MA English & Literary Media

• Narrating Identities: Self, Text & the World: This unit aims to provide you with a sophisticated knowledge and understanding of cultural and critical influences on a range of texts and literary media, exploring how literary, philosophical, and aesthetic movements have been used to define, construct and represent the self across the 20th and 21st centuries.

• Markets & Audiences: A sociological approach to studying the cultural industries and their audiences, exploring marketing and promotion of cultural texts. You'll consider how para texts and extra textual materials contribute to audience expectations and experiences, and how they reflect cultural and political differences.

• Interactive Storytelling: Investigate and understand the art of storytelling in digital-interactive media. Starting with a brief pre-history, this unit will come to grips with contemporary traits thrown up at the intersection between digitalisation and interactivity. There will be a rigorous scholarly framework for your existing digital literacy and you'll have space to reflect on and improve your competence with interactive digital media.

• Publishing Cultures and Materialities: From the eras of Cuneiform to Kindle, you'll study public writing as material objects, which have an economy, history and culture. Publishing as we’ve known it stems from a specific iteration of those conditions and is now shifting into the online new. To take advantage of the opportunities and challenges this development affords, you'll therefore look at fiction from this material sociological perspective.

• Culture & Controversy: You'll explore definitions of free speech, freedom of expression, censorship and public interest in the context of public cultural controversies. For example, D.H Lawrence’s 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover' might be studied as a literary text, whilst you'll also study the historical context of attempts to censor and suppress the novel and debates over that suppression in the print and broadcast media.

• Mediating the Nation: The relationship between cultural production and a series of changing historical and political contexts in contemporary Britain. More specifically, you'll consider cultural constructions of Britain, Britons and Britishness. By analysing a range of literary and cultural forms, you'll explore how these things have been constructed and legitimised through culture historically. This unit will also look at how two historical developments have had a significant impact on how British ness has been culturally constructed: the transition away from imperialism and political devolution across the United Kingdom.

• Dissertation (academic) OR Major Project (creative): An opportunity to develop and show your critical, analytical and research skills by completing a significant piece of academic or creative work. You'll finish your studies and work with a degree of independence not previously experienced in your coursework, focusing on topics that interest you the most. You'll hone your strengths and establish curiosity to take with you into future careers.

You have the option undertake a minimum four-week placement during the course, providing an opportunity to apply your acquired knowledge and skills in the workplace. You are required to find your own placement; however, our Careers & Employability Service and your faculty placements office are on hand to support you.

Programme specifications provide definitive records of the University's taught degrees in line with Quality Assurance Agency requirements. Every taught course leading to a BU Award has a programme specification which describes its aims, structure, content and learning outcomes, plus the teaching, learning and assessment methods used.

Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the programme specification, the information is liable to change to take advantage of exciting new approaches to teaching and learning as well as developments in industry. If you have been unable to locate the programme specification for the course you are interested in, it will be available as soon as the latest version is ready. Alternatively please contact us for assistance.

This international prize – a result of a partnership of Bournemouth University and if:book UK – promotes the best in new media writing and you can enter your exciting and inventive stories that integrate a variety of formats, platforms and digital media.

Fresher is a publishing press, established at Bournemouth University to nurture the publishing talent of the future and support writers everywhere. Fresher runs the Bournemouth Writing Prize, an annual international short story and poetry competition, designed to boost your career as a writer.

Please see our website for the application deadlines. You should apply as early as possible to be considered for your course of choice. If you require a student visa, apply for the visa as soon as you have an unconditional offer and receive your CAS. There may be delays in visa processing in your country and you need to be in Bournemouth ready to study for the start of term.

December and January is one of our busiest application periods and therefore it may take us a little longer to process incoming applications. For courses with a January start date, we recommend submitting your application as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

Click the green ‘Apply now’ button to submit your application free of charge online through myHub, our application portal. You will create your own myHub account so that you can track the progress of your application. Don’t forget to save your application as you go; you can return to it at as many times as you want before you submit it. For more information visit our How to apply section.

The normal requirements for embarking upon a postgraduate taught degree are:

• A Bachelors Honours degree with 2:2 or equivalent in any subject.

If you lack the formal academic qualifications needed to enter a postgraduate or post-experience degree, there are several alternative routes to follow. Some of these are based on experience. Contact the Future Students Enquiry Team for more information.

You can find details of the international qualifications we accept, and what level of study they apply to, on our entry requirements for non-UK students' page.

Please see below some examples of the qualifications for entry:

• India: Bachelor’s degree (4 years) from a recognised HE institution with a minimum overall result of 55% 
• Nigeria:  Bachelor's degree from a recognised institution with a minimum classification of 2:4 
• China:  Chinese Bachelor's (Honours) degree from a recognised higher education institution with 65% or above 
• Turkey: Bachelor’s degree (Lisans Diplomasi - four years) with a minimum overall GPA of 2.3/4.0 
• Vietnam:  Bachelor's degree/Bang tot nghiep dai hoc with an average score of 6.5/10, or 2.25/4, or a Master’s degree/Thac si. 

All applications will be subject to a minimum grade and your degree may need to be in a relevant subject area.

English language requirements

If English is not your first language, you will need to provide evidence that you understand English to a satisfactory level. English language requirements for this course are normally:

IELTS (Academic) 6.5 with a minimum of 6.5 in writing and 6.0 in speaking, listening and reading, or equivalent.

View further information about our English language requirements.

Bournemouth University International College offers a number of pre-sessional English and preparatory programmes to prepare international students for postgraduate study at BU. Admission to the degree is guaranteed on successful completion of your course to the required level.

Roles our graduates have taken on include:

• Scriptwriting
• Print journalism
• Radio production
• Corporate communications.

• Media
• Journalism
• Publishing
• Scriptwriting.

If you want to continue your studies after achieving your Master’s, you can look into our range of doctoral programmes.

What’s included in your tuition fee?

Your tuition fee covers expenses associated with your course including tuition materials, access to facilities, mandatory field trips and the following:

• Materials for laboratory and field-based teaching activity
• Support for finding placements (UK or abroad) and fieldwork, and non-financial support whilst on placement
• A range of student services – advisors, help desks, counsellors, placement support and careers service
• The Library – access to a wide range of electronic resources (databases, e-journals and e-books), print and multimedia collections, subject librarians and study spaces
• Access to Brightspace, our virtual learning environment, which offers a responsive and personalised learning experience with powerful learning analytics capabilities, integrated social media and advanced video features.
• IT labs (some open 24/7), wireless network, AV equipment to borrow
• Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) scheme
• Disability and additional learning support
• The BU Language Centre to help you develop/improve foreign or English language skills
• 24 hours a day, 365 days a year security team.

Additional costs

We are committed to offering you value for money and ensuring there are no hidden costs while you are studying with us, therefore we have listed below any additional costs you may incur that are not covered by your tuition fee:

• Laptops, tablets and mobile devices and any software used on personal devices. Access to a personal computer is strongly recommended for your study. If you are experiencing financial difficulty, visit our website for information regarding hardship funds.
• Accommodation and living costs. Please visit our website for more information.
• ​Travel costs for optional field trips, outdoor wear and footwear for mandatory and optional field trips (if applicable).
• Travel costs to and from the University campus. An annual bus pass can be purchased alongside your rent if you are living in halls of residence/Unilet accommodation or may be purchased separately.
• ​Travel costs to and from your placement (both in the UK and overseas) if this is part of your course of study. Placement year funding information can be found on our website.
• Clothing or equipment costs required for your placement if this is part of your course of study. 
• SportBU membership.

While all aspects of the programme, including required field trips, are included in the fee, additional, optional or extra curricula activities may be available for which a student contribution is required.

If you need to repeat one or more units during the course of your studies (with or without attendance) the pricing will be pro-rata of the full time fee.

International (not Rep. of Ireland) students need to pay a non-refundable £3,000 deposit to secure their place on a postgraduate course. You will need to pay your deposit by the date stated in your offer letter. The remainder of your fee will be payable on registration/enrolment. There are two exceptions to the non-refundable rule on the deposit:

• You fail to meet the academic or English requirements of your offer
• You are refused a visa to enter the UK, provided the reason for the refusal is not a fraudulent application.

We offer a range of scholarships to students who are beginning their studies at BU. Our fees and funding pages also provide details on living costs, budgeting and paying your tuition fees.

Simon Frost is Principal Lecturer in English at Bournemouth University and Senior Editor for Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature. He was Director of Transnational Affairs and Executive Board member for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), 2009-2020. In addition to numerous articles on publishing, literature and reading studies, he has authored two monographs, incl. Reading, Wanting and Broken Economics (SUNY, 2021), and in his research works closely with organisations and companies involved in publishing. Prior to academia, Simon worked in publishing, translation and arts.  

Dr Julia Round is a Principal Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication, where she teaches units on ‘Crime and Terror’ (BA English), ‘Children’s Literature’ (BA English), and ‘Culture and Controversy’ (MA English & Literary Media). Her research focuses on Gothic, comics and children’s literature.

She edits the academic journal Studies in Comics and organises the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (now in its ninth year). She is a leading figure in British comics studies and received the 2015 Inge Award for Comics Scholarship for her research on The Walking Dead.

Her academic books include Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (McFarland, 2014), the co-edited collection Real Lives Celebrity Stories (Bloomsbury, 2014), and Misty and Gothic for Girls in British Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2018).

She published her first short comic, ‘Doll Parts’, in the anthology Wilma: Whatever Happened to Girls’ Comics? (Inkpot, 2017). You can find out more about her work and contact her directly at www.juliaround.com – she is always happy to talk!​

Dr Sam Goodman is a Professor in English & Communication, he teaches on units including Media & Trauma (BA English), Space, Place & Environment (BA English) and Narrating Identities (MA English & Literary Media).

His research interests focus on formations of Britishness across diverse forms of culture, from literary texts to video games and beyond. He is the author of British Spy Fiction & the End of Empire (2015), and co-editor of Medicine, Health & the Arts: Approaches to Medical Humanities (2014), both published with Routledge, and was a BBC/Arts and Humanities Research Council New Generation Thinker for 2015-16, and continues to make programmes with the BBC.

He is currently pursuing a project on alcohol and colonial British India funded by the Wellcome Trust, and documents his research on the blog: imperialmeasuresblog.wordpress.com.

Dr Hywel Dix is Professor in English at Bournemouth University. He was formerly Raymond Williams Research Fellow at the University of Glamorgan, leading to the publication of After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (Second Edition, 2013).

He has published extensively on the relationship between literature, culture and political change in contemporary Britain, most notably in the monograph Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain (Continuum, 2010). His wider research interests include modern and contemporary literature, postmodernism, critical cultural theory and autofiction.

His monograph about literary careers entitled The Late-Career Novelist was published by Bloomsbury in 2017 and an edited collection of essays on Autofiction in English is due out with Palgrave in 2018.

Dr James Pope has a continuing interest in fiction across the media, particularly looking at how new-media may be changing narrative forms and reading and writing practices.

He has specific research interests in interactive fiction, the teaching of creative writing in digital media environments, and children’s literature. As well as several publications around interactive fiction, and children’s literature, James has also published six novels for children and teenagers, including Spin The Bottle (Penguin), which was listed as one of the best teenage novels of 1998 by the Federation of Children’s Book Groups.

He created the dedicated software platform for online interactive storytelling, Genarrator, www.genarrator.org. He is also co-founder and organiser of the annual New-Media Writing Prize, now in its eighth year, which celebrates and promotes interactive narrative around the world. Currently he is working on community-based new-media storytelling projects, and a VR narrative project with digital artists Judi Alston and Andy Campbell.

Dr Yugin Teo is Senior Lecturer in Communications and English at Bournemouth University. He has previously taught literature and film at the University of Brighton and the University of Sussex where he completed his doctorate.

His research on the representation of memory in literature and film has been published in the journals Critique, Medical Humanities and Science Fiction Film and Television. His monograph Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.