Modern Language Studies BA

Following your time spent living in a French-speaking country this advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll help you continue to improve your oral and written skills using a wide variety of texts.

Your grammar expertise and vocabulary shall be deepened through the production of linguistic commentary and summaries. In addition, we'll help you develop translation skills. Your French writing skills will improve immeasurably as we translate into and out of French creative writing in different registers.

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll continue to improve your four key language skills of reading, listening, writing and speaking through class discussions and the use of relevant texts such as complex newspaper articles, detailed radio and TV programmes and increasingly sophisticated fiction.

You'll also study translation and work towards professional standards giving you a solid grounding for a career or further studies in translation.

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll continue to improve your five key language skills of reading/comprehension, listening, writing, speaking, and cultural awareness through translation and writing workshops, class discussions and the use of relevant texts such as authentic newspaper articles, radio and TV programmes and sophisticated fiction.

We'll give you the opportunity to develop translation skills (with emphasis on Russian-English) and gain creative writing experience, demonstrating your advanced Russian capabilities and helping you build a potential portfolio to assist you in either finding employment or postgraduate study.

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency, training you in a more formal, sophisticated register of spoken and written Spanish.

We'll continue to use a wide range of authentic Spanish texts to further deepen your knowledge and confidence at this advanced level. We'll look at how the texts are put together so that you may use these skills within your written and spoken Spanish, taking you to the highest level of proficiency.

This advanced module will be your final step towards fluency. We'll build on your grammatical competence and assist you to develop a more sophisticated and formal register of vocabulary, idiom and advanced syntax.

During class you'll gain the ability to discuss a wide range of topics in written and spoken Portuguese, giving you the confidence to converse articulately upon complex and intellectual subjects.

You develop expertise in summarising texts in the target language, comprehension of both written and spoken material, translation, guided composition writing and oral presentations in the target language.

The module includes study of the different cultural, social and historical factors which influence language use.

This module explores how the Fifth Republic came into being and examines the problems of bedding in a regime that revolutionised French political culture without jettisoning the key features of the 'modèle républicain'.

We follow a chronological narrative of French politics between 1958 and 1969, and will also examine themes such as the ‘écriture de la constitution’, the clash of political visions and bipolarisation and its tensions. We conclude with de Gaulle's apparent act of 'political suicide' in 1969.

On this module we will look at the changing relationship between individuals and society in a French context. Key sociological concepts relating to the social construction of the individual are explored in order to analyse fiction and non-fiction texts that deal with work and social organisation in contemporary France.

The theoretical starting point of the module is Michel Foucault’s analysis of the emergence of ‘disciplinary’ societies.

Key fictional works include Laurent Cantet’s film L’emploi du temps and Thierry Beinstingel’s novel Retour aux mots sauvages.

This module looks at the various ways in which the novel has evolved and adapted to “the contemporary” by responding to the “everyday”. Giving an overview of the various approaches to the everyday in the contemporary novel from the 60s to the present, this module will explore how key authors negotiate, through their writing, the everyday’s indeterminacy and the unstable space it occupies between the social and the individual.

This module is designed to introduce you to the study of various forms of artistic work in relation to the political and social background of the French Revolutionary decade (1789 - 1799). A variety of works will be studied (theatre, opera, song, iconography, painting) in order to consider the reflection of contemporary events, the notion of politically engaged arts, and questions of cultural administration (theatrical repertory, representation, censorship and privilege).

The module will examine the range of social, political and philosophical questions raised by mass immigration to France in the post-war period. These questions will be tackled through historical analysis of patterns of migration and changing immigration policies, as well as through the study of relevant films, novels and theoretical texts which engage with questions of citizenship, identity and ethnicity.

This module will study the different ways travel has been used and represented in contemporary French and Francophone texts, arts and films. From tourism to exploration, from exile to migration, from pilgrimage to business travel, we will question the tacit ideologies found in contemporary travel discourses. We will study more specifically how contemporary discourses of travel have been, or not, adapting themselves to a post-colonial awareness and how it has enabled travellers to represent travel differently. The importance of this field has been steadily growing in between disciplines that range from literary studies to ethnography. The module will use these cross-cultural influences to create an arena in which to develop connections between key disciplines and different forms of arts (literature, ethnography, films and photography).

This module aims to introduce you to key aspects of French documentary cinema by considering a range of documentary cinematic techniques, and by looking at the ways in which documentary form has developed over time. The module examines the work of a range of filmmakers and explores the theoretical, socio-cultural and ethical questions raised by documentary cinema.

You will develop analytical tools that can be used to understand the different ways in which documentaries attempt to engage audiences and deal in sophisticated and often challenging ways with a range of issues.

This module looks at various issues relating to the field of language contact, including bilingualism, multilingualism and diglossia.

The module also explores the outcomes of such language contact:

• linguistic borrowing
• code-switching
• language maintenance
• language shift and language death
• the emergence of pidgins and creoles
• the development of language policy and planning
• the shaping of attitudes towards language

These topics will be explored by using examples from several different languages, and by looking at the French language in contact with other languages in France and further afield.

Literature uses ancient mythology as a rich source to describe powerful emotions, cunning politics or psychological drama. This module will explore how selected German writers engage with the myth of Medea, the powerful wife of Jason, who - according to the Classical myth - kills the sons she loves to hurt Jason.

We will look at how the myth is used, changed and reinvented in texts written between 1926 and 1998. We will consider theoretical writings on mythology and also look at the the Medea myth in paintings, film, theatre and music.

This module will examine historical, political and philosophical approaches to the concept of national identity between divided and post-unification Germany, concentrating on the changing relationships between the articulation of conventional patriotism and self-critical reflection on National Socialism.

Although Germany only had overseas colonies between 1884 and 1918, German, Austrian and Swiss involvement in European colonial history permeates literature and culture to the present day.

This module uses short novels, stories and poems written between 1800 and the present to look at a range of themes in German postcolonial studies: for example, the exotic fascination with Africa; slavery and Afro-German history; anti-colonialism and nostalgia for Germany’s lost empire; political anti-imperialism and anti-racism; the German writing of African immigrants; and the rise since the 1990s of a critical postcolonial memory of Germany’s often forgotten colonial history.

This module looks at how German-language theatre has responded to the challenge of new forms of media. We will draw on theoretical writings on the theatre and will reflect on such issues as agency and identity, the nature of historical material, the status of the audience and the challenge of new technologies. We will read five formally innovative plays from 1927 to 2000 - one called ‘Offending the Audience’, another in which 10,000 feet of film footage were used in the premiere, one a harrowing portrayal of the events of Holocaust, and one a reality TV-style live soap opera, put on over seven weeks in its premiere.

This module examines the problems inherent in translating source-culturally significant materials. Cultural transfer is considered in both directions (English-German and German-English).

The module focuses on two areas of cultural transfer: in literature and in TV and film scripts. The module is assessed in English.

Explore how literature and film can give us a deeper insight into the experiences of conflict in 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Iberian societies.

Together we’ll investigate the way in which film and literature have reflected, resisted, interrogated and remembered the socio-political violence and conflicts that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries so far in Europe (with a particular emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula) and Latin America (including Brazil).

Your Spanish and Portuguese language skills (along with translations or subtitles where needed) will help you adopt a comparative approach focussing on the formal experiments and common preoccupations of filmmakers and writers across different national cultures and historical contexts.

You will discuss questions around a range of themes which may include; authoritarianism, confronting colonial and neo-colonial practices, racial and class inequality, social injustice, gender and sexuality, and living on with the legacies of past traumas.

You can expect to discuss works by writers such as Roberto Bolaño, Ruben Fonseca, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enríquez, Clarice Lispector and Liliana Heker. Feature films and documentaries by Alfonso Cuarón, Pedro Almodóvar, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Claudia Llosa, Patricio Guzmán and Susana de Sousa Dias will also be discussed.

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of the centrality of the history of slavery in the study of Brazilian society and of the significance of Brazilian Slavery in both the transatlantic slave systems and slave societies in the Americas. In the first semester the module introduces students to the different disciplinary and intellectual approaches to the study of slavery in Brazil.

Through a combination of lecture and seminar work, students are encouraged to develop skills of analysis and interpretation through close reading of key texts. While the historiographical focus in on Brazil, the module attempts to accommodate students who have not studied Brazilian history or Portuguese. Mindful of the different skills sets and degree programmes of all students, the module draws on comparative contexts of slavery across the Americas both thematically and theoretically.

Topics covered in the first part of the module include the ideology of slavery, economics of slavery, systems of slave labour, slave culture and community, slave identity, and slave resistance. Within these topics we examine themes of agency, race, class, ethnicity and gender.

Over the course of the first semester students are expected to identify a topic for their second-semester research essay. The second semester is student lead, based on presentation work in a seminar setting. Students will be required to produce individual in-class presentations (work-in-progress) based on their book review.

Throughout the module close attention will be paid to the problems of sources and perspectives in the study of the history of slavery. The module encourages students to develop an awareness of how different historical sources are used and to think critically about them. In class discussions and in written work the expectation is that students apply comparative analysis and demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of historiography. 

This module uses a focus on identities and identity formation, as represented or articulated in literary, cinematic and visual texts, as the basis of a chronological survey of the development of lusophone societies and cultures in the long 20th century (roughly, from 1880 to the present). Approaches to these set texts will introduce, and equip you to evaluate, a history of changing conceptions both of racial, ethnic, sexual, and class identity.

The module will explore how shifts in social taxonomies and conceptions of community and difference relate both to scientific and philosophical discoveries and innovations and to the changing political and socio-economic structures of Portugal and the African territories formerly subject to Portuguese colonial rule. It will also provide an introduction to the study of the concept of identity itself, and of the interrogation, by psychoanalysis and post-structuralist thinking, of preconceptions of either individual or collective identities as stable and unitary. 

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This module covers popular music in Russia during the late tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet eras as an area of culture that affects ordinary people in many different ways – in Russia, songs have often brought people together, sometimes in celebration, sometimes to challenge authority, and they have also offered individuals fun or solace.

In the module you learn how to examine all this, applying concepts such as authorship, performance, technology and ideology, and learning how to evaluate the relationship Russian music has to popular music in the UK, USA and elsewhere. The examples studied include pre-revolutionary popular songs and gramophone culture, the assimilation of jazz, patriotic and propaganda songs, rock and pop-rock.

With guidance you will develop your own essay question focusing on a topic within Russian popular musical culture of their choice. No prior study of music is required for this module but you must also be taking Russian 3, or to be at an equivalent level in Russian, in order to choose this module.

You'll gain an understanding of the growth and development of the cult of saints in the Eastern Christian world in the context of the history and culture of late antiquity and the middle ages.

We focus on the interpretation of original written sources and icons, allowing you to master the basic tools for conducting research in the field.

This year-long module builds on the skills acquired in Serbian/Croatian 1 with more emphasis on independent learning and preparation.

The module develops abilities to break down complex linguistic structures in order to facilitate comprehension and communication skills.

Teaching uses materials from written, audio and video sources, and includes grammar classes. There are exercises in comprehension, translation, guided composition writing, and presentations in the target language.

Film can provide unique insight into how mythology is deployed that creates and maintain nations. This is particularly the case for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a state which relied heavily on the foundational myth of 'Brotherhood and Unity' to bring together citizens across six different republics who recently had been divided by WWII.

In this module, we'll study a selection of films from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and its successor states, with a focus on film from Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. These films show us how 'Brotherhood and Unity' was constructed on film, how it was deployed to bolster the power of Yugoslavia's leader, Josip Broz Tito, and how it was ultimately destroyed to devastating effect.

By the end of the module, you'll have developed an ability to 'read' cinema through the analysis of themes, visuals, and narratives to gain a better understanding of the cultural and historical circumstances under which films are produced.

There is an option to watch these films with subtitles, so there is no expectation that students have Serbian/Croatian language skills (although, if you are studying the language, we encourage you to watch films without subtitles). We'll also provide an overview of Yugoslav history and film studies so no prior knowledge of these subjects is required.

This module introduces the construction of national and collective memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Russian culture and society. The lectures and seminars focus on contemporary and subsequent artistic and social responses to the experience of war, but also examine individual acts of remembering (diaries, reports, letters) in the context of a wider cultural memory.

The module equips you with the skills to analyse, evaluate and discuss Russian and Soviet commemorations of the Second World War and the construction of a collective memory; to identify and contrast different strands of narratives of war experiences which unite individual and collective responses to the Second World War; to analyse and apply relevant theories of memory to Russian and Soviet strategies of commemorating the war; to discuss some of the central problems related to Russian and Soviet memories of the Second World War, including the relationship between memory and forgetting, narratives of suffering and sacrifice and the relationship between acts and rituals of commemoration and the construction of national identity/identities.

This module aims to equip you with the skills required of linguists in the modern, digital workplace and may be taken by those studying Russian or Serbian/Croatian.

The project gives you the opportunity to combine your achievements in language and non-language modules studied over the course of their degree. You work in a group on a topic agreed with the module convenor to create a final Language Project, in the form of a translation, blogpost, podcast, short film or public performance.

This module looks at key 20th century Spanish American novels and short stories and considers issues such as race, gender, sexuality and the conflict of cultures. You will be trained in using a broad range of tools of narrative and rhetorical analysis so as to engage in debates about literary representation and aesthetics, and will hone your use of these through a programme of research tasks, seminar presentations, group discussions, and written assignments.

Explore how literature and film can give us a deeper insight into the experiences of conflict in 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Iberian societies.

Together we’ll investigate the way in which film and literature have reflected, resisted, interrogated and remembered the socio-political violence and conflicts that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries so far in Europe (with a particular emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula) and Latin America (including Brazil).

Your Spanish and Portuguese language skills (along with translations or subtitles where needed) will help you adopt a comparative approach focussing on the formal experiments and common preoccupations of filmmakers and writers across different national cultures and historical contexts.

You will discuss questions around a range of themes which may include; authoritarianism, confronting colonial and neo-colonial practices, racial and class inequality, social injustice, gender and sexuality, and living on with the legacies of past traumas.

You can expect to discuss works by writers such as Roberto Bolaño, Ruben Fonseca, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enríquez, Clarice Lispector and Liliana Heker. Feature films and documentaries by Alfonso Cuarón, Pedro Almodóvar, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Claudia Llosa, Patricio Guzmán and Susana de Sousa Dias will also be discussed.

This module aims to provide students with an understanding of the centrality of the history of slavery in the study of Brazilian society and of the significance of Brazilian Slavery in both the transatlantic slave systems and slave societies in the Americas. In the first semester the module introduces students to the different disciplinary and intellectual approaches to the study of slavery in Brazil.

Through a combination of lecture and seminar work, students are encouraged to develop skills of analysis and interpretation through close reading of key texts. While the historiographical focus in on Brazil, the module attempts to accommodate students who have not studied Brazilian history or Portuguese. Mindful of the different skills sets and degree programmes of all students, the module draws on comparative contexts of slavery across the Americas both thematically and theoretically.

Topics covered in the first part of the module include the ideology of slavery, economics of slavery, systems of slave labour, slave culture and community, slave identity, and slave resistance. Within these topics we examine themes of agency, race, class, ethnicity and gender.

Over the course of the first semester students are expected to identify a topic for their second-semester research essay. The second semester is student lead, based on presentation work in a seminar setting. Students will be required to produce individual in-class presentations (work-in-progress) based on their book review.

Throughout the module close attention will be paid to the problems of sources and perspectives in the study of the history of slavery. The module encourages students to develop an awareness of how different historical sources are used and to think critically about them. In class discussions and in written work the expectation is that students apply comparative analysis and demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of historiography. 

You may believe that politics and literature are two distinct fields of study, but this module will help you understand the complex but integral relationship between the two.

We’ll explore the representation of key social and political issues within contemporary Spanish literature. You’ll discover how literature in late capitalism, and contemporary ‘Hispanic’ authors in particular, dealt with issues of language, identity, culture, society, nationhood, gender, class, memory, time and writing.

We also explore debates regarding the consistency of the categories of ‘Spain’ and ‘Spanishness’ when analysing cultural production in contemporary Iberia. This shall lead us to assess the competing discursive practices involved in remapping the notion of Spanish canonical literature at the beginning of the new millennium.

Taught in Spanish, this module has been designed to give you a thorough insight into Spanish business including the contexts that have influenced its development and the ways it interacts with wider society.

We'll investigate a range of factors that have shaped the Spanish business landscape since the transition to democracy, such as:

• changes within the global and European regulatory environment
• ideological factors
• entrepreneurship
• government action to attract foreign investors, promote Spanish FDI and boost trade with regions such as Latin America, Europe and China.

You'll not only gain a historical understanding, but a contemporary perspective too by looking at case studies of both companies like Inditex (the owners of Zara and other important fashion brands) and important Spanish industries such as tourism. The module also explores some of the less positive impacts and criticisms of Spanish business practices relating to the environment, debt and corruption.

Free education from cradle to grave has been central to modern Cuba’s cultural and ideological identity. This module will encourage you to explore Cuba’s revolutionary change since 1959, through an examination of its evolving ideologies. You’ll review the critical factors of nationalism, dependency, radicalism and leadership which shaped developments from the original rebellion up to the present day.

Together we’ll discover the role of education policies and the ways in which a ‘cultural revolution’ was fundamental to the socialisation process of, and popular participation in (or dissent from) the Revolution.

This study will help you form conclusions about both the meaning of ‘ideology’ within the context of the Revolution, and the international geo-political significance of Cuba's self-definition and evolution.

This module will present a survey of the literature and film produced in Spain during the Franco period (1939-1975), focusing in detail on at least one literary work and one film from each decade of the Dictatorship. The chosen literary texts will include poetry and prose fiction, while the filmic ones belong to a variety of genres, including historical drama, neorealism and melodrama, comedy, and documentary.

The texts covered include some which reflect (and even help to propagate) the ideology of the rÉgime and others which stand in opposition to it. Each will, in its own way, provide an insight into the political, social and cultural attitudes of the decade to which it belongs as well as into the changing role and conditions of literary and cinematic production during this period. 

This module invites students to critically engage with representations of apparently disruptive and transgressive French and Francophone women from determining moments in French history between 1789 and 1945, including individuals who were violent, who took up arms, were transgressive, broke laws, and were institutionalized, deported, and defamed in the press – all in the name of social justice. Examples include revolutionary Théroigne de Méricourt, who dressed as a man in order to fight for women’s revolutionary involvement and was institutionalised for madness, and Louise Michel, one of the women accused of setting devastating fires that gutted government and cultural institutions during the Semaine Sanglante of the Paris Commune.

Students will analyse case studies in the light of the dominant gender discourses of their time (during the 1789 Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Belle Epoque, and the First and Second World Wars), as manifest in cultural representation, such as press, literary and visual sources. Where possible, they will also study the voice of lived experience, via memoirs and works published by the women in question, in order to explore how their own perspectives interacted with representations of them.

Students will examine the case studies and work on a thematic research project in the second. For this, they will be invited to identify a theme pertinent to at least two of the case studies, in order to comment on the threads that link women’s militancy across centuries, but also to explore the extent to which ‘difficult’ women contributed to lasting change in women’s lives over time. Possible themes might include but are not limited to social class, gender and gender identity, (political) violence, mental ill health and perceptions of madness.

The module will give students the opportunity to consult digitized primary source material such as newspapers, books and imagery via archives such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s collection, gallica.fr.

This module looks at various issues relating to the field of language contact, including bilingualism, multilingualism and diglossia.

The module also explores the outcomes of such language contact:

• linguistic borrowing
• code-switching
• language maintenance
• language shift and language death
• the emergence of pidgins and creoles
• the development of language policy and planning
• the shaping of attitudes towards language

These topics will be explored by using examples from several different languages, and by looking at the French language in contact with other languages in France and further afield.

This module provides final-year students studying French as part of their degree with the opportunity to study in some depth eight contemporary French-language films that deal in different ways with the interaction between personal and political aspects of contemporary life.

The module will encourage students to engage with the films both thematically as texts that articulate important contemporary issues, and also formally as films that draw on specific cinematic techniques and make a series of aesthetic choices in order to engage with the personal and the political.

This module aims to introduce you to key aspects of French documentary cinema by considering a range of documentary cinematic techniques, and by looking at the ways in which documentary form has developed over time. The module examines the work of a range of filmmakers and explores the theoretical, socio-cultural and ethical questions raised by documentary cinema.

You will develop analytical tools that can be used to understand the different ways in which documentaries attempt to engage audiences and deal in sophisticated and often challenging ways with a range of issues.

The module will examine the range of social, political and philosophical questions raised by mass immigration to France in the post-war period. These questions will be tackled through historical analysis of patterns of migration and changing immigration policies, as well as through the study of relevant films, novels and theoretical texts which engage with questions of citizenship, identity and ethnicity.