Postgraduate News and Views: Newcastle's MA in Literary Studies, Online music degree with the OU

Ideas and current debates about literary and cultural theory provide the raw material for the University of Newcastle's fledgling MA in Literary Studies: Writing, Memory and Culture. Exploring areas like the Atlantic renaissance, the civil wars in the literary imagination, historical crisis in romantic writing, the English ghost story, and cultural responses to slavery and genocide, it takes everything from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche to contemporary theories of trauma, cultural memory, colonialism, gender and national identity.

Now in its second year with 16 students, the MA has attracted a range of people, says Kate Chedgzoy, professor of Renaissance literature: "Lots have a good first degree in English, but there are people with a wide range of backgrounds, such as social studies or anthropology." And they're doing it for all kinds of reasons, she says: "While it's not particularly vocational, there are a lot of areas of work now where the entry level has moved on from a BA to an MA and while a lot of our students are considering a PhD, we've had people move on into areas like media and publishing."

Bill Angus completed the MA last year: "I came from a theory-based undergraduate background and felt that the postgraduate degree would redress the balance in favour of the historical. It was also a great opportunity to broaden my reading of English texts, and I found postgraduate life in general much better than expected."

¿ Get them early, is the message from Dr Rhys Williams, postgraduate admissions officer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which has just held its third annual postgraduate study fair. The event gives current students, as well as those from the local community, the chance to explore the options with postgraduate courses and find out about sources of funding.

"We get a lot of third-year students, but quite a few too from the second year, who are showing an interest in postgraduate study more than a year in advance," says Williams. One aim is to acquaint students with the university's wide range of conversion courses, says Williams: "This is definitely a growth area – a lot of people want to specialise into a more vocational route and they don't necessarily realise that someone studying for an English degree, for instance, can then do an MSc in computer science."

The fair also gives the university the chance to promote research. "They don't necessarily know that the research councils and the university itself are keen to fund people to do research, and it gives us a chance to get through to them that if they want postgraduate funding they need to apply early."

¿ The Open University is introducing the world's first postgraduate music course to be taught online, starting next February, including a certificate, diploma and MA.

The 120-odd students who have been signed up so far will have access to a specially created online "music research environment", giving them hundreds of indexed website links, and the opportunity to submit work and join online tutorials. "This programme is the first to teach music at this level that integrates IT with a genuine academic agenda," says Professor Trevor Herbert, chair of the OU's postgraduate music programme.

By linking up with the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, the OU is also giving students the option of taking a third of their MA as a performer, with a recital as their final exam.

"It may seem odd in some ways to do music online, but even performers in conservatoires, who have to practise so many hours a day, spend a great deal of their time actually studying music," says Herbert. "Take Bach's Cello Suites, for example, there is a great deal of research that needs to be done to inform your own performance of them. Our students can do that just as well online by downloading sound files from the internet, as well as using CDs."

emma@haughton.net