Modern Languages - Postgraduate Research Opportunities

The Department of Modern Languages is home to internationally renowned researchers in a range of European and world languages and cultures. Our interests range from Medieval, Translation and Music Studies, to the interdisciplinary field of Sexuality and Gender Studies.

The Department incorporates teaching and research across Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, with opportunities to pursue specialist, cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary postgraduate study.

The MA by Research programme requires you to prepare a thesis of up to 40,000 words on a topic of your choice under the expert guidance of an academic member of staff. The PhD, the most advanced research degree, comprises of a thesis of up to 80,000 words on a subject of your choice, again under the expert supervision of an academic member of staff.

You can study an MA by Research or PhD programme on campus or by distance learning. Please note that if you are studying with us by distance learning, there is a compulsory visit to campus in your first year of study.

Research interests of staff include:

The Department fosters an interconnected vision of Modern Languages and our research explores how the study of languages, discourses, and cultures challenges how we understand and experience the world.

We have particular strengths in the following research areas where leading academics, who have extensive experience in supervising students, produce cutting-edge research.

• Arabic studies
• Colonial and postcolonial studies
• Digital humanities in modern languages
• Exile and migration
• French studies
• German studies
• Hispanic studies
• Italian studies
• Linguistics
• Medieval studies
• Memory studies
• Music
• Nineteenth century studies
• Modern languages (audio-visual)
• Russian studies
• Sexuality and gender studies
• Translation studies

For full research interests of staff, please read our staff profiles or visit the 'Research' tab on each programme's webpage.

Funding Notes

Please visit the College of Arts and Law funding page for information on possible funding opportunities: View Website. You can find out about all the scholarships that are available on our Postgraduate Funding Database. If you find a scholarship that you are interested in, we would recommend you check the application guidelines as these can differ between funding schemes. For some of them, you can apply for funding as soon as you have submitted an application for the course. If you would like to start in 2024, applications for the AHRC Midlands4Cities Scholarship opened on 16 October 2023 and closes on 10 January 2024.