Master of Arts in Literary Studies

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

Develop your digital production skills, and combine them with key anthropological concepts. The BA Anthropology & Visual Practice programme helps develop your understanding of contemporary cultural issues, as well as your practical skills in both research methods and visual practice.

Why study BA Anthropology & Visual Practice at Goldsmiths?

• This programme approaches anthropology from a fresh angle that differs from the 'traditional anthropology' taught at other institutions.
• You’ll receive hands-on training in a range of digital production skills, such as editing, videography, and photography. These new skills will complement your theoretical study, and prepare you for vocational opportunities when you graduate.
• You’ll have the opportunity to investigate anthropology in relation to politics, religion, knowledge, philosophy and psychology – and you’ll learn to apply an interdisciplinary perspective to your work.
• Examine anthropology from a contemporary perspective – what you learn in the classroom will be relevant in a variety of public domains, in Britain, and around the world.
• You'll explore links between theoretical issues and ethnographic studies, enabling you to think critically about your own culture and society, and to apply knowledge learned in lectures to your everyday life.
• Our graduates have gone on to work for the UN, World Bank, NGOs, law companies, media companies and corporate social responsibility (CSR) consultancies, while others have gone on to pursue academic careers.

This programme provides you with a broad understanding of the theories and practices of dance movement therapy necessary for safe and effective clinical work, and enables you to practise as a dance movement therapist.

Your learning will be underpinned by the principles and practices of psychodynamic psychotherapy within the social, political and multicultural context of mental health care and educational settings. Study is informed by contemporary dance practice, Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and somatic bodywork.

Through theoretical studies, movement observation studies, dance practice workshops, clinical work and experiential learning, you integrate cognitive understanding and practical experience with a developing awareness of self and other.

The nature of the therapeutic relationship is explored in depth through movement and dance and you have the opportunity to put your learning into practice through at least 90 days of supervised placements. This gives you the opportunity to relate your practical experience to your theoretical studies.

It’s really important for us that you graduate with a set of core digital journalism skills so half of the degree focuses on the computing side of the discipline and half on media and communications. This means you get a holistic MA, where you study the foundations of digital journalism and practise it in its most current forms.

You’ll have the chance to study multimedia and interactive journalism, look at interactive documentaries, digital reporting, and video journalism. You’ll also learn coding, so you can get to grips with using algorithms and data sets, and do social network analysis to monitor what’s going on behind the screens.

Through our partnerships with BBC news labs and The Times’ development team, we make sure we’re keeping up with industry but also working with it.

We want you to reimagine the medium while you’re here, so you get the chance to specialise in your own area of interest for your final project. This could be anything from an interactive website to a video production using interactive story telling and text.  We offer a lot of support when it comes to the coding side of the course. A boot camp before the start of the programme gives you an introduction to some of the techniques and languages.

What you go away with are the core skills for news writing, video, and computational techniques and some amazing industry contacts.

This innovative programme will explore how people experience the world around them, particularly when using technology. You'll learn how each layer of technology, from core hardware through to the way that media is handled, can affect user experience and gain the skills for transforming user requirements into appropriate technical solutions.

Why study the MSc User Experience Engineering?

• This specialist masters degree provides more focused employment possibilities than a more general computing programme.
• You'll learn to design and produce computing-based systems and solutions that have been validated to meet the functional requirements of users, be accessible and inclusive, and provide users with a satisfying user experience.
• A variety of optional modules in advanced technologies and psychology means you can choose a path that emphasises the technology of your choice.
• The vocational nature of the programme gives you the option to complete a field study thesis project as an alternative to the conventional academic thesis.
• Through presentation and demonstration of your work, we'll prepare you to enter a field of work characterised by the agile approach and team working within multi-disciplinary cohorts.
• You'll benefit from the expertise of the Department of Computing, as well as drawing on the knowledge of staff in the Department of Psychology and the Institute of Management Studies (IMS).
• The Guest Lectures and Field Project modules will introduce you to the professional aspects of working as a User Experience designer, developer or engineer and hearing from industry professionals will give you an insight into what it's like to work in the field.

History is a relevant, dynamic, fascinating, and important field of study which, at Goldsmiths, is approached in creative, innovative, and exciting ways.

History - the study, analysis and understanding of the past - is as important today as it has ever been and it continues to make vital contributions to how we comprehend and interact with the world around us.

Understanding past societies fosters emotional intelligence and allows us to appreciate the diversity and adaptability of human life. Understanding our pasts can help us to shape our futures and, crucially, help us shape those futures intelligently, insightfully, fairly, and with compassion. History is here and now as well as being there and then.

Students studying History at Goldsmiths have a great deal of choice over what to study, beginning with options in Year One. Our geographic scope covers Europe (including significant British expertise), the Americas, Asia and Africa. Chronologically, we have a strong focus on early modern and modern history, while also covering earlier periods.

Why study BA History at Goldsmiths?

• We are exciting and challenging: our innovative interdisciplinary approaches to the subject encourage our students to approach and explore the past thematically rather than chronologically and we venture into issues, areas and topics that are often overlooked.
• We are global: our international body of staff research and deliver modules covering a wide geographical range including Asia, Africa, the Americas, the British Isles, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Middle East.
• We excel in what we do: our academic staff are nationally and internationally recognised award-winning experts in their fields, they are at the forefront of research excellence and research-led teaching.
• We put you first: our students are always our top priority and our staff are excellent educators who foster independent and progressive thinking in challenging but supportive environments.
• We broaden minds: history stimulates critical and analytical thinking and, at Goldsmiths, we also encourage creative and imaginative thinking that takes our students beyond the traditional boundaries of the subject.
• We think about your future: alongside intellectual and personal development we equip our students with the skills and experience they need to progress into a rewarding career. This might be through our History in Practice work-placement module or through other career-orientated opportunities and forms of assessment.

This exciting, intellectually rigorous programme gives you the opportunity to develop the study of literature from a variety of perspectives through a number of flexible pathways.

The pathways you can take are:

• Pathway in American Literature & Culture
• Pathway in Comparative Literature & Criticism
• Pathway in Literature of the Caribbean & its Diasporas
• Pathway in Critical Theory
• Pathway in Modern and Contemporary Literature
• Pathway in Romantic & Victorian Literature & Culture

These enable you to combine theoretical angles with the close reading of a wide range of texts, from different media (literary, filmic, visual), periods, and cultural, geographic and linguistic backgrounds – though all texts will be studied in English, in English translation, or with English subtitles.

Computation consists of all the changes brought about by digital technology. Art is an open set of ways of acting inventively in culture. Mixing the two together in a systematic way gives us computational art. This is a very open field, and one that is set to expand enormously in the coming years. It is where the most exciting developments in technology and in culture can already be found. This degree will place you in the middle of this fast-evolving context.

What will I learn?

• This degree develops your arts practice through the expressive world of creative computation. Over a year (full-time) or two years (part-time) you will develop your artistic work and thinking through the challenge of developing a series of projects for public exhibition which will explore the technological and cultural ramifications of computation.
• You will learn the fundamentals of programming and how to apply this knowledge expressively. You will work with popular open source programming environments such as Processing, OpenFrameworks, P5.js and Arduino, and will learn how to program in languages such as Java, Javascript and C++.
• Since computational artworks don’t necessarily involve computers and screens, we also encourage students to produce works across a diverse range of media. Supported by studio technicians in state-of-the-art facilities, our students are producing works using tools such as 3D printers, laser cutters, robotics, wearable technologies, paint, sculpture and textiles.

The BA in Drama and Theatre Arts is designed to foster creative, radical theatre-makers and thinkers. It is adventurous in form, international in scope and hands-on in practice.

The Complete Theatre Maker

• This degree supports you to become the complete theatre maker. At the heart of the programme is a balanced integration of theory and practice. Knowledge gained through making and doing adds to your conceptual understanding, while the insights gained in writing about theatre and society inform the choices you make in your practice-based work.
• Tutored by our diverse and talented team, you will develop technical skills in acting, directing, writing, sound, lighting, scenography, and costume. Bringing these skills together, you will learn how to collaborate and operate in companies, ready to take your own show on the road.
• You will be introduced to a wide range of theatre thinkers, and explore the history and cultural diversity of performance. You will develop a complex understanding of what it means to make theatre in an increasingly global 21st-century society. And with London’s rich theatre culture on your doorstep, you can draw on an exciting range of contemporary practice to inform your thinking and making.

The BA Drama and Theatre Arts is a radical and innovative degree. The curriculum is responsive to the global reach of our teaching staff, including expertise in African, American, Francophone, Japanese, and South Asian performance, as well as British, European, and Russian theatre traditions. We prepare theatre-makers who are socially, culturally, and politically engaged.

The degree explores what it means to perform in contemporary culture, mobilising a range of theatre and performance practices from the interpretation of play texts to devised ensemble work and the possibilities opened up by political protest, live art, and the avant-garde.

This programme looks at language from a sociocultural perspective. It's designed for anyone with an interest in the relationship between language, culture and society but also provides a solid understanding of English language and linguistics.

Why study MA Sociocultural Linguistics at Goldsmiths?

• This degree focuses on (socio)linguistics and discourse analysis and enhances your analytic and linguistic skills by introducing different approaches to the analysis of written and spoken language from a range of everyday and institutional contexts.
• You'll cover topics such as language and ideology, linguistic performances of identity (particularly language and gender, sexuality, ethnicity and social class), language and the media, talk at work, English in a multilingual world, intercultural communication, English as a Lingua Franca, multilingualism and code-switching, and attitudes to different varieties of English.
• You'll be encouraged to engage with these topics by drawing on your own social, cultural and occupational backgrounds in class discussions and in your written work. The opportunity to explore new interests in written work, including the dissertation (dissertation), has allowed many of our students to forge new career trajectories, e.g. in internationalisation, diversity and inclusion, marketing, advertising, journalism, work for NGOs and many different educational contexts, including language teaching.  
• You will be encouraged to engage in hands-on analysis of spoken and written language, after receiving training in how to collect, transcribe and analyse different types of language data, in interviews, natural conversational context, and a various written texts and corpora.
• You will learn how authentic spoken English is used as a resource by speakers to achieve their goals, signal intimacy or dislike, gossip or report, persuade or interview others, position themselves and their identities in different ways. You will learn how written English and other semiotic practices are used to report and to distort, create ingroups and outgroups, reflect and perpetuate ideologies in a variety of print and social media.

This MA examines contemporary issues concerning justice. You will learn how to conceptualise and study the possibilities of human rights, going beyond legal formulations to look at the conditions in which human rights claims are made.

Human rights mobilise millions of supporters across borders, inspiring passion and hope. And they operate at and between all the scales involved in globalisation: local, national, international, transnational. They are moral claims to justice. Although often associated with law, human rights are not the same as legal rights – human rights can be claimed where no legal rights are codified, even if changes in the law are invariably called for as part of attempts to realise human rights in practice.

Human rights are carried by different actors:

• Grassroots social movements, small Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and huge International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs)
• Lawyers and judges
• Bureaucrats and experts in Inter-Governmental Organisations (IGOs) even, sometimes, national politicians
• Journalists, novelists, translators, artists, filmmakers

These different actors are often at odds with each other in defining and defending particular justifications of what human rights are and should be.

In this Masters you will learn about how human rights are constructed, exploring framings of human rights through case studies; and you will begin to practice some of the methodologies and methods that are currently used in NGOs and grassroots activist networks trying to remedy global injustices.