MA, 1 year full time/2 years part time
Subject overview
Sussex is ranked among the top 20 universities in the UK for English in The Times Good University Guide 2013 and among the top 30 in the UK in The Complete University Guide 2014.
In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 95 per cent of our English research was rated as recognised internationally or higher, and over half rated as internationally excellent or higher.
English at Sussex has a well-established international reputation for producing research that develops and extends the boundaries of the subject.
English runs a wide range of innovative MA degrees, taught by faculty working at the forefront of English studies.
We support research centres such as the Centre for Modernist Studies and the Centre for Early Modern Studies, which focus on interdisciplinary research and teaching, and attract high-profile speakers from around the world.
We have a diverse and thriving community of postgraduate students who contribute to an outstanding research culture.
Programme outline
This MA looks at the most intellectually compelling issues facing the study of sexuality today. You can study sexual dissidence from historical, cultural, theoretical, comparative or postcolonial frameworks.
Sussex has established itself firmly as a major influence on the study of sexual dissidence in the UK, continental Europe and abroad. Sussex faculty share a broad range of interdisciplinary expertise and scholarly perspectives including early modern sexualities, postcolonial queer theory, South African writing, queer romanticism, the theory and practice of creative writing, psychoanalysis, social and cultural history, feminist and gender studies, cultural materialism, performance studies, film, visual culture, and media studies.
This MA is associated with the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence.
We continue to develop and update our modules for 2013 entry to ensure you have the best student experience. In addition to the course structure below, you may find it helpful to refer to the 2012 modules tab.
Autumn and spring terms: you take four options from a list that may include Critical Issues in Queer Theory • Gender and Representation • Gendering the Postcolonial • Queering Popular Culture • Sexuality and Creative Writing • The Politics of Gender • The Renaissance Body.
Summer term: supervised work on the MA dissertation.
Full-time courses can also be followed part time over two years, with taught seminars in the autumn and spring terms.
Assessment
You are assessed by four 5,000-word term papers and a dissertation of 15,000 words.
Current modules
Please note that these are the core modules and options (subject to availability) for students starting in the academic year 2012.
Critical Issues in Queer Theory
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
This module provides a forum for addressing some of the most compelling issues facing queer studies today through examining queer theory both as an academic discipline and as a possible political praxis for radical social change. Queer theory mediates in culture between normative ideologies and material practices, between intellectual enquiry and social activism, and between text and context. Unlike its lesbian/gay studies counterpart, often concerned with the politics of sexual difference alone, queer theory operates as a critical lens for (re-)reading the complexity of the cultural worlds we inhabit and as a potential site for social transformation, exposing and critiquing (hetero)normativity as it is imbricated within a range of social norms, categories, and institutions, including, but not limited to, sexuality, the body, the family, gender, censorship, racial and national fantasy, reproductive politics, health care, and the mobility of 'queer', as a materiality and as a discourse, across the globe. Initial lines of enquiry will address how queer theory, with its investment in the endless proliferation of social differences, might enable new understandings of subjectivity, child development and maturation, gender, race, history, imperialism, and postcolonial nationalism.
You will consider the ways in which queer theory functions as a mode of analysis and as a strategy of opposition for reading the signifying practices that constitute culture by challenging the heteronormative social order embedded in most standardised accounts of the world. This implies attention not only to sexuality as an axis of theoretical investigation, but to the persistent pressures of other normalising regimes pertaining to race, gender, social class, nationalism and geopolitical spatialisation, citizenship, and the effects of globalisation without losing sight of specific cultural, historical, and local contexts in any particular instance. Primary theoretical texts will be read alongside cultural texts, where appropriate, including literature, film, music, visual art, clinical texts, and legal documents, in order to demonstrate the approaches and contingencies of queer theoretical work.
Gendering the Postcolonial: Writing and Gender in Postcolonial Fiction
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
Feminist notions of a 'global sisterhood' were powerfully challenged in the 1980s by black and/or lesbian feminists (amongst others), who exposed the heteronormative, culture and class-specific assumptions of mainstream feminism and questioned whether all women were subject to patriarchy in identical ways. At roughly the same time, postcolonial studies began to establish itself as a distinct field within literary and cultural disciplines. The impact of gender on postcolonial studies was belated but there is now a growing body of work that seeks to define postcolonial feminism(s) and to revisit, if not revive, ideas of a transnational or global feminist solidarity.
You will explore some of the key debates within this highly contested field focusing on a selection of key postcolonial texts (Fanon, Said, Bhabha) and on feminist theoretical interventions (Spivak, Mohanty, Lazreg, Boyce Davies, Boehmer, Kaplan, Ahmed, and Alexander amongst many others). Alongside theoretical material, the course focuses on a range of literary texts by contemporary postcolonial writers from a wide range of postcolonial locations, including Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, the South Pacific, the Middle East and postcolonial diasporas. The course also engages with the shift away from an emphasis on 'women' towards 'gender' as a more productive way of interrogating constructions of both femininity and masculinity. Selected writers include: Jamaica Kincaid, Assia Djebar, Zoe Wicomb, Mahasweta Devi, Sia Figiel, Patricia Grace, Edwidge Danticat, Adhaf Soueif, Erna Brodber , JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, VS Naipaul, Nurrudin Farah, and Yvonne Vera. Some of the issues and topics covered include: reading and representing 'the other woman'; representations of 'the' nation; language; class; home and belonging; motherhood; sexuality; orality; intertextuality; heteronormativity; migration.
Sexuality and Creative Writing
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
This module will explore the relationship between literary production, authorship, and gender and sexual identities. The module will introduce neo-Classical and Romantic theories of creativity before asking how twentieth and twenty-first century authors have grappled with these inherited narratives. For example, how do writers who dis-identify with received categories deal with literary traditions that are often construed as a meeting (or battle) between the 'masculine' and the 'feminine'? Where do feminism and same-sex desire fit into this story? And how have recent innovations in reproductive technology affected the familiar analogy between parenthood and literary production? Possible topics for study include: lesbian, gay and bisexual revisionings of literary tradition; historically varying representations of Sappho; the author as (male) Romantic genius; 'Nature' as literary mother; transgender identity and literary androgyny; erotic representations of the writer-muse relationship; authorship as maternity and/or paternity; writing as erotic collaboration; writing and celibacy; new narratives of reproduction and the family; writing and masturbation. Students will have the opportunity of presenting a combination of creative and critical writing should they wish to.
The Renaissance Body
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
In early-modern England the body was a major intellectual preoccupation and a focal metaphor informing and shaping cultural structures and artefacts. This period, too, like the cusp of the 21st century, had a very distinctive conception of the person as a construct or artifice, as the product of social intervention and cultural organization. Engaging with interpretative models from the fascinating interdisciplinary field of cultural theory of the body, you will explore the aesthetics of embodiment through a range of literary and visual texts, unravelling the dense significance of the corporeal imagination of the Renaissance. Key themes include: body borders, the supernatural and society; gendered voices, sex and agency; the medical imagination; diabolic inversions (the witch's body); heroic and monstrous masculinities; transvestitism; mystical monarchy; diseased bodies; revolutionary corporealities; body, soul and mind; consuming bodies and eating communities; the fabricated body; and pornography.
Entry requirements
UK entrance requirements
A first- or upper second-class undergraduate honours degree in a relevant subject.
Overseas entrance requirements
Please refer to column A on the Overseas qualifications.
If you have any questions about your qualifications after consulting our overseas
qualifications table, contact the University.
E pg.enquiries@sussex.ac.uk
Visas and immigration
Find out more about Visas and immigration.
English language requirements
IELTS 7.0, with not less than 6.5 in each section. Internet TOEFL with 95 overall, with at least 22 in Listening, 23 in Reading, 23 in Speaking and 24 in Writing.
For more information, refer to English language requirements.
For more information about the admissions process at Sussex
For pre-application enquiries:
Student Recruitment Services
T +44 (0)1273 876787
E pg.enquiries@sussex.ac.uk
For post-application enquiries:
Postgraduate Admissions,
University of Sussex,
Sussex House, Falmer,
Brighton BN1 9RH, UK
T +44 (0)1273 877773
F +44 (0)1273 678545
E pg.applicants@sussex.ac.uk
Related programmes
Fees and funding
Fees
Home UK/EU students: £5,5001
Channel Island and Isle of Man students: £5,5002
Overseas students: £13,0003
1
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
2
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
3
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
To find out about your fee status, living expenses and other costs, visit further financial information.
Funding
The funding sources listed below are for the subject area you are viewing and may not apply to all degrees listed within it. Please check the description of the individual funding source to make sure it is relevant to your chosen degree.
To find out more about funding and part-time work, visit further financial information.
Leverhulme Trade Charities Trust for Postgraduate Study (2013)
Region: UK
Level: PG (taught), PG (research)
Application deadline: 1 October 2013
The Leverhulme Trade Charities Trust are offering bursaries to Postgraduate students following any postgraduate degree courses in any subject.
Sussex Graduate Scholarship (2013)
Region: UK, Europe (Non UK), International (Non UK/EU)
Level: PG (taught)
Application deadline: 16 August 2013
Open to final year Sussex students who graduate with a 1st or 2:1 degree and who are offered a F/T place on an eligible Masters course in 2013.
Faculty interests
Faculty research interests are described briefly below. For more detailed information, visit School of English: People and contacts.
The following list includes all the English faculty, and other contributors to English MA degrees.
The journals Renaissance Studies, Textual Practice, The Oxford Literary Review and The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory are edited within the School of English.
Dr Gavin Ashenden 20th-century myth and metaphysics; psychology, psychoanalysis and belief.
Dr Sara Jane Bailes Contemporary experimental theatre, live art and visual practices, ideology and performance.
Dr David Barnett Post-war European drama and theatre, post-Brechtian political theatre.
Professor Peter Boxall Modern and contemporary fiction and drama.
Dr Sara Crangle Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. 20th-century literature.
Professor Brian Cummings 16th- and 17th-century literature and history.
Dr Sue Currell American literature and culture 1890-1940, 20th-century mass culture.
Dr Alistair Davies Modernism and postmodernism, 20th-century English and American literature.
Dr Denise DeCaires Narain Postcolonialist writing; feminist cultural theory; contemporary women’s writing in English, especially poetry.
Dr Matthew Dimmock 16th- and 17th-century literature and history, national identity, Islam.
Professor Andrew Hadfield Renaissance literature and politics, Britishness, Shakespeare, Spenser, and national identity.
Dr Doug Haynes European and American modernism, postmodernism.
Dr Margaret Healy Renaissance literature and culture, the political stage, Shakespeare, Dekker, medicine and literature.
Professor Tom Healy Head of School. 16th- and 17th-century writing and cultural history.
Dr Vicky Lebeau The convergence of psychoanalysis, literature and cinema; and feminist theory.
Dr William McEvoy British playwriting and directing; theatre, writing and ethics.
Dr Daniel Kane 20th-century American literature, the avant-garde, poetry since the 1960s.
Dr Maria Lauret American feminist fiction and theory; race and ethnicity.
Professor Stephanie Newell West African literature and popular culture, postcolonial theory.
Dr Rachel O’Connell Late 19th- and early 20th-century British literature; gender, queer, and disability studies.
Dr Catherine Packham 18th-century literature and philosophy; political economy and moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment.
Dr Jason Price Popular theatre histories and practices; politics and performance.
Dr Vincent Quinn Lesbian and gay studies, the history of sexuality, 18th-century studies, Irish studies, and the history and theory of biography.
Dr John David Rhodes Italian cinema, modernist and avant-garde cinemas of Europe and the US, queer art cinema.
Professor Nicholas Royle Modern literature and literary theory, especially deconstruction and psychoanalysis; the uncanny.
Martin Ryle 19th- and 20th-century fiction; the politics of ‘culture’, with especial reference to education; and topographical and travel writing.
Dr Minoli Salgado Postcolonial literature and theory, memory and migrant identity, the short story, Rushdie, and Ondaatje.
Professor Lindsay Smith 19th-century literature and painting; photography in Victorian culture.
Dr Keston Sutherland Contemporary and 20th-century English and American poetry; Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory.
Professor Jenny Bourne Taylor 19th-century literature and culture; literature and science; illegitimacy and the family.
Dr Pamela Thurschwell Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies. Psychoanalysis, 19th- and 20th-century interest in the supernatural.
Professor Norman Vance 19th-century literature, religion and society; Anglo-Irish literature.
Professor Marcus Wood Satire in the romantic period, the representation of slavery, and colonial and postcolonial literature and theory.
Careers and profiles
Our graduates have gone on to careers in teaching and education, publishing, website production and marketing, journalism and writing, the charity sector, and NGOs. A number of our graduates go on to further study and careers in academia.
For more information, visit Careers and alumni.
School and contacts
School of English
Over the last 30 years, English at Sussex has played a key role in shaping the direction of the discipline in Britain and throughout the world. The School of English offers you exciting potential for engaging with English as a world language and literature.
School of English, PG Admissions,
University of Sussex, Falmer,
Brighton BN1 9QN, UK
T +44 (0)1273 678468
E englishpg@sussex.ac.uk
School of English
Discover Postgraduate Study information sessions
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Visit Discover Postgraduate study to book your place.
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