Brunel University
School of Arts

The School of Arts offers postgraduate degrees (both taught and research) in the subject areas of Contemporary Performance, Music, English, Journalism, Film and Television Studies. A distinctive feature of the School is the emphasis it places on developing both practical and critical skills. This is true not only on the taught Masters programmes but on the MPhil and PhD research programmes where it is possible to submit creative work in combination with or, in some instances, as an alternative to the written thesis. At Brunel all lecturers are actively engaged in research or creative practice. This means that you will be introduced to cutting-edge issues and practice in your modules, by experts who participate in the development of the field. Our taught Masters programmes aim to offer you vocational skills and the opportunity to enhance your knowledge and understanding of the contexts in which cultural practices are produced and consumed.

There are taught Masters in:

• Contemporary Performance Making
• Digital Games: Theory and Design
• Documentary Practice
• Journalism (NCTJ accredited)
• International Journalism
• Campaigning and Journalism
• Media and Public Relations
• English Literature
• Creative Writing: The Novel
• Contemporary Literature and Culture

For details on these MA programmes please contact pg-arts-admissions@brunel.ac.uk or visit www.brunel.ac.uk/arts

The School of Arts has a growing postgraduate community and offers a range of resources to support MPhil and PhD research.

Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance

• Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance (CCDP)

The Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance was created in autumn 2006 and is now recognized as a Brunel University Research Centre.

The polycentric emphases in the new research environment rest on a distinctive trans-disciplinary vision which fuses artistic performance, theatre and live art with new media technologies and creative software writing/engineering. Open to partnerships in research collaboration with others in the School of Arts, the School of Engineering and Design, and other centers and institutions elsewhere in the UK and abroad, the core group activities centre on the integration of creative arts, performance writing, directing, choreography and performance design with digital technologies, investigating new and exciting opportunities for working at the frontiers of art, science, and technology, where new modes of performance and interaction are invented.

The core research group in the Centre and its partners seek to explore and to help define the future of performance art in its intersections with digital cultures, and with new media technologies and communications in the creative industries. Our strategic aims over the next hears envision building a leading international role in researching physical theatre and digital performance (with the annual ARTAUD FORUM serving as a hybrid laboratory for research symposia and exhibitions); to develop innovative collaborations with institutional and extra-institutional partners; and sustain research excellence amongst our postgraduate students.

Centre for Contemporary Music Practice

• Centre for Contemporary Music Practice (CCMP)

The CCMP presents seminars and events related to contemporary musical practice and thought. The Centre is based at Brunel University, which has a rare concentration of contemporary music specialists on its academic staff. While many of the Centre's activities focus on the work of its members, its seminars also provide opportunities to encounter the work of eminent composers, performers and thinkers from the UK and around the world. The Centre also offers seminars at the University of London in collaboration with the Institute of Musical Research. Recent guests include Peter Ablinger, Paul Griffiths, Clarence Barlow, Tom Johnson, Hans W Koch, François-Bernard Mâche, and Phill Niblock. The CCMP's current Artists-in-Association are Apartment House, Leafcutter John, and Piano Circus.

We are able to offer music supervision at MPhil and PhD level in the following areas:-

• Instrumental composition for the concert hall
• Composition in mixed-media contexts, and involving for example, live electronics and/or video
• Electroacoustic music in recorded format
• The relationship between composition and both improvisation and performance
• Conducting
• Performance, again in a broad sense, and including popular music(s)
• Music and phonetics
• Sound design for installation and choreography
• 20th Century musicology; aesthetics and sociology of music

Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing

• Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW)

English and Creative Writing at Brunel have gone from strength to strength. We have a thriving graduate community, and welcome PhD applications in any of our particular areas of strength, which include contemporary literature, Shakespeare, Renaissance studies, Victorian literature and culture, creative writing, and world literature in English. The School of Arts has recently made significant new staff appointments to guarantee depth and diversity in its research programmes and its teaching. These new appointments also confirm our commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and culture. Our team includes Fay Weldon, Benjamin Zephaniah and Will Self.

Research in the areas of contemporary literary criticism and creative writing is clustered within the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW). The BCCW organises regular programmes of research seminars and public readings by authors (Writers Talking); and runs the following popular MA programmes: MA in Contemporary Literature, MA English Literature and Culture and MA in Creative Writing: The Novel.

Non-traditional literature

Research in English is organised around our commitment to the study of non-traditional and marginalised literatures in their intellectual and cultural contexts. Brunel has one of the most significant groupings of specialists in contemporary literatures in the country. It is also a national centre for the study of postcolonial literature.

Benefits for students

This research culture benefits undergraduate as well as postgraduate students. At Brunel, all of your lecturers are actively engaged in research or creative practice. This means that you will be introduced to cutting-edge issues and practice in your modules, by experts who participate in the development of the field. At level 3, the Special Author and Special Topic modules involve students in advanced and in-depth study of subjects in which lecturers share a particular research interest.

Some past research projects undertaken by faculty at Brunel include:

• Early modern death; the interaction between poetry, material culture and ritual in the seventeenth century
• Early modern spectacle: Elizabethan progresses, popular culture and reception
• Old age in early modern literature and culture
• War, heroic masculinity, and the body in the early modern period
• Catholic sensationalism in Victorian literature: religious prejudice, secular anxieties, and narratives of cultural subversion
• Fantasy writing of the 19th and 20th centuries
• Mass-Observation and Everyday Life
• The Origins of Intermodernism
• Modernist and postwar women's writing
• Popular fictions, popular culture and consumption
• The politics of cultural translation, literary production and consumption in the postcolonial field
• South Asian Anglophone writing, women's writing and literatures of the black and Asian diasporas in Britain
• Translation studies and the world literature context
• The elegiac mode in postmodern poetry
• The New York School and the Avant-Garde
• Postcolonial literature and theory
• Postwar Science Fiction
• 9/11 and the Traumatological

Screen Media Research Centre

• Screen Media Research Centre (SMRC)

The Screen Media Research Centre has established a substantial body of research in a range of screen media, principally film and television and areas of digital media including videogames.

The centre is also home to the Cult Film Archive, an internationally recognized resource dedicated to the study of a range of cult films. The holdings of the archive, currently some 4,000 titles, are used in connection with the research of members of staff, links with the film industry and in support of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching.

The SMRC is based in the School of Arts at Brunel, but also includes members from the School of Social Sciences and Media Studies

We offer supervision for PhD and MPhil research degrees in a wide range of areas of staff expertise, primarily in film, TV and videogames. These include but are not limited to:

• Recent and contemporary British, European, Hong Kong, Turkish, Middle Eastern, Hollywood and American independent cinema
• Cult film, television and other media
• British and American television
• Science fiction, horror, comedy, the western, crime films
• Documentary, video practice, practice as research
• Political cinema, activist media
• Gender, sexuality and the body in film
• Celebrity culture
• Videogame design and theory
• Marxist and psychoanalytical approaches to screen media
• Cinematic spectacle, narrative
• Avant-garde and experimental cinema
• Ecocriticism and screen media
• Trade unionism in film and TV industries

For information on any of our Research or PhD degrees please contact sue.ramus@brunel.ac.uk