MA in Dickens Studies by Research (part-time)

A central feature of the course will be its series of ten evening seminars with distinguished speakers, held both at the University’s Gower Street premises and in the Board Room of the Charles Dickens Museum, each followed by a dinner and discussion, in private rooms at a nearby restaurant in Bloomsbury. Previous seminar speakers include:Professor Michael Slater, MBE. Britain’s foremost Dickensian scholar and biographer; Professor Emeritus of Victorian Literature, Birkbeck College; former editor of "The Dickensian".Miriam Margolyes, OBE. Actress & BAFTA Award Winner. Deviser, co-writer & performer of the international award-winning show, "Dickens’ Women."Judith Flanders. Senior Research Fellow, Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham; author of award-winning works of Victorian social history, including "The Invention of Murder", "The Victorian House", "The Victorian City", "Everyday Life in Dickens’ London".Lucinda Hawksley. Critic, broadcaster, great-great-great granddaughter of Charles Dickens, and author of recent books on Dickens’s circle, his artist daughter Katie, and the Pre-Raphaelites.Dr Tony Williams. President of the international Dickens Fellowship, Associate Editor of "The Dickensian", honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, University of Buckingham. The incredibly wide-reaching influence and impact of Dickens as a writer, performer, editor and social reformer in the English-speaking world means that Dickens Studies can therefore span an equally wide range of research topics right across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and print culture. Themes addressed by the seminars will include:

the lights and shadows of Dickensian biography

Dickens as a short-story writer

Dickens’s reception in the twentieth-century

Dickens and the development of detective and thriller fiction

Dickens’s influence as an editor and social reformer

the cultural importance of adaptations of Dickens’s work

the power of Dickens’s language

the performative nature of Dickensian characters

Dickens in the digital age

The course will begin with three practical seminars about how to choose, research and write an academic dissertation, and how to handle archival materials, held at the University’s London offices, 51 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6HJ and at the Charles Dickens Museum, 48 Doughty Street.Places on the new course are limited in number, and early application is advised. For dates of the seminars, please click on “Teaching & Assessment”. Those wishing to attend the seminars, but not to undertake a dissertation, may join the course as Associate Students at a reduced fee. Dickens specialists working alongside Professor Drew and Dr Orford in the Department of English or as honorary Research Fellows, include: Dr Jonathan Buckmaster, Dr Nick Cambridge, Dr Hazel Mackenzie, Professor David Paroissien, Dr Jeremy Parrott, Dr Paul Schlicke, Professor Cathy Waters, and Dr Tony Williams.For further details contact: