96% Satisfaction with Learning Resources
Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey 2023
Hone your research skills via a group project
Why Lancaster?
Discover how gender is portrayed in 21st century culture and society, and explore this alongside literary representations from earlier periods
Explore public discussions related to #metoo, diversity and inclusion, gendered and racial violence, representations of difference, and unequal power dynamics in culture, publishing, and literature
Interact with professors and visiting academics in our Centre for Gender Studies, a research community active in feminist and inequality debate
Study on campus in the University Library’s bespoke Postgraduate Study Space, or in the Castle Quarter within the University’s Postgraduate Study Hub at The Storey, the city’s Victorian-build arts venue.
Be inspired by our rich programme of literary events on campus, online, and in the city’s historic Castle Quarter, including our Master's Literary Studies Conference, usually held in the Castle itself.
Enjoy the benefits of our partnership with the archive-rich Wordsworth Grasmere, including internship opportunities
Deepen your understanding of gender inequalities alongside studies in English Literature, and develop your voice to challenge social injustices or help shape the way organisations and governments operate.
Understanding inequality
Gender, sex and bodily discrimination affects all areas of society. During this course you’ll explore these inequalities and their intersections with areas like race and disability. The expertise you develop in this degree will allow you to take a sophisticated approach to contemporary issues facing society.
You’ll also join our community at the Centre for Gender Studies. Some of the most highly respected names in feminist literature have been involved with this Centre including Sara Ahmed, Beverley Skeggs, Maureen McNeil, and Imogen Tyler.
Examine issues of gender and inequality in literature
Alongside your work in Gender Studies, you can select from a range of moduleshoused within the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing. The Department has strengths in all periods and genres of literature, and engages extensively with how questions of gender are explored within literary texts.
Supportive community
You will typically be taught in weekly small-group seminars, and have regular one-to-one tutorials with a supervisor when working on your Dissertation, a long-form project exploring a topic of your own choosing.
We also encourage you to meet in person with all your tutors to discuss your work. You will have an academic advisor with whom you meet to review your progress.
Bursaries
Thanks to a generous endowment, the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing is able to offer:
The Bailrigg Awards – these are awards of up to £150 and are open to any student in the Department who is suffering financial hardship endowment.
Master's Programmes in Sociology at Lancaster University
Discover the key features of a master's degree in Sociology at Lancaster University. Be inspired by our tutors’ expertise in key areas such as climate change and social inequalities.
Being so close to the spectacular Lake District, home of the Romantic poets, the Department has world-class strengths in Romanticism. Our partnership with the Wordsworth Trust, at Grasmere, is long-established, and has a number of new benefits for all our students.
The Castle Quarter is both a wonderful place to enjoy, with many excellent places to eat and drink, and a wonderful resource for literary studies here at Lancaster. Our students in the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing have many opportunities to make the most of this resource.
Careers
By the time you finish this course you will have significantly expanded your understanding of literary art forms. Your expertise in gender studies will enable you to broaden your understanding and help shape change in both the private and public sectors.
This course will equip you for a range of exciting and impactful roles in areas such as journalism, publishing, marketing, social care, and politics.
Our graduates have gone on to work in organisations such as the BBC and UNICEF, as well as to positions such as:
CEO of a women's organisation
Youth engagement worker
Innovation manager for a third sector organisation
Production editor for a publishing company
Social policy officer
Domestic abuse team leader
You may choose to continue your studies at PhD level to deepen your knowledge and continue into an academic career. Graduates of this course may also choose to pursue their own writing career.
Advance your career with a Master's at Lancaster University - Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
Hear from alumni in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University. What did they study and how did their course propel their career?
Entry requirements
Academic Requirements
2:1 Hons degree (UK or equivalent) in Sociology, Gender Studies, English or a related field
We may also consider non-standard applicants, please contact us for information.
If you have studied outside of the UK, we would advise you to check our list of international qualifications before submitting your application.
English Language Requirements
We may ask you to provide a recognised English language qualification, dependent upon your nationality and where you have studied previously.
We normally require an IELTS (Academic) Test with an overall score of at least 7.0, and a minimum of 6.0 in each element of the test. We also consider other English language qualifications.
Delivered in partnership with INTO Lancaster University, our one-year tailored pre-master’s pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Lancaster University master’s degrees. Visit the INTO Lancaster University website for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.
Course structure
You will study a range of modules as part of your course, some examples of which are listed below.
Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, but changes may be necessary, for example as a result of student feedback, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes, and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
Core
core modules accordion
This module introduces you to the practicalities and philosophies of doing interdisciplinary research in gender and women’s studies. You will learn to interpret, understand and explore the consequences of particular research methods. You will also be encouraged to critically consider the relationship between theories and methods in research. The module also provides scope for reflecting on the politics of knowledge, the ethics of research, and the relationship between disciplines and interdisciplinary fields such as gender and women’s studies. You will learn how some key conceptual frameworks within feminism (for example, sex and gender, body politics, sexual difference, queer theory) have been constructed over time through both research practices and theoretical arguments. This module will be useful as preparation for your own research later in the programme and particularly for your Master's dissertation.
How are gender, sex and bodies understood in contemporary sociology and feminist theory? How do feminist theorists and social scientists address questions of difference, representation and performativity in their research? In this module, we engage with the work of particular theorists (enabling you to acquire skills in close reading and critical discussion), critically evaluate relevant empirical findings, and explore current issues of importance to sociology and feminism. Topics include medicalization and health, race and racism, sex and sexuality, bodily autonomy, and reproductive choice. The essays you write then give you scope to follow your own interests in more depth by using the reading lists provided and undertaking independent research.
Optional
optional modules accordion
This module will explore Gothic representations of, for example: pain and illness experience, chronic illness, psychiatric confinement, eating disorders, organ harvest and transplantation, genetic testing, and epidemic or disease emergence. Traditional Gothic tropes find ready echoes in illness. Subjects may experience their bodies as uncanny, once familiar but now strange; they may feel helpless and physically vulnerable; they strive to decipher the cryptic signs of the medical record and the body’s symptoms; they endure strange temporalities and carceral hospital sites; they are subjected to rituals of medical monitoring; and they become supplicants to powerful figures with mysterious knowledge. The Gothic mode can be part of a critique of the complex biopolitics of medicine and illness. Yet at the same time, representing illness and pain through a Gothic mode can carry ideological risks, reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions about which human lives are of value. You will explore the promise and perils of the Gothic mode in the arena of health humanities and critical medical humanities.
In this module we consider a major theme in classical and contemporary sociology – capitalism and its crisis tendencies. Topics for debate will include: ? The history of capitalist development ? The nature of capitalism: its phases, varieties, and global articulation ? The nature of the contemporary crisis in capitalism, its periodisation and temporalities, differences in its dynamics across so-called varieties of capitalism, and its broader economic, political, and socio-cultural repercussions ? The question of whether capitalism is governable ? The relationship between racism, gender and capitalism ? Crisis management, and crises of crisis management
This module engages with a socio-cultural analysis of what has been called a ‘consumer society’, a society with increasing emphasis on marketisation, commercialisation and commodification. The module approaches a variety of topics that consumer society has intensified - such as promotional culture, advertising and branding - and students will have the opportunity to work with a range of conceptual resources to produce understandings of these issues and their impact on society. This module, therefore, offers you key resources with which to understand contemporary society and social change in a way which complements their other core and optional modules.
This module is designed to introduce you to contemporary methodological issues, key approaches, practical techniques, and case examples relating to the study of media.
Many different methods are used in media, and that variety is reflected in this module. To explore research practice in this discipline, we look at textual and discourse analysis, visual analysis, ethnography and participatory approaches, but place a strong emphasis on engaging with issues of identity, differences, power and experience in the hyper-complex media and cultural environments that we live in.
To give you a taste of particular research methods and approaches, we draw on recent examples of media and cultural research done here at Lancaster, and encourage you to explore their theoretical and practical implications.
We aim to have a number of invited guest speakers on this module, and you will have the opportunity to discuss and critically evaluate different methodological approaches and learn how to draw on these approaches as a starting point for your own research. It is our aim that you acquire a good understanding of the key elements in planning and carrying out independent research projects.
The module is led by the Politics, Philosophy and Religion department with input from colleagues in Computing Science, Sociology and Criminology. We aim to foster interdisciplinary teaching and learning across social sciences and computing sciences. PPR491 Cybercrime is a core module on the MSc Cybersecurity degree and an optional module for PPR students MA students as well as those in Sociology and Law, so has been designed with you all in mind.
The module is block-taught across an intense two-week period, through lectures and seminar activities in Summer Term. There will be an hour for lunch each day, and several comfort breaks. Each lecture examines a specific issue relating to ‘cybercrime’. In week 23 you will present the final findings from your group task to the whole class.
In the group task you will learn how to use evidence-based methods to explore a cybercrime topic. We will show you how to do this on day 1. Sessions/topics are delivered by experts in their field, and there will be plenty of time for questions and debate.
Current debates over issues such as plastic and food waste, fracking, loss of biodiversity or climate justice – and the protest movements and campaigns that have arisen in response – provide tangible evidence that the relationship between society and the environment is a difficult and often controversial one. This module examines the role that sociology and social theory can play in helping us to understand that relationship better and explores the range of approaches that have been developed in environmental sociology. Studying the environment sociologically opens up a host of interconnected social, cultural and political issues. Whose knowledge counts? How can we handle unquantifiable risk? What role should technology play? And what about democracy, freedom, diversity and justice? Using lectures and seminar discussion, the module will lead you through the resources of sociology and social theory to enable you to think through these questions in relation to some of the most urgent environmental issues facing societies today.
Everyone in western culture wears clothes, that necessarily have been designed and manufactured by someone, and therefore no one can be exempt from the fashion industry. In the twenty-first century, however, this industry has reached a point of crisis as increasing attention to sweated labour, environmental sustainability, cultural appropriation, prescriptive body images and diversity of representation have challenged conventional ways of designing, manufacturing, marketing and consuming fashion. Since 2000, this has led to a growing number of films that directly address the fashion industry. These are underpinned by the often-overlooked art of costume design, which makes film a particularly vivid medium for the depiction of fashion.
By focusing on film, this module offers an accessible entry point to the social and economic issues affecting the fashion industry today as well as to fashion history and theory. The module begins by introducing other forms of fashion media that play an important role in the dissemination of fashion as well as becoming intertextual modes of representation within the films themselves. It then examines two films that summarise many of the themes of the course as a whole by reflecting on the representation of the fashion industry through magazine publishing. Finally, it works through the processes of the fashion industry – designing, manufacturing, marketing and consuming – typically exploring a film, two critical essays and selected examples of fashion media each week. It pays attention to three key themes: the way fashion narrative deploys the genre conventions of documentary, comedy, crime and Gothic/horror; the analysis of costume on screen; and the politics of and responses to crisis within the industry itself.
This module runs as an intensive workshop usually in the summer term... It offers an advanced introduction to feminist technoscience studies, focusing on theoretical and empirical developments, as well as key debates. It will ask what counts as ‘science’ and ‘technology’, how are they imagined and practised, and how scientific and technological knowledges are produced, circulated, and deployed.
Theoretical debates will be introduced and investigated through a specific empirical topic, chosen each year to reflect the particular expertise of tutors, for example, feminism encounters biotechnology; feminism and the non-human; bodies, cyborgs and prostheses; genomics, kinship and kinds; virtual and effective technologies.
This module is concerned with a range of wonderful texts from c.1919 to c.1980 that together suggest a line of broadly modernistic writing that has a fascination both with the city (primarily Paris, but also Berlin, Oxford, London, Zurich, and even that city of death which is the death camp) and with the mixing of genres - in particular, such genres as critical essay, philosophical treatise, poetry, comic dialogue, fragment, novel, anecdote, manifesto, autobiography, history, textual commentary, and travelogue. Featured authors currently include Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and Jacques Derrida. Special attention will be paid to texts that blur the genre-boundary that, traditionally, separates critical writing from creative writing, and students will be invited, if they wish, to submit such texts themselves.
This module aims to develop students’ understanding of the ways in which social phenomena are conceptualised, defined and measured. The module will be a mix of lectures, seminars, and computer-based labs where students will get to play with real data. You will access data, explore data sets, generate and modify variables, frequency counts, cross tabulation, produce tables, bar charts and scattergrams, and test relationships between variables.
This module examines manhunt narratives -- stories about the systematic pursuit of people who don't want to be found - in British and American writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It will address questions of space, power, violence, mobility and surveillance as they are raised by a range of set reading that covers classic thrillers (Buchan, Orczy), proto-feminist stories of female runaways (Gaskell, Wollstonecraft), narratives of escape from slavery (the Crafts, Whitehead), SF stories of hi-tech pursuit and evasion (Dick, Wells), and uncanny experiences of self-hunting (Conrad, Stevenson). The module asks how manhunt narratives work, what fears, desires and fantasies they cater for, and why they are such a prevalent feature of both highbrow and popular literature.
Primary Texts:
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
Joseph Conrad, 'The Secret Sharer'
Ellen Craft and William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Elizabeth Gaskell, 'The Grey Woman'
Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman
‘Reality is movement’ Henri Bergson observes in Creative Evolution (1911). This module explores how the im|mobilities of people, goods, money, information, resources, policies shape the individual and collective, human and more-than-human, local, global, planetary and interplanetary realities we experience.
Mobility capital, mobility justice, mobility transformations are some of the key concepts we will explore. The module provides opportunities for you to experiment with mobile methods and how they shape the study of physical, imaginative and communicative mobilities of, for example, migration, tourism, work, and love. Decarbonising transport, the need for a digital ethics to govern the im|mobilities of data, and the multiple refugee crises across the world are examples of the global challenges that we will address. We will also consider issues of creative inspiration for activism and ‘affirmative critique’.
This module offers an introduction to understanding and exploring ideas of space, movement and identity in relation to major writers and texts across the nineteenth century with a particular interest in reading and mapping. What can and cannot be mapped? What resists or exceeds acts of mapping? We will read key writers of place alongside a range of relevant spatial and philosophical texts and extracts for each of the thematic themes that are addressed across the module. As the title suggests the course is particularly interested in the challenges involved in moving across and between direct physical and embodied experiences and the representation of place in different literary forms.
The module focuses on three themes: walking and writing; mapping literary place and space; and interior and exterior spaces. We will use these themes to think about how place and space are constructed through movement, action and reaction, as well as to consider how the visual representation of place through literary maps bears upon verbal description within a text.
This module explores modern and contemporary literature from and/or about Palestine and Israel, from 1948 to the present. Literary writing is a space in which communities are imaginatively reinforced, sites of memory are contested, and political resistance is articulated. However, in rich and overlapping literary canons, writers also emphasise relational experience and potentially shared futures, nuancing our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. We will address the rhetorical function of different literary genres (notably novels, short stories, and life writing) and literary modes (for example: comedy, realism, autobiography, and speculative fiction). We will also consider audience(s) and the politics of writing/reading across contexts. No prior knowledge is required. The course will appeal to students interested in postcolonial, comparative, and world literature; history, trauma, and memory studies; and the relationship between nation and narration, or literature, politics, and place.
Theories of practice are widely discussed in contemporary social theory and introduce new possibilities for overcoming classic distinctions (individual: social, agency: structure, mind: body) in dualistic thinking in sociology. Developed and applied in many disciplines, practice theories provides critical insights into current global issues including environmental sustainability and health. Normally taught in a week-long intensive format, this module is delivered by the Practice Theory group at Lancaster and is open to visiting, international MA and PhD students. It normally blends lectures and short provocative talks with in-class exercises and student reading and writing groups to introduce you to a new take on important sociological topics such as power, time, materiality, social reproduction and variation, and method. The aim of the course is to give you opportunities to undertake theoretical and conceptual training in theories of social practice and develop an understanding of the ramifications of adopting a practice theory approach that might be applied to future investigations across a range of substantive areas from management to education, sustainability and energy to health.
This module provides first-hand experience of organising and undertaking a group research project on a subject of your own choosing. You will work through processes of research design and strategy, developing research questions, planning and carrying out fieldwork and analysis, and presenting and evaluating research. Working together in small groups, you will produce a research proposal, a journal article based on your project, and an oral presentation of your work. You are also encouraged to keep a research diary of the process. This will provide the basis for an individual reflective essay to be submitted after the module has finished. Although the module is essentially practical, it also provides an opportunity to learn about generic issues involved in doing social research and about the contemporary context of research policy and funding.
This module explores key theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues in researching migration, migrants’ experience, and the effect of migration on origin and receiving societies. Through the use of case studies, you will have the opportunity to examine, in-depth, several topics in contemporary migration research, and related methodological and ethical considerations. Topics covered may include: are we living in an 'age of migration'?; how do we define 'migrant' and why does it matter?; borders; citizenship; migration as a reproductive justice issue; ethical considerations when researching migration; the use of qualitative and quantitative methods in researching migration; and more.
This module explores the relation between the novel and neoliberal politics, economics and philosophy from 1979 to the present. It introduces you to the philosophy of neoliberalism by examining key theoretical texts by, for example, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Michel Foucault, David Harvey and Wendy Brown and tracks how the modern novel historically reflects, reinforces and questions the rise (and fall?) of neoliberalism. This module seeks to map the contours of what Walter Ben Michaels has famously called the Neoliberal Novel by examining its defining genres, tropes, subjectivities, imaginaries, affects and ideologies. We will seek to address the following indicative questions. To what extent is it possible to speak of a Neoliberal Novel? How far do novels from 1979 to the present reflect, anticipate and contest the history of neoliberalism from the collapse of Keynesianism in the mid-1970s, through the monetarist experiments of the Thatcher and Reagan governments in the 1980s, up to the financial crash of 2008 and the rise of 'post-liberal' populists like Trump? To what extent is it possible for the contemporary novel to think with, through and even beyond the neoliberal order?
This short course is an introduction to philosophical issues arising from and involved in methods and techniques of social research. The course will be taught in a traditional manner of lectures and related seminars with associated reading. Since it is intended to serve as an introduction to philosophical issues in social research, the course will concentrate on setting out and discussing the major lineaments of the philosophical bases and justifications of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Of necessity some selection will have to take place but this will be guided very much by anticipations of the research methods to be discussed in following and related modules. The relatively short period of the course requires teaching methods which can cover a great deal of ground fairly quickly yet effectively; hence, the combination of lecture and seminar, and individual presentations. The module uses the classes for FASS507 (Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science).
Taking our cue from Haruko Maeda’s remarkable twenty-first century painting Heartbeat of the Death, Queen Elizabeth I (2013), Tudor Gothic critically considers the relationships between traces of Tudor history and culture in four gothic novels (Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night (2012), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (c.1803), Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or a Tale of Other Times (1784) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)) and proto-gothic tropes (such as wonder, terror, strange places, clashing time frames) in select poetry, prose and drama produced in the Tudor period (1485-1603) itself. Rather than viewing the Tudor Gothic as an anachronistic term, the module suggests that Tudor Gothic informs and shapes literary gothic’s social, political and imaginary landscapes.
Fees and funding
We set our fees on an annual basis and the 2025/26
entry fees have not yet been set.
There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
College fees
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small College Membership Fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2024, the fee is £40 for undergraduates and research students and £15 for students on one-year courses. Fees for students starting in 2025 have not yet been set.
Computer equipment and internet access
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
For most taught postgraduate applications there is a non-refundable application fee of £40. We cannot consider applications until this fee has been paid, as advised on our online secure payment system. There is no application fee for postgraduate research applications.
For some of our courses you will need to pay a deposit to accept your offer and secure your place. We will let you know in your offer letter if a deposit is required and you will be given a deadline date when this is due to be paid.
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
If you are studying on a programme of more than one year’s duration, tuition fees are reviewed annually and are not fixed for the duration of your studies. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
Scholarships and bursaries
Details of our scholarships and bursaries for 2025-entry study are not yet available, but you can use our opportunities for 2024-entry applicants as guidance.
The information on this site relates primarily to 2025/2026 entry to the University and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our legal information.
Our Students’ Charter
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. View our Charter and other policies.