Overview

Newcastle has a thriving community of postgraduate students working in film.

MA in Film

Our taught MA in Film enables students to specialise either in film theory & history or film practice. 

This includes film production and cinema management. 

It prepares all students for the advanced research involved in doctoral study.

MLitt and PhD

Postgraduates studying for the MLitt and the PhD are a crucial part of our research culture.

Supervised projects span academic schools and sub-disciplines. 

This ensures the best fit between graduate students’ interests and supervising staff expertise.

Postgraduate film students enjoy speakers, conferences and special events organised by the University.

The Humanities and Social Sciences Graduate School provides training in key postgraduate learning skills. It also hosts postgraduate events.

Funding

The Centre has funding to enable postgraduates to attend events related to their projects. This can include conferences and film festivals.

Following their attendance at an event, students write a report about their experiences. There are two calls per year when students can apply for support.

Information on funding is available here.

Taught Programmes

Our taught Master's programmes draw on our expertise in a wide range of theoretical and practical disciplines.

Courses

Students go on to a wide range of roles in the film world. They also acquire the research skills necessary for doctoral-level study.

• MA in Film: Theory and Practice
• MA in Media and Journalism
• MA in Media and Public Relations

Postgraduate supervision is provided for projects that span academic schools and sub-disciplines.

This ensures the best fit between graduate students' interests and the expertise of supervising staff.

Research Programmes

Research programmes in film studies are available at two levels.

MLitt

• MLitt in Film Studies - one year full-time, two years part-time

This is a research-led programme also incorporating research training.

PhD

• PhD/MPhil in Film Practice/Film Studies - three years full-time, six years part-time

Academic schools

Postgraduate students research in film in three of our schools:

• English Literature, Language and Linguistics
• Modern Languages
• Arts and Cultures

Interdisciplinary supervision is common.

Our Students

Here you can find out about what some of our current and former PhD students have worked on.

Current PhD students

• Evripdis Karydis – 
• Louis Francis –
• Ang Gao –
• Michael Pattison –
• Michael Cribbs –
• Luis Fallas Fallas – Central American Cinema: representations of its political economy relations
• Arene Al-Shara'h –
• Eun-Jee Park – Paternity in contemporary French Cinema
• Gary Jenkins – Representations of the Holocaust in post-1990 German, Israeli and US cinema
• Fiona Smith – Contemporary Hollywood Blockbusters and Culture relating to the Director

Completed PhDs

• Alex Adams - "What can be infinitely destroyed is what can infinitely survive": literary and filmic representations of political torture from Algiers to Guantánamo
• Louise Anderson - Else-where and else-when :the formation of newsreel memory as a distinctive type of popular cultural memoryElse-where and else-when :the formation of newsreel memory as a distinctive type of popular cultural memory
• Joe Barton - Rupture and recuperation: technological traces in digital narrative cinema
• Helen Fenwick - Adaptations of Neo-Victorian texts
• Amy Scott - The Figure of the Journalist in 1920s and 1930s Film and Literature
• Mani Sharpe - Gender and space in post-colonial French and Algerian cinema
• Erin Hill-Parks - Discourses of cinematic culture and the Hollywood director: the development of Christopher Nolan's auteur persona
• Adam Jones - Between self and other: abjection and unheimlichkeit in the films of David Lynch
• Noel Brown - Hollywood, the family audience and the family film, 1930-2010
• Katherine Farrimond - Beyond backlash: the femme fatale in contemporary American cinema
• Rebecca Naughten - Spain made flesh: reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007
• Alexandria Tate - Outing Female Marginality: Queering the divide between spatially determined identity and temporal indeterminism on screen, 2009
• Andrew Moor - Alien territory: romantic resistance and national identity in films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
• James Leggott - A Topography of the British Social Realist Film: Troublesome bodies and gendered spaces from the new wave to the present, 2004
• Robin Stoate – Reading Cyberspace: fictions, figures and (DIS) embodiment

Completed MLitts

• Dan Wu - Hong Kong Cinema post-1997
• Sam Cocksworth - Representations of the Muslim ‘Other’ in Popular Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Contemporary Era
• Barbara Williams - Theatricality in British Heritage and Films of the 1980s
• Ruth Bober - To what extent has the change in structure of the cinematic gaze altered the structure of the joke in French film comedy since the 1970s?
• Jeremy Fisher - Influence, Perspective and Motive: Choices in the Adaptations of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris
• Colin le Sueur - Infection: Viral and Ideological Transmissions in American and Japanese Horror Films