European Languages MPhil

The Department of Modern Languages at Aberystwyth University offers an MPhil programme in a wide range of topics. Students undertaking an MPhil often spend a considerable part of their research period working from libraries abroad and or archives, while remaining under supervision from their mentor at Aberystwyth. 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 FalklandsMalvinas conflict; avant-garde; 20th-century Hispanic poetry; women’s cultural practice; and language learning and foreign language anxiety.

2:1 Bachelors (Honours) degree in a relevant subject area, or equivalent.