Recent or current undergraduate modules
Discovering digital cultures (1st year module)
This introductory module enables students to frame informed discussions of the influence of digital technologies on contemporary culture. Students study theorical ideas and cutting-edge digital texts whilst also developing their own digital project, such as building a website, making a short game, or designing an app.
Discovering creative practice (1st year module)
As part of this team-taught module, students will encounter questions around digital authorship, electronic literature, hardware design, and accessibility and diversity in the production of digital texts. What does it mean to write a digital work? How has authorship changed? How might the advantages of the digital be balanced with the rich history of printed works?
Digital futures (2nd year module)
This module covers key topics in the history of digital cultures and explores how writers, filmmakers, artists, and videogame designers have articulated the challenges of our increasingly digital world. This module covers key topics, such as social media, virtual reality, cyborg subjectivities, and global communications, while uncovering how issues of social justice, such as feminism, decolonialisation, and disability justice, have played a central role in digital cultures from their very beginnings.
The end of life as we know it: the implications of digital technology (3rd year module)
This module gives students the opportunity to investigate the contemporary artefacts, effects, and politics of our increasingly digital moment. Each week will focus on a specific technology, such as, mobile phones, digital currencies, virtual reality, or search engines, and explore its current and projected impacts, its context of use, and its place in a history of technological development. This module asks: what role does the humanities play in the development, dissemination, and criticism of these new forces in our lives?
Bringing out the bodies: technology, transhumans, and skin. (3rd year module)
This course explores the relationships between fiction, practical science, politics, philosophy, and ethics and also considers how our view of what it means to be a human being might change through the introduction of new technologies. Students will study how we might play a role in negotiating our future through understanding fiction and the language that people use to discuss new ideas. What is it that excites or scares us about the future? How might arts or humanities research and practice help in the kind of support/prevention that you want to advocate for?
The social life of literature (3rd Year module)
This module explores how we interact with literature today. Far from books existing in a vacuum, they come to us through multiple channels—newspaper reviews, word of mouth, prizes, Instagram pictures, Goodreads—and we read in multiple ways—on our own, in groups, online, offline. In this module we consider the ways in which communities discover, read, and talk about books in the twenty-first century has changed from earlier eras and how these changes affect reading practices.
Postgraduate taught modules
Living in code: understanding digital cultures (MA optional module)
In this module, students will question the role of digital technologies in shaping lives, literatures, and cultures, exploring how artists and humanities researchers have responded to a wide range of artefacts, artworks, and practices in an increasingly digital world. What new potentials are there for storytelling? Is a printed book the same as a pdf? Do search engines make libraries obsolete? And how might social media affect our identities, self-expression, and the ways communities can communicate? Students do not need any previous experience in studying digital technology; this course will show how existing skills of textual interpretation, critical analysis, and consideration of cultural context can be brought to bear on many aspects of the new digital cultures that we are each connected to or work within.