you must have one of the following qualifications as evidence of your English language skills:
- IELTS: 6.0 with 5.5 minimum in each skill
- Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE): Grade C
- Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English (CAE): Grade C
- Pearson Test of English (Academic): 54 with 51 in each component
- IBT TOEFL: 80 with no subtest less than 17
For more information go to English language requirements https://www.stir.ac.uk/study-in-the-uk/entry-requirements/english/
If you don’t meet the required score you may be able to register for one of our pre-sessional English courses. To register you must hold a conditional offer for your course and have an IELTS score 0.5 or 1.0 below the required standard. View the range of pre-sessional courses http://www.intohigher.com/uk/en-gb/our-centres/into-university-of-stirling/studying/our-courses/course-list/pre-sessional-english.aspx .
Two hours of seminars per module per week, plus individual consultations and supervisions with members of staff. Assessment is by means of a 4,000-word essay for each core module, and a variety of skills-based assessments (such as presentations; portfolios; blog-entries) for optional modules. All students complete a 15,000-word dissertation on a topic of their choice once optional and core modules have been completed.
With course-work assessed solely by means of independently devised, researched and executed essays, the MLitt in The Gothic Imagination equips students with a number of the skills and abilities that are prized and actively sought after by employers across the private and public sectors. These include the ability to process and reflect critically upon cultural forms; the ability to organise, present and express ideas clearly and logically; the ability to understand complex theoretical ideas; and the ability to undertake extended independent research.
Previous graduates of the course have gone on to pursue successful careers in such fields as teaching, publishing, research, academia, advertising, journalism and the film industry.
The 15,000-word dissertation that is submitted towards the end of the course allows students to devise, develop, support and defend their own academic ideas across an extended piece of written work; addition to the skills of independence, organisation and expression fostered by this exercise, the dissertation also provides an excellent point of entry into more advanced forms of postgraduate research, including the Doctoral degree.