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Film and Television Studies

Postgraduate Studies at Warwick

Why Study a Postgraduate Degree?
  • Postgraduate degrees deepen and extend your academic interests and allow you to pursue specialist work in your preferred areas of inquiry.
  • They help to develop skills, both theoretical and practical, that not only increase intellectual and personal development but are also transferable and marketable and enhance employment possibilities in related fields such as arts administration, film and television journalism, film and television teaching, advertising and media.
  • You will need to consider whether our staff, curriculum and resources match your interests and expectations. The following information will help you with these choices:
Staff and research supervision
  • The department’s primary strength is in its staff (see the full staff list for further details).
  • They include some of the world’s leading scholars in the field, and all play an active part in teaching on our graduate programmes.
  • We have a superb staff-student ratio: for example, our taught MA is normally restricted to twelve students whilst there are eight full-time members of staff, and all MA students are allocated a personal tutor.
  • This balance permits an unusual degree of access to leading scholars with a passionate commitment to teaching. Supervision of MA dissertations and MPhil and PhD theses is frequent, structured and monitored.
  • The Department offers supervision in a broad range of areas thanks to the diversity of staff research interests (see details of staff publications).

The Department particularly excels in supervising work in the following areas:

  • Aesthetics;
  • British television and issues of representation (race, gender, nation, sexual orientation);
  • Contemporary and classical Hollywood;
  • Costume and fashion in the cinema;
  • Digital media
  • Documentary film and television;
  • European cinema (British, French, German, Italian, Spanish);
  • Film and history
  • Film History
  • Silent cinema;
  • Television history and television genres;
  • Women’s cinema, gay and lesbian cinema, masculinity in cinema;
  • World cinemas

The department also regularly welcomes a range of distinguished visiting academics (see our current events calendar, list of past speakers and Visiting Fellows).

Facilities
  • The department’s facilities are unrivalled in the field.
  • There has been a huge proliferation of film and television studies degrees over the past decade. However, few of these degrees are properly resourced. Teaching film and television properly is expensive and requires considerable investment in specialist equipment and services.
  • This department possesses its own fully dedicated teaching rooms, all equipped with 16mm and 35mm projectors and multi-system VCR and DVD projectors; some of the rooms also have Steenbeck editing tables to facilitate close-textual analysis with actual prints.
  • While video and DVD are used for the purposes of seminar discussion, Warwick is one of the few institutions that goes to the trouble and expense of teaching film as film, as opposed to the prevailing practice of using video/DVD as substitutes.
  • Every week prints are hired and projected for all courses. There are student rooms in the department with dedicated video capture computer equipment, and a special study room for graduate students.
  • The library is probably the strongest of any University in Britain for Film and Television Studies. Along with an outstanding collection of books and journals, it also has the biggest video and DVD collection of any university in the country, consisting of over 20,000 titles (on average, 20 titles are added weekly to the collection in response to staff research interests and to requests from students in relation to their dissertation needs). See the full list of the department's resources.
Research Culture
  • Each term the Department runs a programme of research seminars led by departmental staff, PhD students and a range of distinguished visiting speakers (see the current seminar programme).
  • The Department also runs a Methods Reading Group for research students and the Department's postgraduate community also run their own Postgraduate Research Group, a venue for sharing and discussing research and ideas in a friendly, informal atmosphere.
  • The Department also runs and hosts the Midlands Television Research Group. This meets regularly each term and is composed of staff and graduate students from the University of Warwick and a number of other leading institutions in the field. It organises a programme of seminars, work-in-progress presentations, guest speakers, and supports collaborative research projects. All graduate students with an interest in Television Studies can become members.
  • In addition, the Department regularly organises and hosts major international film and television studies conferences, such as:
    • Popular European Cinema (1989)
    • European Heritage Cinema (1995)
    • Weimar and Third Reich Cinema: A Different Take (1997)
    • Deviant Imaging: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Film (1998)
    • Visual Cultures and Urban Identities in the Paris of the 1930s (1998)
    • Popular European Cinema III: The Spectacular (2000)
    • Stars Beyond the Hollywood Firmament (2001)
    • What is a DVD? (2005)
    • European Film and Television in Transition (2005)
    • Marketing the Movies: Promotion, Advertising and Film Studies (2007)
    • Television, the Archive and the Document: A Symposium (May 2008)
    • In the Shadow of Empire: The Post-Imperial Urban Imaginaries of London and Paris (2008). Click here for a report.
    • Beginnings and Endings in Film, Films and Film Studies (2008).
    • Making and Remaking Classic Television (2009) - more information can be found here.
    • Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking CinemaScope': The Spectacle of Technology in Screen Media (2010).
    • Film-Philosophy III: the third annual conference of the Film-Philosophy journal (2010). Click here for further information.

    • 'Archives of the Audio-Visual' (2011)

    • 'Researching Film and Television Through the Archive' (2012)

    • 'Writing Lives' (2012)

    • 'Television for Women' (2013). Click here for further information.

    • 'Rome, Open City: Examining the legacy after seventy years' (2015). Click here for further information.

    • 'Film as Film Today: On the Criticism and Theory of V. F. Perkins' (2018)

    • 'The New Projectionists: VJing, AV Performance and Post-cinematic Projection' (2018)

    Uniquely, the University of Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre offers funding opportunities for graduate students to organise one-day conferences focusing on their own research areas, allowing them to communicate ideas with leading international figures in their field. Several of our research students have benefited from this scheme.

Structured Teaching
  • All graduate courses and screenings at Warwick are designed and run for graduate students only. Rather than advertising a long list of options that may or may not be taught in any given year, we offer a select list of courses that will be taught (bar force majeure) and the teaching is undertaken by staff only (and never by overburdened PhD students!).
  • Our MA programmes provide courses designed to offer a strong methodological basis for the study of film and television, enabling each student to apply this to his or her research interest.
  • Courses normally follow a pattern of screening, lecture, a further screening, and then seminars for the discussion of the work or reading in question. Many courses also include small group and individual project work, enabling the acquisition of a range of skills (use of image capture software, 16mm projectors, Steenbeck editing tables, research software, etc.).
  • Students begin work on their dissertation in the first term and the process of development is closely monitored by first a personal tutor and subsequently a dissertation supervisor.
Location

Warwick University is 80 minutes away by train from London and 20 minutes from Birmingham. Therefore, where research materials might not be available through inter-library loan or held in the video library, the British Film Institute is relatively accessible (the department can provide a free pass to the BFI library) as are the great number of institutions, festivals, screenings and events available in the nation’s two largest cities.

Alumni Success

Many of our past students are now lecturers at numerous Film and Television Studies departments around the country including those at the following universities:

  • Aberdeen
  • Aberystwyth
  • Birmingham
  • Bristol
  • Cheltenham and Gloucester
  • UEA
  • Glasgow
  • Kent
  • Leeds Metropolitan
  • London Metropolitan
  • Northumbria
  • Oxford
  • Reading
  • Roehampton
  • Royal Holloway
  • Sheffield Hallam
  • Southampton
  • Southampton Institute
  • King Alfred’s, Winchester

Numerous recent publications originated as PhD theses supervised in this department, including:

  • Andrew Klevan, Disclosures of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narratives (Trowbridge: Flicks, 2000)
  • Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood's Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower, 2000)
  • Rachel Moseley, Text, Audience, Resonance: Growing Up With Audrey Hepburn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002)
  • Valerie Orpen, Film Editing (London: Wallflower, 2003)
  • Alastair Phillips, City of Darkness, City of Light: Emigre Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004)
  • Jacinda Read, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
  • Martin Stollery, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Culture of Imperialism (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000)
  • Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993)
  • Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (London: IB Tauris, 2005)
Enquiries and Further Particulars

Department of Film and Television Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7HS

Photo from 'Daughters of the Dust'

Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)