The main focus of your research degree will be a detailed dissertation, and you will receive regular supervision from specialists within the Department on its planning, creation and writing.
The MPhil normally takes one year of full-time research (two years part-time), after which students complete and submit a dissertation of up to 60,000 words.
Areas of research include:
- French: historical linguistics; early modern literature and ideas; modern literature; cinema; Anglo-Norman; Romance linguistics; history of travel and travel literature; 20th- and 21st-century French thought, especially existentialism and feminism; (auto-)biography and life-writing; and theoretical approaches to reading.
- German: 20th- and 21st-century German prose; autobiographies and life writing; women’s writing; German-Jewish literature; history and culture; Holocaust texts and translation; German-speaking refugees from National Socialism and especially the Kindertransport; postdramatic theatre and translation; German grammar and language anxiety; new tragic in European theatre and performance.
- Spanish: stylistic comparison of 19th-century Spanish novels; North African comparative colonial literature; cosmopolitanism; geopolitics; landscape; science in Latin American literature and film; gender, identity and nation; cultural legacies of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict; avant-garde; 20th-century Hispanic poetry; women’s cultural practice; and language learning and foreign language anxiety.
Our postgraduates have been researching such topics as:
- Translating René Le Pays's Amitiez, amours, amourettes: rendering travelogues in the language of their destination
- The early 20th-century German women writers Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum
- The translation of audio-visual Holocaust testimony
- Regional Refugee Committee supporting refugees from National Socialism
- Kindertransport autobiographies and fiction
- A comparative analysis of Second Generation Kindertransport in the US and the UK.
