Children’s Literature and Literacies

The MA Children’s Literature and Literacies is a vibrant, wide-ranging degree course that offers professional development and academic progression by enhancing subject and research expertise in these interdisciplinary fields of study. Informed by current scholarship, research, and practice, it provides you an opportunity to develop in-depth and advanced knowledge and understanding of children’s literature and literacy through both wide-ranging and diverse specialist modules, culminating in an independent research project (MA dissertation) that reflects your individual ambition and aspirations, your engagement with conceptual and empirical research; and critical reflective approaches to research methods and professional situations, both practical and theoretical.

This MA aims to develop a broad, inclusive, critical, and contemporary understanding of literacies, including the range of digital, visual and interactive texts available to children and young people and the influence of these on their learning experiences. It gives you an opportunity to deepen your passion for literature written for children through research-led modules that engage with emerging frameworks and debates. It equips you with a wider understanding of current research methodologies and critical and theoretical frameworks, to sustain and further your independent research and topic interests and questions.

We have an established research culture, and you will be invited to join our staff at regular literary events, workshops, and presentations. You will be encouraged to participate in the research seminar series, conferences, and other public events. The institutional strength in children’s literature and literacy is interdisciplinary and demonstrated by Literature and Literacies Research Knowledge Exchange Unit (RKEU), a cross-disciplinary Research and Knowledge Exchange Unit whose activities and events will be of interest and open to you.

The English team is committed to producing high quality academic outputs, and this is acknowledged in the recent outcome of REF 2021. The publications of the department are an expression of the thematic range of the team’s work, the richness of its research, and the character of its public impact projects. REF 2021 recognised the quality of the engagement of English staff in public impact, as represented in projects extending locally, nationally, and internationally. Some of the published outputs assessed through REF 2021 included those reflecting our research interests in women writers, life stories, and the Victorian and Edwardian period, nineteenth-century literature and culture, and research on the popular media relating to the Falklands War. To these subjects, we now add expertise in travel writing, identity, migration and postcolonial studies.