Critical Theory MA

This critical theory master’s will equip you with a solid understanding of foundational critical theory texts and teach you how to engage with the contemporary discourse that informs current debates about race, class, gender, climate change, and beyond.

It’s a multidisciplinary course that empowers you to follow your own interest, thanks to a wide range of optional modules across the humanities and social sciences. You’ll graduate with knowledge of the intellectual history of critical theory and the tendencies emerging from continental philosophy and with the skills to apply these theoretical discourses to different objects and fields.

Key benefits

• Focus on continental philosophy and the history, study, and applications of critical methodologies across the humanities
• Diversify your study with a variety of multidisciplinary optional modules
• Learn from a range of active researchers who are publishing in their fields of specialism
• Produce your own piece of research with a dissertation
• Enjoy all the benefits of learning in London.

Course essentials

This MA in critical theory offers a blend of English and Philosophy study that will develop your critical thinking skills and allow you to apply theoretical discourses across different objects and fields. Thanks to a focus on diverse perspectives, this master’s prepares you to critically engage with contemporary social, cultural, and political issues. It will also hone your research and writing abilities, furnishing you with transferable skills desirable for further academic study or careers in journalism, publishing, or cultural analysis.

You’ll begin your Critical Theory MA by gaining in-depth knowledge and understanding of the landmark critical texts from this field. You’ll study continental philosophy, Marxist political thought, psychoanalytic theory, structuralist literary analysis, and more. During small-group seminars, you’ll get to discuss the key ideas and concepts of a series of short but dense, provocative, paradigm-shifting texts.

You’ll finish the first required module equipped with the tools and frameworks to understand, interpret, and apply discourses in critical theory. You will be able to deconstruct and critically analyse thinking on topics like technology, theories of gender and sexuality, postcolonial theory, and beyond while also considering the humanities’ epistemological and methodological directions in recent decades.

The second semester of your Critical Theory MA will begin with the next required module, which explores contemporary debates in critical theory. You’ll split the teaching time in half to delve into two significant themes, such as biopower or subjectivity and desire, and practice applying theory in discourse.

The rest of the teaching time is split across six optional modules. You’ll create your own critical theory syllabus by choosing from a multidisciplinary collection, allowing you to learn from active researchers publishing across a broad range of disciplines. This means you could pick up modules that touch on philosophy, English literature, modern languages, geography, theology, philosophy, digital humanities, culture, and beyond.

This gives you the chance to complement your studies by exploring topics such as the role of myth in modern literature concerned with the legacy of slavery or how non-linear and decolonial mapping of the Global South can trace interconnections between coloniality and the multiple experiences of modernity. You could consider how cultural memories are produced, disseminated, and secured, and the political contours of its transmission, or explore French thought and writing in the 20th Century through the object, the image, and the gesture.

Your master’s in Critical Theory will conclude in the production of a dissertation that will both prepare you for future academic research and allow you to focus your studies. It allows you to delve deeper into an area of particular interest and produce your own research and analysis on a topic that links a required module to one of your optional ones.