Postgraduate taught courses
We now offer a Creative Writing Course on the MA in Modern and Contemporary Writing!
The Department of English and American Literature offers several exciting and innovative MA courses. The Department has an excellent tradition of research. Our outstanding performance in research is reflected in the UK Government's award of its highest grade of 5* in successive Research Assessment Exercises.
We represent a wide range of critical interests and methods, from work with medieval manuscripts to analysis of the discourses of reproductive technology. We also have several unique and important archives, including the most significant Samuel Beckett collection in the world, a Special Collection of Nineteenth-Century Children's Literature, and very strong collections in nineteenth-century publishing history (most notably the Chatto & Windus collection). Our students are often encouraged to work with these archival resources, at both MA and PhD level. Reading is also superbly located for access to two of the UK's largest research collections: the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford are both within easy reach. Our University library subscribes to Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online which give digital access to books printed before the nineteenth century.
The English Department is a welcoming place, and there is friendly intellectual contact in the form of seminar series. Students come from many different countries to attend our courses.
We offer a distinctive range of MA programmes, each of which has taught components, followed by dissertation supervision: