This pathway is a Faculty-wide comparative option. You will need to apply for the MSt or MPhil in Modern Languages and if you are offered a place, select your special subjects accordingly. Standard MSt in Modern Languages requirements apply: students need to show proof of degree-level linguistic ability in at least one European language outside English, commensurate with advanced literary study and an interest for literary and cultural theory.
Faculty members participating include:
Convenors: Prof Dimitris Papanikolaou, Prof Guido Bonsaver, Prof Ben Morgan.
Core Seminar
This mandatory core seminar, entitled ‘Studying Culture’, is taken in Michaelmas term and aims to give students a grounding in some important methodological and thematic issues associated with Cultural Studies. Possible sessions of the core course might include topics such as:
- Studying the everyday
- Studying the City
- Censorship and Culture
- The culture industry/ the case of popular culture
- Uses of cinema
- Written and Visual Narratives in Contemporary Culture
- Gender performances and popular culture 1 (Case study: Camp)
- Modernism and Popular Culture
N.B. This Seminar can also be taken as an optional Special Subject by students following other pathways.
Special Subjects
For their second Special Subject, graduates will be able to study one relevant topic in greater depth during Hilary term, and can be shaped in a language specific or comparative context. An indicative list of Special Subjects regularly offered includes (but is not confined to):
- European Cinema and Literature
- German cinema
- German cultural history in the 20th century
- Coming to terms with the past: the culture of memory in post-war Germany
- Cinema and politics in contemporary Italy
- Fascist culture
- Literature and film adaptation in Italian culture
- Foucault and the history of science
- New Queer cinema
- Cinema and migration
- Popular music and literature
- Greek cinema and social change
- The national idea in Russia
- Cultural outsiders