BA English Literature with Foundation

Title:

Changing Identities

Code:

EN0CID

Convenor:

DR Michael Lyons

Summary:

This module will give students the opportunity to explore the theme of identity across a wide range of texts. The module focuses principally on two aspect of identity, both in literature and society: changing identities and the identity of the self.

Students will be encouraged to explore these themes through seminars and workshops; this is an opportunity for students to consider how identity develops, how it is expressed, how and why it might change.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Environmental Humanities

Code:

EN0EH

Convenor:

PROF Gail Marshall

Summary:

This module will introduce students to the concept and practice of environmental humanities, and explore the ways in which literary texts and digital media help us to understand the relationships between human beings and the physical environment, through examining representations of nature, and people’s impact on it in texts drawn from English and world literatures. This module is multidisciplinary and will be of interest to all students who want to know more about environmental questions. It will form an important basis for working on degree-level modules in any discipline that concern development, sustainability, the eco-system, human and natural rights, questions of human responsibility and agency, and literary representation.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Film Narrative

Code:

EN0FN

Convenor:

PROF Lucinda Becker

Summary:

EN0FN Film Narrative will help you explore different types of narrative in film through close analysis of film sequences and more discursive discussion of film narrative structures and their effect. The module will cover four areas of narrative: unreliable narration (Fight Club), theatrical narration (Much Ado About Nothing), docudrama narrative (The Duke) and complex narratives (Memento).

Each week there will be a close analysis session on the module film, and students will be invited to suggests other films to be included for analysis. Students will also be given the opportunity to produce their sequence analysis on a film on the module or another film of their choice.

The module and its assignments will prepare you for tasks you will encounter later in your degree programmes, such as textual analysis, close analysis in a group situation, recording analysis in a logical way and presenting your ideas both through detailed fact sheets and an essay format. You will also see a clear line from their seminar work to their assessment tasks.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Global Identities

Code:

EN0GID

Convenor:

DR Michael Lyons

Summary:

This module will give students the opportunity to explore the theme of identity across a wide range of texts. The module focuses principally on two aspect of identity that shape our engagement with the world: gender and sexuality identity, and race and national identity.

Students will be encouraged to explore these themes through seminars and workshops; this is an opportunity for students to consider their own place, and the place of others, in the global community.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Study for Success

Code:

EN0SFS

Convenor:

PROF Lucinda Becker

Summary:

This module will provide students with much of the knowledge and experience, and many of the study skills, needed to succeed in their chosen BA Programme. Taught through a series of workshop-style seminars and tutorials, it will provide students with the experience and knowledge to produce assignments at undergraduate level and to take a strategic approach to their time at university.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Foundation in Academic Skills

Code:

IF0RAS

Convenor:

MR Matthew Tolley

Summary:

This module, delivered at the University of Reading, will provide students with the opportunities to develop the academic skills essential for success both on the Foundation Year and as an undergraduate.  Course content will be delivered through a combination of guided online tasks and practical workshops. Students will be grouped according to their broad disciplines enabling the module to cover generic skills, while allowing for some differentiation in content and assessment tasks.     

Assessment Method:

Assignment 35%, Oral 35%, Portfolio 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Genre and Context

Code:

EN1GC

Convenor:

DR Chloe Houston

Summary:

This module is designed to provide knowledge and understanding of two formative pairings of historical moment and genre: the Renaissance stage and the Victorian novel. In the first term, students will study four Renaissance plays, with an emphasis on drama as a distinct genre with its own particular conventions, and with attention to key aspects of the Renaissance stage, from playing spaces to the use of stage props. In the second term students will study three major Victorian novels, engaging with contextual issues of urbanisation, gender, sexuality and identity. In both cases, students will be encouraged to analyse literature in relation to genre and context and will gain an understanding of their intersections at particular historical moments.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Poetry in English

Code:

EN1PE

Convenor:

DR Paddy Bullard

Summary:

This module provides students with training in skills of close reading that are foundational to the study of English Literature, as well as an overview of the history of poetry in English. Students will be introduced to major movements and ideas in key periods from the early Renaissance up to the present; and to a range of genres including love poetry, political poetry, pastoral, elegy, satire, the sonnet, the ode, and the dramatic monologue. Poems studied later in the course will be drawn from the wider English-speaking world, including Ireland, the Caribbean and North America, and will include a diversity of voices.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Research and Criticism

Code:

EN1RC

Convenor:

DR Stephen Thomson

Summary:

This module provides a secure foundation in both the practical skills and theoretical literacy needed for the degree-level study of literature. It combines advanced training in reading, research, and academic writing with an introduction to debates around the core concepts of ‘reader’, ‘author’, and ‘text’. The set texts – a selection of short stories and literary essays from across the world – invite students to reflect on the complexities of these critical terms and to become more independent and more questioning as readers. A series of online screencasts equip students with subject-specific skills such as writing a critical precis and plot summary as well as general academic good practice like referencing and incorporating quotations.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

What is Comparative Literature?

Code:

EN1COMP

Convenor:

DR John McKeane

Summary:

This module will introduce students to some of the major critical and theoretical issues in the study of Comparative Literature, as well as to important methodologies for studying literature in a comparative context. Approaching a cluster of texts from different cultural and historical traditions, students will be encouraged to reflect on the practices and consequences of reading transnationally.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Introduction to Creative Writing

Code:

EN1CW

Convenor:

DR Conor Carville

Summary:

This module allows students to develop their skills in creative writing across a range of genres. They will be introduced to practical and theoretical issues involved in the activity, and will develop skills in the composition, criticism, revision, and polishing of creative work. Building on ideas from the lecture course, students will produce a portfolio of creative writing for discussion in seminars and contribute to the discussion of presented work. Students will also produce a critical essay derived from the subjects studied in the lecture course in consultation with seminar leaders.

Assessment Method:

Portfolio 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Shelf Life

Code:

EN1SL

Convenor:

DR Paddy Bullard

Summary:

This module is an introduction to English literature’s material dimension, and to the library as a symbol. For the most part literary study involves the interpretation of poems, novels or plays. This module complements this ordinary kind of reading by investigating books and other archival documents as physical objects. Its focus is on the preservation, use and dissemination of material texts in libraries and collections, and on how those sorts of places have been represented in literature.

One half of the teaching on the module is seminar-based. Students will use set texts to find out how writers have imagined libraries and archives in the past and present: as treasure-houses for a culture’s most valued stories; as labyrinths that hide mysterious and dangerous knowledge; as cemeteries for ideas; as “thought in cold storage”; or, conversely, as bastions for the active defence of free thought. They will consider how literary representations of libraries and archives map onto their actual operation. The other half of the module is practice-based. Students go behind the scenes at the University of Reading’s Special Collections department. They explore its world-class holdings and learn how its archives are safeguarded and made accessible to scholars. Reading’s Special Collections contain priceless stores of rare books and manuscripts, including the Overstone Library, the MERL library, the National Publisher’s Archive, and the Samuel Beckett Collection.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Portfolio 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Twentieth-Century American Literature

Code:

EN1TCL

Convenor:

PROF David Brauner

Summary:

Summary module description: Twentieth-Century American Literature presents students with a challenging range of work, bringing together canonical texts with the less familiar; engaging with work by white and African-American writers; and covering a number of genres and sub-genres, from poetry, the short story and drama, to the graphic novel. Students will develop their skills in the close reading of literary texts; they will acquire and demonstrate an ability to respond to shifts in modes, styles, and preoccupations across the period; they will learn about and begin to debate ideas of cultural, ethnic, class and racial difference in relation to the US national identities.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Thinking Translation: History and Theory

Code:

EN1TRANS

Convenor:

DR John McKeane

Summary:

This module introduces students to the main theoretical approaches to translation. The lectures will adopt a historical perspective and address how translation practice has evolved over time. Together, we shall also look at how and whether theory has had any influence on translation practice in the market-place.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Towards Sustainability: Positive Action for a Better World

Code:

AP1A35

Convenor:

PROF Julian Park

Summary:

This is a 20 credit University-Wide module offered at Part 1 the aim of which is to better understand the sustainability challenges facing the world and to consider the positive actions that can be taken either collectively or at the individual level that aids the sustainability agenda. The module will consist of lectures, case studies, discussions and speakers from external organisations as well as a group project work.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Introduction to Marketing

Code:

AP1EM1

Convenor:

MR Nick Walker

Summary:

Gain fundamental knowledge of the key concepts of marketing and relate these critically to contemporary practice. Examine traditional approaches to marketing such as strategic marketing, segmentation, targeting and positioning, as well as the marketing mix, and discuss issues arising within marketing theory and practice, which bring into question some of the foundational principles of the discipline. Through lectures, readings, and the analysis of case studies, address the latest thinking within the marketing discipline.

Assessment Method:

Class test 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

The Fundamentals of Business and Marketing

Code:

AP1EM2

Convenor:

MR Nick Walker

Summary:

Gain an introduction to management science and its relevance to businesses. Interactive in-class activities and the use of online apps will help you learn techniques for inspiring teamwork in an organisational context, discover the importance of strategic management design for achieving an organisation's goals, and understand the roles of the manager and the responsibilities this carries. You will also have a range of opportunities to gain hands-on practising decision making through case studies. Develop your leadership skills to motivate and guide a team towards the achievement of an organisation’s objectives. 

Gain fundamental knowledge of the key concepts of marketing and management, and relate these critically to contemporary practice. Examine fundamental marketing concepts such as strategic marketing, market segmentation and the marketing mix. You will also begin to explore these concepts through the lens of Digital Marketing.

You will discuss issues arising within marketing theory and practice, which bring into question some of the foundational principles of the discipline. Through lectures, readings, and the analysis of case studies, address the latest thinking within the marketing discipline.

Assessment Method:

Class test 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Introduction to Management

Code:

AP1SB1

Convenor:

PROF Julian Park

Summary:

This module provides a contemporary and comprehensive introduction to management science and its relevance to businesses. Interactive in-class activities and the use of online apps will help you learn techniques for inspiring teamwork in an organisation context, discover the importance of strategic management design for achieving an organisation's goals, and understand the roles of the manager and the responsibilities this carries. You will also have a range of opportunities to gain hands-on practising decision making through case studies. Furthermore, develop your leadership skills to motivate and guide a team towards the achievement of an organisation’s objectives.  

Assessment Method:

Class test 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Early Empires: Mesopotamia, Egypt & Rome

Code:

AR1EMP

Convenor:

PROF Roger Matthews

Summary:

This module introduces the archaeology and historical context of the world’s early empires, dating from 2500 BC to AD 395. We focus on the great empires of ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria), Egypt, the Persian Achaemenid Empire and the Roman Empire. We will review other imperial entities of the world, including examples from China and the Far East, and the Americas. We will examine special themes relevant to the topic of empires, including ideology, imperial cult, trade, urbanisation, warfare, agriculture and the everyday lives of imperial subjects. You will study the rise and fall of some of the greatest, and the most fearsome, socio-political entities to have existed on our planet.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 70%, Practical 10%, Report 20%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Early Empires: Mesopotamia, Egypt & Rome [10 credits]

Code:

AR1EMP10

Convenor:

PROF Roger Matthews

Summary:

This module introduces the archaeology and historical context of the world’s early empires, dating from 2500 BC to AD 395. We focus on the great empires of ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria), Egypt, the Persian Achaemenid Empire and the Roman Empire. We will review other imperial entities of the world, including examples from China and the Far East, and the Americas. We will examine special themes relevant to the topic of empires, including ideology, imperial cult, trade, urbanisation, warfare, agriculture and the everyday lives of imperial subjects. You will study the rise and fall of some of the greatest, and the most fearsome, socio-political entities to have existed on our planet.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Forensic Anthropology and the Archaeology of Death

Code:

AR1FOR

Convenor:

DR Gundula Müldner

Summary:

This module investigates the archaeological methods employed in the scientific study of the dead, both from modern crime scenes and within older archaeological contexts. You will have the opportunity to analyse skeletal remains, and carry out fieldwork in the form of a cemetery survey, learning how to analyse and interpret these results. Through a series of case studies, you will explore the role of forensic archaeologists and anthropologists (working within the context of the ethics, law and politics) behind the examination of human remains.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 50%, Report 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Forensic Anthropology and the Archaeology of Death [10 credit]

Code:

AR1FOR10

Convenor:

DR Gundula Müldner

Summary:

This module investigates the archaeological methods employed in the scientific study of the dead, both from modern crime scenes and within older archaeological contexts. Through a series of case studies, you will explore the role of forensic archaeologists and anthropologists (working within the context of the ethics, law and politics) behind the examination of human remains.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Revolutions and Transitions: The Human Journey from 6 Million Years Ago to the Present Day

Code:

AR1RAT

Convenor:

PROF Steve Mithen

Summary:

This module investigates the development of human society from a long-term and global perspective. It traces the human journey from our earliest ancestors of c. 6 million years ago to the present day. The module considers the key revolutions and transitions that have affected human thought, behaviour and society, focussing on the evidence from material culture. Key themes include human evolution, the development of complex societies, the inventions of metallurgy and writing, the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and globalisation. The module is taught by a combination of online lectures, face-to-face seminars and lectures, and practical classes.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Revolutions and Transitions: The Human Journey from 6 Million Years Ago to the Present Day

Code:

AR1RAT1

Convenor:

PROF Steve Mithen

Summary:

This module investigates the development of human society from a long-term and global perspective. It traces the human journey from our earliest ancestors of c. 6 million years ago to the present day. The module considers the key revolutions and transitions that have affected human thought, behaviour and society, focussing on the evidence from material culture. Key themes include: human evolution, the development of complex societies, the inventions of metallurgy and writing, the industrial and agricultural revolutions, and globalisation. The module is taught by a combination of online lectures and face-to-face seminars and lectures.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Contemporary world cultures: an introduction to social anthropology

Code:

AR1SOC

Convenor:

DR Alanna Cant

Summary:

This module provides a general introduction to social anthropology, the study of human societies and cultures. It will introduce you to major themes in the discipline of anthropology through focused study on topics that may include: kinship and marriage, gender and sexuality, the roles of religion, ritual and witchcraft in modern life, the concepts of ethnicity and race, and contemporary hunting and gathering societies. The module will also consider how anthropology can help us understand key issues in today’s world, such as ethnicity, race and decolonisation, and the role that work and consumption play in forming identities. Teaching is focused on real-world case studies from different cultures and regions around the globe, including the research expertise of the lecturer(s). 

Assessment Method:

Assignment 70%, Set exercise 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Contemporary world cultures: an introduction to social anthropology [10 credits]

Code:

AR1SOC10

Convenor:

DR Alanna Cant

Summary:

This module provides a general introduction to social anthropology, the study of human societies and cultures. It will introduce you to major themes in the discipline of anthropology through focused study on topics that may include: kinship and marriage, gender and sexuality, the roles of religion, ritual and witchcraft in modern life, the concepts of ethnicity and race, and contemporary hunting and gathering societies. The module will also consider how anthropology can help us understand key issues in today’s world, such as ethnicity, race and decolonisation, and the role that work and consumption play in forming identities. Teaching is focused on real-world case studies from different cultures and regions around the globe, including the research expertise of the lecturer(s). 

Assessment Method:

Set exercise 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Ancient Song

Code:

CL1SO

Convenor:

PROF Ian Rutherford

Summary:

This module introduces students to the lyric poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, studying authors from both civilisations and considering a range of thematic approaches to the surviving corpus of poetry. It is intended to be suitable for beginners and for those who have studied some ancient literature before; there is no language requirement, but there will be an opportunity for students who do have relevant skills to employ them in their coursework and exams.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Texts, Readers, and Writers

Code:

CL1TR

Convenor:

PROF Eleanor Dickey

Summary:

This module explores the history of texts, reading, and writing in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. We shall look at literature, papyri, inscriptions, letters, Linear B, etc. Attention will also be given to the invention of the alphabet and to ancient writing materials and technologies. No knowledge of Latin, ancient Greek, or the ancient world more generally is required.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 40%, Oral 50%, Set exercise 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Drawing Skills

Code:

FA1DSS

Convenor:

MISS Beverley Bennett

Summary:

In this module you will develop your drawing skills in a series of focused practical sessions, drawing from various subjects, including life drawing, still life, spatial and architectural/landscape contexts. Through the module you will develop your skill-set in terms of foundational techniques such as line, tone, scale; you will also develop applied drawing skills including planning, scaling and gridding up; and develop an understanding of the relationship of the whole subject to detail and internal form. Practical teaching will support a focus on drawing as a way to record, document and communicate observations, as well as a way to explore, realise and communicate ideas and imagination. 

Assessment Method:

Project 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Modernisms & Mythologies

Code:

FA1MM

Convenor:

MS Kelly Lloyd

Summary:

This module will provide a broad, introductory survey of key developments in the history, theory and criticism of art during the modern period. Its starting point will be theories of the development of modernity and its social, political and economic components, and the ways in which modern art functions in and on its historical contexts. It will continue to look at the retrospective modernist critical and theoretical accounts of modern art's development.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Approaches to Film

Code:

FT1ATF

Convenor:

DR Adam O'Brien

Summary:

How do films tell stories, make meanings, and contribute to our culture? What questions can, and should, we ask of a film?

This module includes a mix of cinema screenings, seminars and lectures, exploring a range of fiction and non-fiction films. Class discussions and assignments will challenge you to explore the meanings and cultural significance of moving images, across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Analysing Theatre and Performance

Code:

FT1ATP

Convenor:

DR Matt McFrederick

Summary:

How do theatrical stories allow us to examine and reimagine our impression of the world today?  What practical qualities do theatre makers return to - or reinvent - in creating meaning in performance?

In this introduction to theatre and performance, you will share your interpretations and expand the ways you see and think about theatre in relation to the world today. You will learn how to be a confident spectator and reader of theatre through a range of diverse and topical performances in local or in London-based venues - previous trips have included the National Theatre, RSC Live, Peking Opera, the West End and smaller, innovative fringe venues.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 70%, Oral 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Approaches to Television

Code:

FT1ATT

Convenor:

DR Faye Woods

Summary:

In an era of intensified competition for audiences and technological innovation, the box in the corner has expanded to include a vast universe of televisual content that can be slipped into your pocket. In this module you will learn the tools to both analyse this wealth of programming and the industry that produces it. Considering contemporary developments alongside the extensive history of the form, it examines continuities rather than disruption. Centred on close analysis and critical reading, you will explore a range of exciting viewpoints and frameworks through which to approach television.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 60%, Set exercise 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Comedy on Stage and Screen

Code:

FT1CSS

Convenor:

DR Tonia Kazakopoulou

Summary:

This module gives you the opportunity to study comedy on stage and screen, encompassing film, television, theatre and stand-up comedy. You will engage with the relevant critical vocabulary and contextual knowledge to explore how humour is created, consumed and debated, across a range of genres and practices. Case studies may include classic and contemporary film comedies (e.g. screwball comedy, black comedy); musical comedies (e.g. The Book of Mormon); stand-up comedy (e.g. Ali Wong, Hannah Gadsby); sitcoms (e.g. Friends); or the work of specific creative practitioners (e.g. Joe Orton).

Assessment Method:

Assignment 60%, Set exercise 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Radical Forms in Theatre and Performance

Code:

FT1RFT

Convenor:

DR Lucy Tyler

Summary:

Since the late nineteenth century, in an era ravaged by war and enormous political upheaval, theatre and performance makers have engaged in innovative and often radical experimentation with the aim of challenging the status quo and rehearsing alternative futures. This module introduces you to practitioners whose interrogation of the possibilities of performance have influenced many artists working today. You will investigate an exciting range of historical and contemporary texts and performance practices, and through a dynamic mix of lectures, seminar discussions and practical workshops, explore the key themes and preoccupations that have marked radical and experimental performance since the late nineteenth century. 

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Wildlife Documentary: Ecology and Representation

Code:

FT1WD

Convenor:

DR Adam O'Brien

Summary:

This module gives you the opportunity to study wildlife documentaries, and filmmaking addressing ecological issues. You will engage with the relevant critical vocabulary and contextual knowledge to explore how meanings on screen are made. Case studies may include David Attenborough’s landmark BBC series, nature documentaries such as March of the Penguins, and climate change films such as An Inconvenient Truth. There may be a Q&A with a guest speaker from the creative industries. 

Assessment Method:

Assignment 60%, Oral 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Intercultural Competence and Communication

Code:

IL1GICC

Convenor:

MRS Daniela Standen

Summary:

In this module students develop the skills and understanding needed for communicating effectively in a multi-cultural global environment, including the university and the workplace.  Intercultural competence and communication will be considered from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including Language Education, Film, and Curriculum. During the course of the module you will tackle questions such as: How do you work successfully in multicultural Teams? Are nationality and identity the same thing? Why do stereotypes exist?

Students will demonstrate their learning through reflections and by defining and explaining a real-world situation. The module will be delivered at the University of Reading Whiteknights campus.

Assessment Method:

Oral 10%, Portfolio 30%, Project 60%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Modern Britain: Society, History and Politics

Code:

IL1GMB

Convenor:

DR Lucy Watson

Summary:

This module aims to provide an introduction to key aspects of modern British society, politics and history, identifying past and present issues.

Topics explored include the historical and political landscape of Post war Britain, British identities, patterns of inequality, education, religion, and Britain’s relationship with Europe.

In the Summer term students will work independently to explore a specific from the range taught in Term 1, to develop knowledge of the underlying concepts and principles and demonstrate an ability to evaluate and interpret these.

Assessment Method:

Oral 40%, Project 60%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

English Language and Society

Code:

LS1ELS

Convenor:

DR Christiana Themistocleous

Summary:

The course aims to provide a broad introduction to English Language and Society, and a basis for further in-depth study of the field in parts two and three of the degree in English Language and Linguistics.

Assessment Method:

Exam 60%, Assignment 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Globalization and Language

Code:

LS1GL

Convenor:

DR Tony Capstick

Summary:

In this module students will explore the role of language in globalization. They will examine the reasons for the spread of languages around the globe historically and in the future (especially in the context of political developments such as Brexit, and the increasing importance of World languages such as English). They will also explore debates about linguistic imperialism and the political dimensions of language use and language policies. Finally, they will explore the effects of technology and migration on the linguistic situation in Latin America, New Zealand and the Middle East, including how urban centers are becoming increasingly multilingual and ‘superdiverse’, and the political and social consequences of this. Teaching is drawn from across the School of Literature and Language.

Assessment Method:

Set exercise 10%, Project 90%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Presenting the Past

Code:

MC1PP

Convenor:

DR Rhi Smith

Summary:

Museum display environments create representations of the past through a complex process of design, curatorship, and interpretation. This module uses museological theory and practice to interrogate the way that heritage organisations present the past to the public.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Greats of European Cinema

Code:

ML1GEC

Convenor:

DR Marta Simo-Comas

Summary:

The aim of this module is to provide students with an understanding of the ways in which European Cinema – and the various national cinemas that comprise it – reflects the changing political, social and cultural climate of the twentieth century. The course is designed to introduce students to key features of film analysis and to develop their ability to apply these to the films studied.

Assessment Method:

Exam 55%, Set exercise 45%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Student Enterprise

Code:

MM1F10

Convenor:

MS Linghe Lei

Summary:

This is a dynamic module introducing students to key concepts of business start-up. Students work in a team to identify and develop a new business opportunity, and then seek to test their idea through ‘lean start-up’ experiments. Students will be introduced to key concepts of entrepreneurial management including design thinking, business model creation, entrepreneurial finance and marketing. This is a highly interactive and practical module, with a focus on experiential learning.

Assessment Method:

Project 60%, Class test 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

The Science of Climate Change

Code:

MT1CC

Convenor:

PROF Nigel Arnell

Summary:

This module provides an introduction to the science of climate change, aimed at students who do not necessarily have a scientific background.

Assessment Method:

Exam 70%, Assignment 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

British Society

Code:

PO1BRI

Convenor:

DR Dawn Clarke

Summary:

The module draws on theories and approaches from Politics, Sociology, Psychology, History and Philosophy to consider some of the main contours of contemporary British Society. The module will explore a number of images of Britain including: Britain as a Welfare State, Multicultural Britain and Britain as a Class Society. It will also explore crime and deviance in Britain, the role of the mass media and the increasing power of the food industry. 

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Inequality

Code:

PO1INE

Convenor:

DR Jonathan Golub

Summary:

Inequality is everywhere around us: different individuals earn different salaries, people of different genders and backgrounds have access to different economic opportunities, and those at the top of the income distribution have radically distinct life chances than those at the bottom. What explains rising inequality, is it fair and what are the consequences? Should anything be done to reduce inequality, and if so, what? This course aims to answer these questions by providing students with the analytical tools and knowledge to understand and explain the evolution of earnings, racial and gender inequality over time and its variation across developed countries. It also considers the economic, normative and political implications of different forms of inequality, in particular gender and racial inequality. Is inequality at the top of the income distribution (i.e. the 1% v. the rest of us) the inevitable outcome of a well-functioning market system or does it suggest problems in the way democracy works? Does inequality undermine democracy for instance by affecting political participation or increasing the appeal of non-liberal populist parties? Take the course and you will find out more about these fascinating questions and more!

Assessment Method:

Assignment 40%, Oral 10%, Project 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Introduction to Political Ideas

Code:

PO1IPI

Convenor:

DR Andrew Reid

Summary:

An introduction to political theory, covering central topics like the state and its authority, democracy, rights and liberty, equality and social justice, and war and intervention, as well as some of the basic methods for understanding them all. 

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Global Justice

Code:

PP1GJ

Convenor:

MISS Michela Bariselli

Summary:

Global traditions of philosophy  from the Buddha and Confucius to Simone Weil, Frantz Fanon, Martin Luther King Jr., and African and Native American thinkers advocate ideas of justice and freedom that extend far beyond contemporary conceptions. This course shows how these thinkers question our  ideas of justice, and  transform how we approach injustice and freedom in the  context of race and colonialism, nature and  indigenous communities, identity  and sexuality, family and polity, through radically different conceptions of freedom and violence,  love, equality and harmony.

Some of the claims we will examine include: Justice is freedom from suffering!  Revolutionary violence is cathartic and emancipatory! Political justice  requires mental training! Nature is alive and has rights! Gender and sexual freedom are gained by  dissolving bodily boundaries!  Truth lies in pleasure! Justice is  love! Social justice comes with harmonising differences! 

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Class test 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

The Meaning of Life

Code:

PP1ML

Convenor:

DR Luke Elson

Summary:

What is the meaning of life? This is perhaps the most important philosophical question we can ask. What is the answer? Indeed, what is the question really asking? In this module, we seek the answers. Along the way, we will consider a series of fascinating questions which promise to enlighten our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. What makes life worth living? Is there any reason to fear death? Could life in artificial reality be better or more fulfilling than life in the real world?

Reading:

A list of required readings will be posted online. All or nearly all core readings are available electronically.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Class test 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Reason and Argument

Code:

PP1RA

Convenor:

DR George Mason

Summary:

This module enhances students’ ability to understand and construct complex arguments through the study of logic and the psychology of human reasoning. Reading: A module guide will be available. Recommended: Jamie Carlin Watson and Robert Arp, Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Reasoning Well, 2nd edition, Bloomsbury, 2015.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Class test 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Radical Philosophy

Code:

PP1RP

Convenor:

PROF Maximilian De Gaynesford

Summary:

From Plato and Marx to contemporaries like Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and Catharine MacKinnon, there is a long tradition of radicalism in philosophy. This course is about how radical philosophy can usefully question our deepest assumptions and challenge our deepest beliefs. Poets should be outlawed from our society! We can secure knowledge by doubting everything! Capitalism will be destroyed by the very forces it creates! Gender is a social performance! Pornography silences women! Torture is permissible in extreme circumstances, e.g. post 9/11! These are some of the claims this course investigates philosophically.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Class test 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Introduction to Psychology

Code:

PY1IPY

Convenor:

DR Katie Barfoot

Summary:

This module is delivered at the University of Reading, for students who are interested in but not studying Psychology.  

Assessment Method:

Exam 60%, Report 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Printing and printmaking

Code:

TY1PRI

Convenor:

DR Rob Banham

Summary:

The invention of printing, and the resulting spread of knowledge, played a crucial part in the development of modern society. This module will provide students with a broad overview of advances in printing and printmaking over the past 500 years. We will study how technological advances and the changing needs of readers affected the production, distribution, and reception of printed documents of all kinds. Students will also gain practical experience of printing, including letterpress, copper-engraving, and stone lithography, and will have opportunities to handle books, prints, and artefacts produced by some of the great printers and printmakers of the past.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 50%, Set exercise 10%, Portfolio 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

What the font? Making and using typefaces

Code:

TY1WTF

Convenor:

DR Rob Banham

Summary:

You are surrounded by fonts. Social media, text messages, email, branding, advertising, websites, books, magazines … Human (and machine) communication relies extensively on fonts, but what do you really know about them? How and why are new fonts created? And is it ever OK to use comic sans?! This module will introduce you to the world of typeface design, exploring the history, theory, and practice of making and using fonts and giving you the opportunity to design a typeface of your own. No background in design is required.

Assessment Method:

Set exercise 50%, Project 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

The Business of Books

Code:

EN2BB

Convenor:

DR Nicola Wilson

Summary:

This module will enhance students’ knowledge and understanding of the book as a technology and provide the critical skills with which to consider the history and future of the book as a form. Through a combination of theoretical, methodological and hands-on teaching sessions and workshops, we will study the role and function of books in a select number of different places, historical periods, and institutional contexts, including for instance in the library, in the book shop, the publishing house, and in the board room.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 70%, Oral 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Contemporary Fiction

Code:

EN2CF

Convenor:

DR Madeleine Davies

Summary:

This module will provide the opportunity to study a selection of fiction in English from the 1980s to the present day. It will highlight the formal, thematic and cultural diversity of Anglophone fiction produced in this period. Students will encounter a range of authors, including but not limited to African-American, Irish-American, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Japanese, Canadian-Trinidadian, black British and Nigerian – though the use of such identity categories will be subject to critical scrutiny.Texts will be studied in and against a number of social, political and historical contexts, including multiculturalism, feminism and globalisation. The module will also engage with many of the key critical/theoretical paradigms of the past four decades, such as post-colonialism, post-modernism, transnationalism and intersectionality.

Assessment Method:

Exam 67%, Assignment 33%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Chaucer and Medieval Narrative

Code:

EN2CMN

Convenor:

DR Mary Morrissey

Summary:

Sometimes called the 'father of English literature', Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) is one of the great innovators in English literary history. In this module we will explore his most famous work, The Canterbury Tales. This is a story collection of enormous variety, featuring everything from vulgar comedies to moral fables and from biting satires to narratives of tragic love. Each week we will explore a different text from The Canterbury Tales and delve into some of Chaucer's key themes, such as love, religion, gender, class, chivalry and magic. The module will also introduce some of the major literary and intellectual influences upon Chaucer's work and set his narratives alongside comparable texts from the period.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Critical Issues

Code:

EN2CRI

Convenor:

DR Stephen Thomson

Summary:

Building on ideas and issues already broached in EN1RC Research & Criticism, this module offers the opportunity to explore critical theory in greater depth. The study of a variety of theoretical texts dealing with topics such as language, ideology, power, gender, and race, will offer not only ‘tools’ for dealing with these issues but also a space in which to reflect on, and gain a deeper understanding of, the ways in which these issues have commonly been thought. This is a challenging module, demanding patient engagement with arguments that may not immediately fit into our common-sense ways of thinking and that may, indeed, require us to question some of the grounding assumptions on which our everyday thinkings rests. But it is also a deeply rewarding module, and highly recommended for anyone considering a dissertation touching on any of the topics mentioned above.

Assessment Method:

Portfolio 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Creative Writing: Creative Nonfiction

Code:

EN2CWN

Convenor:

MS Shelley Harris

Summary:

Creative non-fiction is a wide, exciting, and ever-evolving contemporary genre. It includes memoirs, essays, blog posts, long-form journalism, biography and auto-fiction, and the increasing number of books and articles which fall between these genres. This module will explore this genre, and help you to write your own pieces or pieces of creative non-fiction. Learning takes place in seminar groups, where analytical reading and practical writing interconnect, and in smaller peer groups, where students support each other’s editing with constructive feedback.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Creative Writing: Poetry

Code:

EN2CWP

Convenor:

PROF Peter Robinson

Summary:

Creative writing is always an interplay between the act of reading and that of writing, each informing the other. In this module, we will critically engage with a range of poems, consider some of the key debates about the form, and write our own poetry in response, experimenting with the possibilities of the genre. Learning takes place in seminar groups, where analytical reading and practical writing interconnect, and in smaller peer groups, where students support each other’s editing with constructive feedback.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 30%, Portfolio 70%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Creative Writing: The Short Story

Code:

EN2CWS

Convenor:

MS Shelley Harris

Summary:

Writers are readers too, and all authors are engaged in a creative cycle: reading literature, writing it, and taking that experience back into their reading. This module invites student writers to explore that process, critically engaging with a range of short stories, encountering some of the key debates about the form, and writing their own short fiction in response. Learning takes place in seminar groups, where analytical reading and practical writing interconnect, and in smaller peer groups, where students support each other’s editing with constructive feedback. This module is delivered at the University of Reading.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 30%, Portfolio 70%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Modernism in Poetry and Fiction

Code:

EN2MOD

Convenor:

DR Mark Nixon

Summary:

This module examines the concepts of modernity and modernism, and relates them to the history of early twentieth-century poetry and fiction. Experimentation and innovation in poetic and narrative form are explored as responses to wider social upheaval and cultural movements.

Assessment Method:

Exam 67%, Assignment 33%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Introduction to Old English Literature

Code:

EN2OEL

Convenor:

DR Mary Morrissey

Summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl0T_Gz-KWI&t=8s

This module introduces students to the period of English literature that is often the most unfamiliar: the Old English or Anglo-Saxon period (c.7th-11th century). Old English literature is richly rewarding, not just because it has been an important influence on many twentieth-century writers (most famousl, J.R.R. Tolkien), but because its literary techniques and themes (female heroes, battles with Vikings, dragons, voyages of exile) are different to much later English literature. This module allows students to explore the literature of a time when England was part of the culture of the North.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

The Romantic Period

Code:

EN2RP

Convenor:

DR Matthew Scott

Summary:

The module will provide a broad introduction to the varied literary culture of the Romantic period in Britain by examining a diverse group of texts written between 1750 and 1850.

Assessment Method:

Exam 67%, Assignment 33%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Renaissance Texts and Cultures

Code:

EN2RTC

Convenor:

DR Alanna Skuse

Summary:

Renaissance Texts and Cultures is a module in which students explore the ways that English literature was shaped by, and helped to re-shape, English culture in the years between the Reformation and the Civil Wars. It provides students with a training in historicist literary criticism, that is, the critical approach that stresses the interconnectedness between literary texts and the cultural and political processes current at the time when the texts were first written and made public.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Shakespeare

Code:

EN2SH

Convenor:

PROF Lucinda Becker

Summary:

The module is organised chronologically in order to focus attention on Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist. Close study of plays, including Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Macbeth and The Tempest, will encourage students to explore aspects of tradition and innovation in Shakespeare’s use of theatrical modes. The module will allow students to integrate a knowledge of the intellectual, cultural and stage history of the period into their study of the texts.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Victorian Literature

Code:

EN2VIC

Convenor:

DR Lucy Bending

Summary:

The Victorian era is one of great diversity and tension. It is a period when authors began to think about man's place in a world without God; about the workings of the mind; and the role of class and gender in the construction of identity. This module will engage with these, nd other ideas, looking at some of the greatest works of Victorian literature. The module will include novels (Charlotte Bronte's Villette, and Hardy's Return of the Native), poetry (Tennyson's In Memoriam, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese) journalism (Thackeray's 'Going to See a Man Hanged'), short stories (Daughters of Decadence edited by Elaine Showalter) and plays (Wilde's A Woman of No Importance).  The module offers a broad and exciting sweep of different modes of writing, drawing on some well-known and canonical texts, and some texts that are less frequently studied in an attempt to understand what mattered to the Victorians.

Assessment Method:

Exam 67%, Assignment 33%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Writing America

Code:

EN2WA

Convenor:

DR Sue Walsh

Summary:

The module is concerned with literary constructions of American identity in American literature, focusing on some of the ways in which imaginative writers have perceived and defined the New World in relation to the Old and helped to shape or contest the nation's sense of cultural distinctiveness. The module will examine both the diversity of American voices and the emergence of common preoccupations, including myths of the frontier, Manifest Destiny, personal and political liberty, and the the construction of race, gender and sexuality.

Assessment Method:

Exam 67%, Assignment 33%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Writing, Gender, Identity

Code:

EN2WGI

Convenor:

DR Stephen Thomson

Summary:

This module introduces students to a range of texts and critical approaches which address the relationship between writing and identity. Set texts cover a broad chronological sweep and include letters, novels, short stories and autobiographical works. We explore questions around the constructions of gender, sexuality, race and class in the set texts and more broadly. We discuss and debate assumptions embedded in the texts and our own assumptions as readers of these texts. We explore the power dynamics at play in a text and consider the implications. Lectures provide a contextual framing for the set texts and begin to open out critical questions around writing and identity; seminars are focussed on detailed analysis of the set texts and the recommended secondary reading.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Writing in the Public Sphere

Code:

EN2WPS

Convenor:

DR Mary Morrissey

Summary:

On this module, we study the literature written in order to prompt social and political change. We examine speeches, pamphlets, tracts, and political posters from the early modern period to the present, and we consider how they continue to shape debates about class, race, religion, nationality, and women’s rights across the four nations of Britain and Ireland. We study ideas of a ‘public sphere’ in which political and cultural debate are conducted, and we analyse the techniques used in political literature. We use our study of these texts to identify the rhetorical strategies necessary for successful political campaigning today.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Forensic Archaeology and Crime Scene Analysis

Code:

AR2F17

Convenor:

PROF Mary Lewis

Summary:

Through lectures and practical seminars, targeted reading and online resources students will be able to understand and engage with the theory behind a range  of forensic and archaeological practices, when and why they are used, and the  process by which these are undertaken.

Assessment Method:

Report 70%, Class test 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Ancient Epic

Code:

CL2AE

Convenor:

DR Christa Gray

Summary:

This module offers an introduction to Greek and Latin epic, centring around close study of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, but including discussion of other early Greek hexameter poems such as Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and the Epic Cycle. It may also cover Hellenistic epic, for example Apollonius Rhodius, or other Roman epics like Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Greek History: Persian Wars to Alexander

Code:

CL2CGH

Convenor:

PROF Timothy Duff

Summary:

Greek History 479-323 BC, from the end of the Persian Wars, through the Peloponnesian War and the fall of Sparta, to the rise of Macedon and the meteoric career of Alexander the Great.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Ancient Drama

Code:

CL2DR

Convenor:

PROF David Carter

Summary:

This module examines the ancient genre of drama, with respect to its content, themes and style, and the context of performance culture which surrounded it.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Roman History: From Republic to Empire

Code:

CL2RO

Convenor:

DR Andreas Gavrielatos

Summary:

This Roman history module covers the period from the second triumvirate in the last years of the Republic to the reigns of the emperors.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Development of transferable skills through a school placement 2

Code:

ED2TS2

Convenor:

DR Caroline Foulkes

Summary:

This module enables undergraduate students to develop key transferable skills needed for employment, and also provides outreach experience. Following specialist training on key aspects of working in schools, ten day placements in June/July in secondary schools in the Reading area will provide work experience in a professional setting.

In the autumn, students will build on the knowledge and transferable skills acquired in order to plan and deliver, with colleagues, a teaching session that shares knowledge of their degree specialism with small groups of school students. Students will reflect on, and share, their experiences with their colleagues. Assessment will be by coursework, and placement supervisor report on professionalism and engagement.

Students will be selected by application and interview.

Please be aware that once the placement has been completed in June it is not possible to switch from this module in the Autumn Term as students have completed practical activities directly relating to 50% of the mark (Professionalism and portfolio) and that link to activities in the Autumn Term.

Assessment Method:

Practical 10%, Oral 50%, Portfolio 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Wildlife Documentary: Ecology and Representation

Code:

FT2WD

Convenor:

DR Adam O'Brien

Summary:

This module gives you the opportunity to study wildlife documentaries and filmmaking addressing ecological issues. You will engage with the relevant critical vocabulary and contextual knowledge to explore how meaning is created and constructed. Case studies may include David Attenborough’s landmark BBC series, nature documentaries such as March of the Penguins and climate change films such as An Inconvenient Truth. There may be a Q&A with a guest speaker from the creative industries.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 60%, Oral 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Corporate Social Responsibility Consultancy

Code:

GV2CSR

Convenor:

MR Jim Ormond

Summary:

This module introduces students to critical analyses of corporate social responsibility and environmental governance. The module encourages students to play the role of sustainability consultants, drawing on the module convenor’s extensive experience in this area. As such, students will gain employability and professional development skills alongside the more intellectual content of the module.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Intercultural Competence and Communication

Code:

IL2GICC

Convenor:

MRS Daniela Standen

Summary:

In this module students develop the skills and understanding needed for communicating effectively in a multi-cultural global environment including the university and the workplace.  Intercultural competence and communication will be considered from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including Language Eucation, Film, and Curriculum.  During the course of the module you will tackle questions such as: How do you work successfully in multicultural Teams? Are nationality and identity the same thing? Why do stereotypes exist?

Students will demonstrate their learning, through reflections and critical evaluation of a real-world situation.

The module will be delivered at the University of Reading Whiteknights campus

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Modern Britain: Society, History and Politics

Code:

IL2GMB

Convenor:

DR Lucy Watson

Summary:

This module aims to provide an introduction to key aspects of modern British society, politics and history, identifying past and present issues.

Topics explored include the historical and political landscape of Post war Britain, British identities, patterns of inequality, education, religion, and Britain’s relationship with Europe.

In the Summer term students will work independently to identify and research a specific topic from the range taught in Term 1, to develop critical understanding of the underlying concepts and principles and apply these to different contexts.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Introduction to English Language Teaching

Code:

LS2LAT

Convenor:

DR Erhan Aslan

Summary:

The course aims to provide an overview of key aspects of language teaching methodology and practice. 

Assessment Method:

Portfolio 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Language and New Media

Code:

LS2LNM

Convenor:

PROF Rodney Jones

Summary:

In this module, students will explore the ways digital media are changing the way people use language. Students will be introduced to a range of theories from sociolinguistics, media studies and discourse analysis and will learn to apply these theories to analysing authentic texts and interactions. Among the topics covered in the module are genres and registers of mediated communication, social networking and online identity, multimodal and multimedia communication, mobile communication and wearable computers, and online tracking and surveillance.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 25%, Oral 25%, Portfolio 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Science, perversion, and dream in global fantastic literature

Code:

ML2GF

Convenor:

DR Alice Christensen

Summary:

This module will explore a number of key literary texts that engage the Fantastic mode of literary representation. The module aims to promote critical awareness of the ways in which French, Hispanic, Italian and German literary traditions adapted and transformed the Fantastic narrative so that it spoke to a number of specific issues such as the advances in science and technology, the changing roles of women, the pressures of modernisation, the impact of psychoanalysis, and fears related to changes brought about by colonisation, the political structure of the Nation-state, and the economy. Texts will be read in the original language if the student is taking that language to degree level, and in English translation if not.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Society, Thought, and Art in Modern Europe

Code:

ML2STA

Convenor:

DR Veronica Heath

Summary:

This module aims to provide students with a systematic historical and cross-national understanding of the key ideas, institutions and symbols that have come to constitute and represent modernity, in its original cradle in Europe and the rest of the world. The module examines the birth of modern men and women in Europe in the late eighteenth century, in the fulcrum of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and the broad intellectual, cultural, economic, political and social conditions which have been shaping and re-shaping them since. The module further shows a) the contributions of different European nations to a common European reaction to and re-evaluation of tradition and innovation and b) the diffusion of modernity (Westernisation) from Europe to Asia and Africa and its role in the creation of a global world. Finally, it shows how art has played a leading role in the transformations of modernity - not only recording it but also constituting one of its central components.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 80%, Class test 20%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Founder Dilemmas

Code:

MM2101

Convenor:

PROF Norbert Morawetz

Summary:

This is a dynamic and experiential module aiming to give students a strong understanding of key dilemmas likely to be faced by first time entrepreneurs. The module develops student's entrepreneurial skill and confidence to put plans into action. Students gain understanding of the practice of entrepreneurship as informed by theory, role play and guest lectures. This will include exposure to the experience of successful entrepreneurs. Students are given a solid understanding of the realities of business start-up.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

The Science of Climate Change

Code:

MT2CC

Convenor:

PROF Nigel Arnell

Summary:

This module provides an introduction to the science of climate change, aimed at students who do not necessarily have a scientific background.

Assessment Method:

Exam 70%, Assignment 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

American Government and Politics

Code:

PO2AMG

Convenor:

DR Graham O'Dwyer

Summary:

This module examines the historical, ideological and constitutional frameworks of American Government and Politics. It analyses the relationship between ideas and values (such as liberty and individualism) and the ways in which these condition the expression of the American political system; it looks at intermediate institutions that connect the public to the federal government (such as elections, the media, and interest groups); it explores the central institutions in Washington (such as the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court), and assesses important policy areas (such as gun control).

Assessment Method:

Assignment 70%, Report 30%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Modern International Relations

Code:

PO2MIR

Convenor:

DR Joseph O' Mahoney

Summary:

This module provides an advanced analysis of some theoretical approaches to international politics, including models of interstate bargaining, international order, and collective action.  Students will also learn about some of the most important  global issues, including the causes of war, globalisation, US hegemony, international cooperation to combat climate chaos, nuclear weapons, cyberwar, and terrorism. 

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 45%, Set exercise 5%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Political Thinking

Code:

PO2THI

Convenor:

DR Alice Baderin

Summary:

Module in applied political theory. The course investigates the ethical issues that lie behind some important contemporary policy debates. 

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Ethical Argument 1: Philosophy and How to Live

Code:

PP2EA1

Convenor:

DR Luke Elson

Summary:

This module introduces students to longstanding methods, issues and arguments in moral philosophy.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Oral 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Global Philosophy 1

Code:

PP2GP1

Convenor:

MISS Michela Bariselli

Summary:

This module introduces some key thinkers and issues in global philosophy, the philosophy of gender and race, the ethics of resistance and the epistemology of terrorism. Some of the claims we will examine include: Gender is an illusion, male and female ‘sex’ attributes are social constructions!  Race categories are racist, they should be abolished! Persons are ‘processes’; self and identity are conceptual fictions!  Self-immolation is an ethical form of political protest! Gandhi and Islamist suicide bombing share an ethics of sacrificial dying! Debt is founded on violence! We should undertake dying with full awareness, by meditative fasting!

We will engage in philosophical conversations with (i) contemporary feminist and race theorists such as Judith Butler, Sally Haslanger and Naomi Zack on performativist,  constructionist and essentialist approaches to gender and race; (ii) Buddhist philosophers on the metaphysics of self and identity; (iii) Buddhist, Gandhian and Islamic ethics of sacrificial dying and political resistance; (iv) interdisciplinary perspectives on the nature and origins of debt and money; (v) Jaina conceptions of meditative dying, suicide and euthanasia; (vi) the epistemology of terrorism and Islamic approaches to non-violence.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Oral 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein 1

Code:

PP2HKW1

Convenor:

DR Sev.J. Schroeder

Summary:

This module introduces students to the ideas of three great philosophers: David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, focussing especially on their respective conceptions of philosophy.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Oral 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Ignorance, Doubt, and Relativism 1

Code:

PP2IDR1

Convenor:

DR Walter Veit

Summary:

This module introduces students to a core area of philosophy – epistemology (the theory of knowledge), makes them familiar with key stances on the extent and nature of human knowledge (modal theories, reliabilist theories, virtue theories etc.), and requires them to evaluate such stances and find their place on the epistemological map. They will also be introduced to the social aspect of epistemology, by considering what role knowledge plays within a society, how we gain knowledge from others, and how we may be harmed specifically as knowers.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Oral 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Meaning and the Mind 1

Code:

PP2MM1

Convenor:

DR Jumbly Grindrod

Summary:

This module introduces students to core philosophical issues about meaning and the mind, and to central connections between these issues. How could there be minds in a physical world? Are states of consciousness physical states? How do our thoughts and words come to represent the world around us? These questions are intimately related. The capacity to represent the world is a central, problematic feature of the mind. Moreover, to assess what minds are, we must pay careful attention to what our words for mental states mean, and to how they come to mean what they do. We will investigate these questions by reading and discussing recent work in the philosophy of mind and language, by authors such as David Chalmers, Hilary Putnam and John Searle, as well as classic texts by authors such as Gottlob Frege and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Oral 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Oppression, Inequality, and the Enemies of Democracy 1

Code:

PP2OID1

Convenor:

DR George Mason

Summary:

In this wide-ranging module, with an emphasis on contemporary political philosophy, we will explore some of the most important concerns for society. We will ask questions such as: Do existing accounts of justice need to be amended to acknowledge, explicitly, the concerns arising from race, gender, and disability? How should political philosophy respond to intersecting oppressions? What aspects of modern life threaten democracy? What is the best method by which to develop theories of justice? Is justice a local or global concern? How should we balance loyalty to our own state with concerns for global justice?

Assessment Method:

Assignment 90%, Oral 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Dissertation

Code:

EN3DIS

Convenor:

DR Stephen Thomson

Summary:

The Dissertation is a substantial (8,000-word) work of literary-critical argument, based on sustained independent research under the guidance of a supervisor, and written and presented in a scholarly manner. Prior to completing the dissertation students who take this module submit a 2,000-word portfolio of supporting documents, including: a literary review or bibliographical exercise; a sample of dissertation-level work; and a reflective piece, discussing rationales and research questions for the project. The module offers students the opportunity to explore in depth topics of particular interest, and to develop skills accumulated during their first two years of study.

Assessment Method:

Dissertation 80%, Portfolio 20%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

American Graphic Novels

Code:

EN3AGN

Convenor:

PROF David Brauner

Summary:

Through detailed analysis of a range of graphic novels and related scholarship, students will develop their skills of close reading sequential art and their understanding of the particular discourses that characterise graphic novels and academic criticism of the medium. There will be a particular emphasis on graphic novels that interrogate and complicate the relationship between autobiography, biography and fiction and that explore constructions of gender and ethnicity in the context of broader historical and political developments in contemporary America. 

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Hitchcock

Code:

EN3AH

Convenor:

DR Neil Cocks

Summary:

Through studying of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, this module offers students the opportunity to engage critically with a new medium. Through a detailed analysis of a range of films, students will be introduced to a variety of critical frameworks, from structuralist accounts of film grammar, to recent interventions from Queer Theory and Psychoanalysis. They will be asked to adopt a reflexive approach towards such theory, thinking through the demands it makes upon their reading.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

British Black and Asian Voices: 1948 to the Present

Code:

EN3BAV

Convenor:

DR Cato Marks

Summary:

This module examines a range of British texts (poetry, drama, novels, short stories, films) by writers of black and Asian descent. Beginning with the 1950s and progressing to the present day, we discuss what might constitute the (black) British literary tradition. The module reads its set texts alongside theoretical and historical material examining issues of cultural capital, national identity and minority communities. Documentary footage, blogs, and contemporary reportage will also be examined in order to trace the pressures that the terms ‘black’ and ‘British’ have exerted on each other in a variety of historical, social, and cultural contexts.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Contemporary American Fiction

Code:

EN3CF

Convenor:

PROF David Brauner

Summary:

The module is concerned with American fiction published in the last two decades of the twentieth century and first two decades of the twenty-first, focusing on some of the ways in which contemporary American novelists deconstruct and reconstruct traditional ideas of what the novel can and should be and do. Exploring key terms such as realism, postmodernism, metafiction and irony, the module will examine both the diversity of contemporary American voices and the emergence of common preoccupations among these writers, alongside the different socio-historical contexts in which they work.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Children's Literature

Code:

EN3CL

Convenor:

PROF Karin Lesnik-Oberstein

Summary:

This module examines issues around children’s literature and children’s literature criticism and questions wide-spread popular assumptions about how to read and write about children’s literature. Students who do not wish actually to challenge and develop their own thinking, reading and writing about children and children’s books should not, therefore, take this module! Through in seminars closely analysing a range of children’s literature from the twentieth century and later, the module questions and analyses critical assumptions and formulations around authorship, memory, observation, readership, and identity. Some of the texts will be set by the module convenor whilst further texts may be chosen by the seminar group. 

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Decadence and Degeneration: Literature of the 1880s and 1890s

Code:

EN3DD

Convenor:

DR Lucy Bending

Summary:

This module engages with some of the most iconic texts in English literature, including Stoker’s Dracula, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. In it we will explore what is meant by these terms ‘decadence’ and ‘degeneration’, calling, amongst many other things, on portrayals of 1890s’ foppishness, Darwinian models of evolution, the emergent New Woman phenomenon, the Wilde trial, and the portrayal of prostitution. This module is very interested in contextual material as a way of understanding literary texts, and we will be looking at a wealth of magazine articles and medical and scientific texts as a way of recognizing the depth and complexity of literary works.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Literature and Healing

Code:

EN3LH

Convenor:

PROF Andrew Mangham

Summary:

This module explores the link between literature and healing through three major themes: writing illness, the medical memoir, and writing therapy. The first of themes considers how literature has provided a medium for describing, exploring, and coming to terms with illness. The second looks at texts written by health workers with a view to interrogating the way literature provides a platform for representing the realities of modern healing profession. The third and final theme will look closer at the idea of literature as therapy. We will consider how literature has played a role in the treatment of a range of complex health conditions, from depression and anxiety to memory-related and cognitive disorders like dementia. The module will include the option of undertaking a placement with a local health-care provider, working with professionals in producing, exploring, and sharing patient stories.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Literature and Mental Health

Code:

EN3LMH

Convenor:

DR John Scholar

Summary:

This module looks at how literature engaged with mental health in the first half of the twentieth century, a crucial turning point in psychology. Authors may include E.M. Forster, Wilfred Owen, May Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield. In the nineteenth century people were becoming increasingly aware of the challenges to mental health posed by city life across Europe. But such challenges were soon overwhelmed by the destruction of the First World War. In its wake two young disciplines, psychiatry and psychology, gained credibility and resources. These disciplines arguably helped to destigmatize mental illness, laying the foundations for how we approach mental health today. But so did the literature of this period which famously turned inwards to record as faithfully as possible the mind in all its complexity. We will look at literary engagement with trauma, anxiety, and obsession, among other things, but we will also look at how literature inspired readers, helping them to feel positive about their minds and bodies, and depicting seminal moments of psychic and sexual liberation.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Margaret Atwood

Code:

EN3MAT

Convenor:

DR Madeleine Davies

Summary:

Margaret Atwood is Canada's most influential contemporary writer. Atwood consistently engages with issues of power ('who can do what to whom and get away with it') and her work connects with a range of contemporary debates including ecological, feminist, and ideological discourses. On this module we discuss dystopia, speculative fiction, the uncanny, ideology, postmodernity and questions of language and narration, engaging with the texts via close analysis and critical/theoretical readings of the texts. The novel explores Atwood's novels (The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) but her poetry and critical essays are discussed as appropriate. Students will demonstrate their engagement with the module in a summative Portfolio assessment which will be submitted by or on the final day of the term in which the module is taught (see below for assessment details). There is no exam on this module.

Assessment Method:

Portfolio 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Medieval Otherworlds

Code:

EN3MO

Convenor:

DR Aisling Byrne

Summary:

Magic and the supernatural play an important role in medieval English literature. In this module we will explore literary accounts of a range of fantastical locations where the ‘other’ is encountered in a particularly dramatic fashion. We will discuss romances where questing knights arrive in uncanny fairy kingdoms or where King Arthur travels to Avalon. We will analyse travel accounts which populate the fringes of the world with marvels and strange beings. In some narratives, heroes test themselves in hellish landscapes or search for paradise on earth. In other texts, sleepers confront the surreal world of their own dreams. Although depictions of these places can be sensational or escapist, authors also use them to explore very serious themes such as desire, death, gender and political authority.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Creative Writing Masterclass: Prose

Code:

EN3MPS

Convenor:

MS Shelley Harris

Summary:

This module will deepen student writers’ understanding of narrative techniques and sharpen their prose. Using a range of short stories, narrative non-fiction and novel extracts as a springboard, students will advance their knowledge of issues such as structure, characterisation, dialogue and prose quality. At the same time, they will put theory into practice by writing, editing and submitting to competitions and publications.
Learning takes place in a weekly two-hour workshop and one hour peer group, where students support each other’s work with constructive feedback. Where possible, we will invite guest writers and industry experts into the workshops, to share their know-how. This module is delivered at the University of Reading.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 30%, Portfolio 60%, Project 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Creative Writing Masterclass: Poetry

Code:

EN3MPY

Convenor:

PROF Peter Robinson

Summary:

This module will enable students to develop and design a short collection of poems, or a sequence or series of poems, or one longer poem, with a view to submitting a selection or extract to a print or online poetry magazine. Weekly workshops will introduce original exercises to allow students to generate material and hone technique. Attention will be paid to the elaboration of style and voice, as well as the balance between consistency and variety of theme and premise across the collection. Workshops will also facilitate group discussion of student work. Close consideration will be given to issues of address and audience, as well as the nature and scope of the poetry being written and published today, with particular focus on emerging voices and subject-matter.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 30%, Portfolio 60%, Project 10%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Placing Jane Austen

Code:

EN3PA

Convenor:

DR Paddy Bullard

Summary:

Jane Austen once compared her art to that of the miniaturist: each of her novels, she wrote, was like a ‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour’. But the relatively small scale of her writing in terms of setting – its tendency to domestic portraits and family groupings – belies the expansiveness and mobility of her imagination. Austen had a vivid sense of the wider world in which she lived. Her meticulously realised interiors are set carefully within larger landscapes, and both are full of social, economic and aesthetic meaning. Her characters move between great houses and ordinary cottages, between city and suburb, between old agricultural estates and newly landscaped parklands, between familiar parishes and fashionable tourist destinations. Austen scholars have also explored wider backgrounds to her fiction: the ocean journeys of her naval officer relatives (and their equivalents in her novels); the colonial slave plantations that paid for those stately country homes. This module investigates Austen’s sense of space and place. It examines the movements of her characters through rooms and houses, the patterns of their dances in assembly halls, the paths of their journeys through town and country. It investigates how these movements sometimes represent changes of heart or class, of mind or fortune. It shows how they are always significant for the carefully drawn lines of her narratives.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 50%, Portfolio 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Psychoanalysis and Text

Code:

EN3PSY

Convenor:

PROF Karin Lesnik-Oberstein

Summary:

This module introduces and explores relationships between psychoanalysis and literary criticism, concentrating not on psychoanalysis as ‘applied’ to literature, but, instead, on thinking through the implications of psychoanalysis for literary criticism and theory. On the basis of readings from Sigmund Freud the students are introduced to central concepts from and about psychoanalysis, primarily the psychoanalytic ‘unconscious’, and then continue by examining the implications of this for ideas about authorship and intentionality, readership and response, and text and interpretation. After the initial readings from Freud, each group selects both primary and secondary literature to analyse closely.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

From Romance to Fantasy

Code:

EN3RF

Convenor:

DR Mary Morrissey

Summary:

On this module, students will explore the role played by fantastical or wondrous elements in English literature from the middle ages to the present day. It will focus on a range of key narrative structures (such as the quest), persistent motifs such as magical objects, and influential modes, such as the gothic. It will present authors typically associated with fantasy, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, alongside authors less typically associated with this type of writing, such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen. It will also consider how romance narratives, like the stories of King Arthur, developed in the medieval period and were then revived and reworked in later centuries. It will explore the reinvention of the middle ages in subsequent centuries and consider what ‘medievalism’ tells us about the culture of later literary periods.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Shakespeare on Film

Code:

EN3SHF

Convenor:

PROF Lucinda Becker

Summary:

Filmic adaptation of Shakespeare is a major component of the ‘Shakespeare Industry’. This module explores how the medium of film has treated Shakespeare, with a focus on how the written text can be used in depictions, interpretations and adaptations, and how film making techniques affect our perception of Shakespeare’s works. Alongside consideration of how plays have been interpreted on screen we will also consider key actors and directors, tracing changes and developments in both cinema and the ways early modern drama has been interpreted and appropriated by filmmakers in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Throughout we will work with an awareness of Shakespeare as a cultural icon.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 80%, Oral 20%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

The Bloody Stage: Revenge and Death in Renaissance Drama

Code:

EN3TBS

Convenor:

DR Chloe Houston

Summary:

This module explores the representation of revenge and death across a range of revenge tragedies performed on the Renaissance stage. The Renaissance is a period when bodies were mutilated and put on public display by the state. We will explore what spectacles of punishment can tell us about wider cultures of retribution and violence, including the tensions between private revenge and state justice. Since bodies in death are surprisingly articulate, this module will consider how to analyse the staging of death scenes and whether there are differences in the ways that men and women die on stage. These highly stylised revenge tragedies are deliberately provocative and raise important questions about the aesthetics and ethics of violence.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Utopia and Dystopia in English and American Literature

Code:

EN3UTD

Convenor:

DR Chloe Houston

Summary:

Utopia is our way of thinking about the nature and possibility of an ideal society. The word ‘utopia’, coined by Thomas More in 1516, suggests both ‘good place’ (from the Greek, ‘eu-topos’) and ‘no place’ (‘ou-topos’): a place which is both ideal and non-existent. This module will introduce the idea of utopia from its earliest manifestations in western literature up to the present day. Reading a range of texts from different genres and periods of history, we will explore the development of utopian literature from its philosophical, satirical origins in the sixteenth century to the ecological utopias of the late twentieth century and beyond. Along the way, we will encounter the notion of dystopia, a literary tradition which has a shorter but equally rich history, and will question the ways in which utopias and dystopias are inter-related.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 80%, Oral 20%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury

Code:

EN3VW

Convenor:

DR Madeleine Davies

Summary:

Virginia Woolf is a crucial reference point for women’s writing and feminist criticism.  This module provides students with knowledge and understanding of selected novels and essays by Virginia Woolf, and explores key issues including her challenges to concepts of boundaries, hierarchies, sex, sexuality and difference, and her attention to debates concerning the social, political, cultural and economic marginalisation of women in the early years of the Twentieth Century. The module emphasises Woolf’s novels, but seminars are also devoted to her critical essays and ‘political’ writing. Discussion of ‘Bloomsbury’ ethics and art weaves throughout the module. The debates included in the module connect with pacifism, the writing of the city, psychoanalysis, the challenge to heteronormativity, the body, and the tension between female creativity and procreativity.

Assessment Method:

Portfolio 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Writing Women: Nineteenth Century Poetry

Code:

EN3WWP

Convenor:

DR Lucy Bending

Summary:

This module will explore writing primarily by (but also about) women in the nineteenth century. We will read some well-known and influential poems –Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, for example – as well as some by less well-known names, discussing the ways in which women responded to poetic tradition. We will ask how women found a voice in a predominantly patriarchal society; what subjects were deemed suitable for female poets, and how such poets overcame the limitations of expectation; how different verse forms could be used to different ends. Above all, the aim is to enjoy a wide-range of poems with women at their centre.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Lifestyle, Nutrigenetics and Personalised Nutrition

Code:

FB3LNPA

Convenor:

DR Vimal Karani

Summary:

The module deals with human nutrition during the life cycle in health and disease and links this to nutrigenetics, nutrigenomics, epigenetics and personalised nutrition. Throughout the module you will study a selection of current issues in nutrition which impinge on lifestyle (diet and physical activity), health, genetic susceptibility and disease and matters relevant to the interface between human nutrition and food science.

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Intercultural Communications

Code:

LS3IC

Convenor:

DR Erhan Aslan

Summary:

In this module, students will explore how people of different discourse systems or groups communicate with one another in various face-to-face and digitally-mediated contexts. Specifically, students will gain an understanding of how assumptions and values that have been constructed or adopted within a specific culture group influence the ways in which people successfully communicate with each other as well as experience miscommunication. Students will become familiar with a variety of topics in intercultural communication as they engage in hands-on analyses of intercultural encounters.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 50%, Set exercise 10%, Project 40%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Criminology

Code:

LW3CRY

Convenor:

PROFESSOR Jo Phoenix

Summary:

Criminology is a lecture-led module examining the nature of crime as a social phenomenon, theoretical explanations of criminal behaviour, and official responses to crime. The module will incorporate tutorial classes and a piece of assessed coursework.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Identity and Conflict in Modern Europe

Code:

ML3IC

Convenor:

DR Athena Leoussi

Summary:

This module focuses on identity and conflict in modern Europe. By examining race, gender, warfare, revolution and immigration, it explores the evolution of modern conceptions of the self, of what it is to be human. The module further examines a) the ways in which  modern identities have been pursued and realised in different European contexts, for example, through social movements and national and international legislation; b) the conflicts which new and modern visions of the self have generated and in which they have been shaped; and c) cultural expressions of identity and conflict in paintings, sculptures, monuments and films.

Assessment Method:

Exam 50%, Assignment 30%, Oral 20%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Language and Power

Code:

ML3LP

Convenor:

PROF Federico Faloppa

Summary:

This module aims to familiarise students with the linguistic means by which a whole range of persuasive texts can be analysed. We will also be considering the use of language as a powerful tool in itself. We will investigate a range of genres, discourse types, and theoretical approaches, and we will look at textual, pragmatic, and rhetorical features to better understand power relations and how texts (and their content) can be manipulated. We will then understand, and apply techniques to reveal a text’s underlying ideological stance and bias. 

Assessment Method:

Oral 25%, Project 75%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Feminism and Political Theory

Code:

PO3FPT

Convenor:

DR Maxime Lepoutre

Summary:

This module explores the contributions of feminism to contemporary political theory. It begins by examining theoretical controversies surrounding the definition, subject matter, and aims of feminism. It then brings these theoretical insights to bear on a range of pressing issues in feminist politics, such as abortion, surrogacy, pornography, marriage and sexist language.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 100%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

Gender and Politics

Code:

PO3GAP

Convenor:

DR Rose De Geus

Summary:

Why do women remain under-represented in politics? Are voters sexist? And do women make for better political leaders? These are examples of the types of questions that we will consider in this module. Over the course of ten two-hour seminars we will explore how gender shapes politics. Throughout this we will also consider how gender intersects with other identities of race, ethnicity and sexuality. In the module we will look at many real-world examples and students are encouraged to bring their own examples for discussion. The module also exposes students to a variety of different research methods that are used in the field of gender and politics. The course is taught through ten two-hour seminars which require active participation and preparatory work from students. 

Assessment Method:

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

International Political Economy

Code:

PO3IPE

Convenor:

DR Jonathan Golub

Summary:

The course is an introduction to International Political Economy (IPE), which focuses on the interaction between states and markets at the domestic and international levels. It covers the major theoretical approaches to IPE and applies them to study international trade, development, financial crises, and economic sanctions. It also considers the relationship between globalisation and the welfare state as well as the environment.

Assessment Method:

Exam 40%, Assignment 40%, Oral 20%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.

Title:

US Foreign and Defence Policy since 1950

Code:

PO3USF

Convenor:

DR Graham O'Dwyer

Summary:

American foreign policy matters. As the most powerful, wealthiest, and influential state in the contemporary international system what Washington thinks and does is important to understand. But how did the US come to be in such a dominant position? This module explores this question and a set of integrated ones that flow from this concerning the American foreign policy tradition, the growth of presidential power in foreign policy making since 1945, and a number of case studies that explore key events and policies across time. By exploring historical and contemporary cases, since the Vietnam War, students will analyse how foreign policy decisions are made, look at who influences them, and how this has evolved overtime. Drawing on primary and secondary sources students will gain an understanding of crucial events such as the Vietnam War, nuclear diplomacy during the Cold War, US-Mexico-Colombia relations and the War on Drug, and the response to 9/11. Finally, the course will explore salient challenges faced by US foreign policymakers today.

Assessment Method:

Assignment 50%, Report 50%

Disclaimer:

The modules described on this page are what we currently offer. Modules may change for your year of study as we regularly review our offerings to ensure they’re informed by the latest research and teaching methods.