In year three, you will continue and extend the process of specialisation promoted in the second year. You will write an original research dissertation and follow a programme of advanced study in a choice of modules in Film and Television and in American and Canadian history, literature and culture.
You must pass year three which counts two thirds of your final degree classification.
You must choose between taking a dissertation in Film and Television Studies or a dissertation in American and Canadian Studies. There are three options:
Dissertation in American and Canadian Studies
This module involves in-depth independent study of a subject in American and Canadian Studies. It encourages both student-centred and student-initiated learning. The topic you choose must be appropriate for your course and must be approved by the module convenor. You are assigned a supervisor with expertise in your chosen area of study.
The completed dissertation should be 5,000-7,000 words in length for the 20 credit module and 10,000-12,000 words in length for the 40 credit module. The 20 credit dissertation is for one semester only and the 40 credit version is year-long.
Recent dissertation titles include:
- To Ban or Not to Ban: Changing Motivations Behind Efforts to Censor African American Literature in America’s Public Schools, 1976-2018
- The Development of Television in the Canadian North and its Role in the Preservation of Inuit Culture
- The Feminist Justification for the Afghanistan War: The Cooperation Between the Bush Administration and the Feminist Majority Foundation
- "The Teeth of the World are Sharp”: James Baldwin’s Protest Novels
- Towards Humane Borders: Activist and NGO Responses to the Militarisation of the US-Mexico Boundary
- “A Blended World … A Safe Space for Everybody”: A Case Study of Underground Ballroom Culture
- “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues”: The Empowerment of Black Female Blues Singers - Romance or Reality?
- “Older Arts and Newer Technology”: Cultural Recoding in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters
Dissertation in Film and Television Studies
Throughout your degree you'll come across topics that really engage you and you wish you had more opportunity to explore in greater depth. The dissertation is that opportunity!
You'll agree a topic with your supervisor who'll be there to support and advise you throughout the entire project.
This individual support will be matched by more general sessions that develop your research and writing skills.
By the end of the year you'll submit a well researched and written project of 8,000 - 12,000 words.
The project will not only demonstrate your subject knowledge but also your ability to:
- critically assess evidence and sources
- argue coherently
- work independently
Essential skills any employer wants to see.
This module is worth 40 credits.
You will take modules from both Group A and Group B. The balance of optional modules will depend on your dissertation choice.
Film and Television Genres
Many films share common traits. Together they might be classed as “action”, “made for television” or “low budget”. But how does as film get assigned a genre? Who does the assigning? And what impact does this assigning have?
During the module we’ll delve deep into a particular genre. We’ll examine it’s:
- key concepts and texts
- development
- influence and influences
Building on what you’ve learnt in years one and two you’ll also look at the genre in the context of production and consumption.
As well as knowledge of a specific genre you’ll also develop the skills to apply your learning to other genres.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Screen Encounters: Audiences and Engagement
Develop and expand your understanding of the relationship between screen media and their most important component – the audience.
We’ll explore widely across history including:
- pre-cinema moving images
- the changing nature of cinema space
- the impact of domestic television and VCRs
- the playing of games and use of smartphone apps
- experimental forms of screen media
You’ll also consider the impact social and political factors, and changes in daily living, have on screen media’s relationship with its audience.
Alongside the theory you’ll also get practical experience by using questionnaires and focus groups to conduct your own audience research.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Video Production Project
This module combines the historical and theoretical knowledge you have gained with the practical task of video production. You'll investigate the ways that production activities contribute to videomaking through recording and editing techniques, and experience the many decisions that must be made through the production process. You'll spend time in media labs and in the field making a collaborative video production, alongside four hours a week in lectures and seminars.
Global Cinema
Almost every country has a cinema industry. Yet what’s shown, and why, varies wildly.
We’ll look at how films outside Hollywood are made, distributed and received globally, and how these reflect local, regional and international trends.
We’ll ask how these cinemas:
- reflect past and current international film industries setups and audiences’ tastes
- are driven by local cultural specifics and global changes
- might benefit different institutions and structures in society
We will also try to untangle categories such as national cinema, transnational cinema and world cinema, as well as to make sense of different filmic traditions, genres and modes around the world. Who creates these categories and who do they serve?
With an entire global cinema to draw from, the focus will narrow in any year to particular regions, filmic genres or movements.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Working in the Cultural Industries
The cultural and creative industries are at the forefront of government strategies across the world for developing post-industrial economies, are seen as exciting places to work, and regularly feature at the top of graduate employment destinations.
- But what are these industries, and what is it like to work in them?
- How do you gain entry to these competitive, highly skilled jobs?
- What is ‘creativity’ and why is it so important to modern economies?
- And what does the future hold for cultural and creative sectors?
We’ll examine the structure, organisation and working patterns in the creative and media industries alongside more practical exercises designed to help you to identify and evaluate your own skills and interests. This combination of industry knowledge and personal reflection is aimed to help you to find a rewarding and exciting career when you leave university.
You’ll also examine key aspects of contemporary work including:
- the concept of creativity, the knowledge economy and precarious labour
- important issues such as internship culture, exploitation and inequality
There will be plenty of opportunity to discuss and build upon your own experiences and aspirations, and to conduct independent research on areas of creative and media work that interest you.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Development and Production
This module considers the main processes and people involved in the development and production of screen content. In particular, it will cover the following areas: People (talent development and management); Ideas (development and content creation); Money (financing and assets); Places (global production trends).
This module is worth 20 credits.
Photographing America
This module examines the development of photography in America from roughly 1945 onwards. The module breaks the period down into themes and considers:
1. the transformation of ‘documentary’ photograph;
2. the emergence and importance of colour photography;
3. experimental, conceptual and post-conceptual photography;
4. issues of serialism and seriality;
5. landscape photography;
6. the photobook
7. analogue/digital
The module will draw on the work of a diverse range of photographers, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Ed Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Robert Heinecken, Stephen Shore, Todd Hido, William Eggleston and Doug Rickard.
Teaching Film and Media Studies for Undergraduate Ambassadors
This module is part of the nationwide Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme, which works with universities to provide academic modules that enable students to go into local schools to act as inspiring role models. You will split your time between the university-based seminar and your allocated school, where you will be placed in an appropriate department as a teaching assistant. You will design and deliver a teaching project aimed at improving pupil understanding of selected aspects of media studies. You will be supported by the module convenor, the education specialist on campus, and the school's contact teacher. The module typically includes fortnightly seminars and seven half-days spent in school. Placements are in secondary schools and Sixth Form or FE colleges.
Gender, Sexuality and Media
Examine how issues of gender and sexuality relate to media and popular culture.
Using the intersectional fields of feminism, queer theory, and media and cultural studies we'll ask some crucial questions such as:
- How are gender and sexuality represented in media and popular culture?
- How do media and cultural industries structure gender and sexual inequalities?
- How are identities and practices of media audiences and users gendered and sexualised?
- How can gender and sexual norms be challenged in creative and radical ways?
This module is worth 20 credits.
Public Cultures: Protest, Participation and Power
Explore the relationship between public space, politics and technology using overlapping and interdisciplinary fields, including:
- cultural studies
- cultural geography
- digital studies
- urban sociology
- cultural politics
You will engage in debates about the changing nature and uses of public space, with an emphasis on urban environments and digital space.
A range of protest movements will also provide case-study material and offer a central focus for your theoretical and practical explorations of the role of new technologies in:
- controlling space
- resisting control
- enabling new forms of civic participation.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Fascism, Spectacle and Display
This module will examine cultural production during Italy’s fascist regime. There will be an emphasis on the experience of visual culture in public settings such as the exhibition space, the cinema, and the built environment. A wide range of cultural artefacts will be examined, paying attention to material as well as visual aspects. Visual material will be situated in the social, cultural and political circumstances of the period. Topics will include: Fascism’s use of spectacle, fascist conceptions of utopia, the regime’s use of the past, the relationship between Fascism and modernism, Fascism as a political religion, the cult of Mussolini, urban-rural relations, and empire building. The module will also consider the afterlife of fascist visual culture and the question of ‘difficult’ heritage.
Prohibition America
Why did National Prohibition officially begin in the United States in 1920?
What were the goals and intentions of the powerful women's reform movements and religious pressure groups calling for dramatic restrictions on alcohol?
Why was there so much political support for state and national restrictions, particularly during the First World War? Why was prohibition so hard to police during the 1920s?
The restrictions on what and how you could drink reshaped American society, politics, and culture during the 1920s and 1930s. Prohibition transformed alcohol consumption, opened up new leisure activities, and increased bootlegging, smuggling, and other criminal activities. However, popular histories and media representations of the prohibition years are full of myths and stereotypes. On this module, you will challenge these to build a better understanding of an important period in the 20th century United States.
This module is worth 20 credits.
US Foreign Policy, 1989 - present
Explore US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period.
You will examine the historical narratives of American international relations, considering the drivers behind the foreign policies of Presidents George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
More specifically, we will consider:
- Whether the post-1989 period constituted a break from previous traditions in US foreign policy, or whether there has been an essential continuity through the war on terror and beyond
- The impact of economics, geopolitics, ideology and security issues on post-1989 strategy in different regions of the world
- The impact of a new international environment, marked by the demise of bipolarity and the rise of globalisation
You'll spend around three hours per week in lectures and seminars on this module.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Popular Music Cultures and Countercultures
This module examines the role played by American popular music in countercultural movements. We focus on the ways in which marginalised, subordinate or dissenting social groups have used popular music as a vehicle for self-definition and for re-negotiating their relationship to the social, economic and cultural mainstream. We explore how the mainstream has responded to music countercultures in ways that range from repression to co-optation and analyse how the music and the movements have been represented and reflected on in fiction, film, poetry, journalism and theory. Among the key moments examined are the folk revival and the 1930s Popular Front, rock 'n' roll and desegregation in the 1950s, rock music and the 1960s counterculture, and postmodernism and identity politics in the music of the MTV age.
A History of the Civil Rights Movement
This module examines a range of documents and scholarly controversies pertaining to the Civil Rights Movement between 1940 and 1970. Documents will include public and organisational records, photo-journalism, speeches, memoir and personal papers. Controversies will include those relating to the chronological limits, spatial dynamics, and gender politics of the movement, as well as those relating to the movement's goals and achievements.
Ethnic and New Immigrant Writing
This course will consider the development of ‘ethnic’ and new immigrant literature in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present day. It will do so by positioning literary works within their wider historical, political and cultural context.
The course will examine the dominant ideas and concerns of a range of texts from life-writing and poetry to drama, short fiction and the novel by writers from a range of ethno-cultural backgrounds, including Irish, Jewish, Italian, Caribbean and Asian American.
Issues for discussion will include:
- the claiming of the United States by new immigrant and ‘ethnic’ writers
- race and ethnicity
- gender, class and sexuality
- labour and economic status
- the uses and re-writing of American history and ‘master narratives’
- the impact of US regionalism
- the ways in which writers engage with the American canon
- multiculturalism and the ‘culture wars’
- the growth of ‘ethnic’ American writing and Ethnic Studies as academic fields.
The course will analyse works by such writers as:
- Jacob Riis
- Mario Puzo
- Philip Roth
- Jamaica Kincaid
- Bharati Mukherjee
- Sandra Cisneros.
This is an optional module worth 20 credits.
North American Film Adaptations
This module examines North American short stories and novels and their film adaptations, paying attention to the contexts in which both the literary and the cinematic texts are produced as well as to the analysis of the texts themselves. In particular, the module takes an interest in literary texts whose film adaptations have been produced in different national contexts to the source material.
Varieties of Classic American Film, Television and Literature since 1950
What is a film, television or literary classic? How has this term come under pressure and fractured over the past half century or so? In this module you will consider the concept of the mid and late twentieth century American “classic” in a variety of contrasting and overlapping contexts. These contexts will be elaborated on the basis of their formal, generic, period and/or cultural designations that will cover university and exam curricula reading lists, popular opinion and widespread critical consensus (such as the currently prevalent view, for instance, that the early twenty-first century constitutes a ‘golden age’ of US television).
Recent Queer Writing
This module explores lesbian, gay, transgender and queer writing, focusing especially on the search for agency and the representation of gender and sexuality in selected contemporary texts. The majority of writers studied will be Canadian, although some American examples will also be included. The module is multi-generic, engaging with forms including novels, short fiction, life writing, poetry, drama and graphic narratives. Topics for discussion will include:
- LGBTQ sexuality;
- constructions of masculinity and femininity;
- the politics of representation: the extent to which writing can enable agency as subjects or citizens;
- intersections between race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and the construction of gender and sexual identites
- writing for LGBTQ youth
- literature studies will be contextualized in relation to relevant debates in feminist, queer, post-colonial and transnational theories
Representative authors for study may include James Baldwin, Jane Rule, Dionne Brand, Dorothy Allison, Shyam Selvadurai, Tomson Highway, Leslie Feinberg, and Ivan Coyote.
American Madness: Mental Illness in History and Culture
Experiences of and ideas about madness, insanity, and mental illness have varied and changed radically within American history and culture. This module will survey and analyse these changes from the mid-19thcentury to the present. We will consider how and why medical authority, gender, and class have all impacted the way in which mental illness is understood, and consider the significance of changing approaches to treatment. Sources used on this interdisciplinary module range from medical accounts and psychiatric theory to memoir, fiction and film. The aim is to place representations of mental illness in their historical context, and to ask what they reveal about related ideas about identity, conformity, social care and responsibility.
Sexuality in American History
From the Puritans to Playboy, sexuality has been a focal point in the culture, politics, and society of the United States. This module will examine Americans' differing attitudes over time toward sexuality. Representative topics covered may include marriage and adultery, homosexuality and heterosexuality, nudity, abortion, birth control, prostitution, free love, and rape.
The Special Relationship, Spit and Slavery - Britain and the US 1776-1877
Reassess the Anglo-American relationship, during an era of major upheaval in both nations.
Spanning from the American Revolution through to the end of the Reconstruction era, you will be challenged to examine how events and ideas forced Britons and Americans to reconceptualize their relationship.
You will engage with concepts that are crucial in the formation of the modern world, including:
- race
- ethnicity
- liberty
- republicanism
- class
- gender
- manners
- reform
This module is worth 20 credits.