MAGlobal Literatures and Cultures

Source: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/courses/languages/global-literature/ Parent: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/courses/

MA Global Literatures and Cultures

MA Global Literatures and Cultures

Why study MA Global Literatures and Cultures at Exeter?

• Work with world-leading Humanities scholars across three terms to explore the works of literature, art and thought that have shaped our global culture.
• Develop a range of skills desired by employers including intercultural understanding, critical thinking, communication, and independent research.
• Benefit from one-to-one dissertation supervision with an academic expert in your chosen field.
• Attend a diverse range of guest speaker events, symposia and workshops linked to research centres across the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as access on-campus to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, and the University of Exeter’s Special Collections.
• Meet local and international writers, artists, and creatives through university-aligned events hosted at different centres in Exeter, a UNESCO City of Literature.
• International students enjoy access to tailored help, including optional extra classes and one-to-one support with academic English and study skills from our quality-assured INTO study centre.
• Study a language as part of your course through the Language Centre.

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Contact

Programme Director: Prof. Muireann Maguire

Web: Enquire online

Phone: +44 (0)1392 72 72 72

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Top 20 in UK subject rankings for Modern Languages

The Complete University Guide 2026

100% of our Modern Languages and Linguistics research has internationally excellent impact

Based on research impact rated 4* and 3* in REF 2021

Taught by published translators and experienced practitioners, plus specialists in the use of machine translation and computer-assisted translation tools

Study on our beautiful campus in Exeter, a UNESCO City of Literature just over two hours from London.

We are a Russell Group university, the biggest centre for humanities research in the South-West.

Top 150 in world subject rankings for Modern Languages and Cultures

QS World University Subject Rankings 2025

Entry requirements

We will consider applicants with a 2:2 Honours degree or above (or equivalent). We welcome students from any academic background.

Please also see our guidance on essential documentation required for an initial decision on taught programme applications.

Entry requirements for international students

English language requirements

International students need to show they have the required level of English language to study this course.

The required IELTS test scores for this course fall under Profile B1.

Please visit our English language requirements page to view the required test scores and equivalencies from your country.

Course content

Led by the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, with expertise in seven language areas (Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish), this MA allows students to access specialist teaching on literature, film, visual culture and thought from the pre-modern to contemporary period.

Students can choose from a wide variety of option modules across Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, English, Film and Screen Studies, Publishing and other Humanities programmes. You can learn about culture from Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The programme is divided into units of study called modules which are assigned 'credits'. The credit rating of a module is proportional to the total workload, with 1 credit being nominally equivalent to 10 hours of work. Students may also opt to take languages credits as part of their MA programme.

You may take the MA in Global Literatures and Cultures full time over one academic year or part time over two, completing the core module (30 credits), the compulsory dissertation (60 credits), and selecting three or more optional modules (90 credits), amounting to 180 credits in total. You will take the core module over Term One and Term Two, alongside one or two optional modules each term (subject options available).

The modules below provide examples of what you can expect to learn on this degree course based on recent academic teaching. The precise modules available to you in future years may vary depending on staff availability and research interests, new topics of study, timetabling and student demand.

Modules

Please note that the module information displayed here is from a previous year and is subject to change.

90 credits of compulsory modules and 90 credits of optional modules.

Compulsory modules

Optional modules

90 credits of option modules\ \ a - Level 6 options: students can take no more than 30 credits of these level 6 undergraduate modules. Other viable level 6 modules from LCVS may be available but are subject to approval from the programme director and meeting language prerequisites.

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Fees

2026/27 entry

UK fees per year:

*£12,650 full-time; £6,325 part-time*

International fees per year:

£25,550 full-time; £12,775 part-time

Scholarships

The University of Exeter offers a wide range of scholarships to support your education, with £7 million available for international students applying to study with us in the 2026/27 academic year, including our prestigious Exeter Excellence Scholarships *. We also provide awards for sport, music and other achievements, as well as regional and partner scholarships with organisations such as Chevening, The Beacon Trust and the British Council. For more information on scholarships and other financial support, please visit our scholarships and bursaries page.

University of Exeter Alumni Scholarship

We are pleased to offer University of Exeter alumni beginning a standalone postgraduate programme in 2026/27 with us a scholarship towards the cost of your tuition fees. Full details can be found here.

*Terms and conditions, including deadlines, apply. See our website for details..

Find out more about tuition fees and funding »

Teaching and research

Teaching

Teaching will be through a mixture of lectures and student-led, discussion-based seminars, as well as experiential learning. You will be assessed in a variety of methods including research reports, essays and group or individual presentations.

Students are exposed to a range of teaching about the international circulation and exchange of ideas, with attention to challenging traditional hierarchies and power structures. The core module provides a strong foundation for comparative critical study. You can then shape your programme to focus on your interests.

Dissertation

You will also carry out a Dissertation or Dissertation by Practice, which will require you to produce an original piece of independent research or practice-based work, based on your interests.

Research areas

Drawing directly on the internationally recognised research and teaching expertise across the department. Students will also have the opportunity to participate in research projects and events. For instance, our MA students were recently involved in organising the Translation Festival at the University and Central Library. Current research projects in the Department include Venezuelan Voices, Cartas Vivas, RusTrans and Narrating Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature.

Centres

The Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies operates a variety of Research Centres across all subject disciplines, including the Modern Languages Centre for Translating Cultures, the Global China Research Centre, the Centre for Imperial and Global History, the Centre for Medieval Studies, the Centre for Early Modern Studies, the Centre for Latin American Studies, the Centre for Intermedia, and the Centre for Victorian Studies.

These centres provide a lively and stimulating programme of visiting speaker events, symposia and workshops that will complement and enrich your postgraduate studies.

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Careers

Our programme will develop your specific competences to interpret and analyse complex textual and cultural artefacts, you will graduate with a full range of skills that will make you competitive in the job market. Graduates can look to work in a diverse range of sectors including publishing, civil service, teaching, translation and more.

You will be encouraged to become a productive, useful and questioning member of society, be able to assimilate significant quantities of data (written text and visual sources) and express yourself clearly and with precision in oral and written form.

Careers and employment support

While studying at Exeter you can also access a range of activities, advice and practical help to give you the best chance of following your chosen career path. For more information visit our Careers webpages.

Professor Muireann Maguire

Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature

Dr Katie Brown

Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies

Dr Yue Zhuang

Senior Lecturer in Chinese, Art History and Visual Culture

Professor Maria Scott

Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought

Dr Wenqian Zhang

Lecturer in Chinese and Translation Studies

Dr Yan Wen-Thornton

Senior Lecturer (E&S)

Professor Muireann Maguire

Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature

Muireann Maguire is Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. She is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded Horizon 2020 project 'RusTRANS: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA,' grant agreement no. 802437. This project, which is active until December 2023, explores the dynamics of Russian-English literary translation through a series of historical and/or contemporary case studies.

Professor Maguire's other research interests include gender studies, specifically the depiction of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding in Russian and Western literature; her book Hideous Agonies: Myths of Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature is in progress. In 2021-22, she is Principal Investigator on an AHRC Networking Grant, 'Salt Babies: Narrating Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature'.

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Professor Muireann Maguire

Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature

Muireann Maguire is Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. She is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded Horizon 2020 project 'RusTRANS: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA,' grant agreement no. 802437. This project, which is active until December 2023, explores the dynamics of Russian-English literary translation through a series of historical and/or contemporary case studies.

Professor Maguire's other research interests include gender studies, specifically the depiction of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding in Russian and Western literature; her book Hideous Agonies: Myths of Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature is in progress. In 2021-22, she is Principal Investigator on an AHRC Networking Grant, 'Salt Babies: Narrating Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature'.

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Dr Katie Brown

Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies

Katie specializes in contemporary Latin American culture, with a particular focus on Venezuela. Her main research interests are the circulation of people (travel, migration and exile) and of texts (publishing, cultural policy and translation). She also researches and teaches about intermediality and cultural responses to politics in the 20th and 21st century. She runs venezuelanvoices.exeter.ac.uk

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Dr Yue Zhuang

Senior Lecturer in Chinese, Art History and Visual Culture

With cross-cultural academic expertise in studies of the history of gardens and landscape art, Yue’s research areas straddle Chinese studies, art and architectural history, and visual culture. As a recipient of funding from EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Swiss National Foundation, and The Leverhulme Trust, she has led a series of research projects (Matteo Ripa’s Views of Jehol, 2011-13; Entangled Landscapes, 2013; Nature Entangled, 2014-18; and Cultivating Happiness, 2016-17) all exploring the cross-cultural dynamics between China and Europe at the intersections of gardens and landscape art, intellectual history, and the history of Sino-European exchange. She is the co-editor of Entangled Landscapes: Early Modern China and Europe (2017), a volume initiating a paradigm for research innovation in studies of the global history of gardens and landscape art. At present, she is implementing a new collaborative project ‘Cultivating one’s garden: Eastern and Western Perspectives.’

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Professor Maria Scott

Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought

I am currently very interested in the notion that reading fiction can help to develop empathy, including Theory of Mind, in readers; I am exploring (and problematising) this idea from the perspective of (French) literary studies, looking at what literary fiction and literary theory have to say on the subject. My book Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism came out with Edinburgh University Press in April 2020.

My teaching and research tend to focus on 19th-century literature and culture. Many of my publications have focused on the work of the novelist Stendhal and the poet Charles Baudelaire, both of whom were also art critics. As the titles of my monographs suggest, I like to read works from unorthodox angles: Baudelaire's 'Le Spleen de Paris': Shifting Perspectives (Ashgate, 2005) and Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female (Legenda, 2013). The Baudelaire book won the Gapper Book Prize for the best monograph published in 2005 by a scholar working in the field of French studies and based in the UK or Ireland. The Stendhal book was published in French by Garnier in 2015.

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Dr Wenqian Zhang

Lecturer in Chinese and Translation Studies

I obtained my PhD in the fields of Translation Studies and Chinese Studies from the University of Leeds in January 2020, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (March-August 2020). Prior to joining the University of Exeter in September 2022, I taught on the MA Chinese language programme and the MSc Translation Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh (2020-2022).

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Dr Yan Wen-Thornton

Senior Lecturer (E&S)

Dr Yan is the first PhD researcher, who studied the longitudinal study of Chinese women entrepreneurs that focused specifically on the Chinese governments three decades economic reform period from 1980s-2000s. Her research has made a significant contribution to women entrepreneurship and to discover how Chinese culture, government policy and massive domestic market demand have influenced and affected Chinese womens’ entrepreneurial identity and their motivation to start-up new companies. Furthermore, Dr Yan is interested in Gender, literature and Psychology studies, she was awarded a qualification in Psychology studies by Oxford University.

Professor Tom Hinton

Associate Professor of French Language and Literature

Professor Helena Taylor

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Dr Natalia Pinazza

Senior Lecturer in Portuguese Studies (Lusophone and Latin American Culture) (E&S)

Professor Michelle Bolduc

Professor in Translation Studies

Dr Eliana Maestri

Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies

Professor Tom Hinton

Associate Professor of French Language and Literature

My research interests focus on medieval French and Occitan literature, especially of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an interest in manuscripts and the material context of medieval texts; currently I am working particularly on the French of medieval England. More broadly, I am interested in the reception of literature; the uses of the past; the representation of the unfamiliar; narrative aesthetics; and theories of translation.

I offer modules on medieval French and Occitan literature and culture, as well as co-teaching on wider survey modules at all levels (UG and PGT). I also teach French language. In 2017 I won the University of Exeter Student Guild award for Best Postgraduate Supervisor and in 2023 I was shortlisted in the Champion for Students category.

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Professor Tom Hinton

Associate Professor of French Language and Literature

My research interests focus on medieval French and Occitan literature, especially of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an interest in manuscripts and the material context of medieval texts; currently I am working particularly on the French of medieval England. More broadly, I am interested in the reception of literature; the uses of the past; the representation of the unfamiliar; narrative aesthetics; and theories of translation.

I offer modules on medieval French and Occitan literature and culture, as well as co-teaching on wider survey modules at all levels (UG and PGT). I also teach French language. In 2017 I won the University of Exeter Student Guild award for Best Postgraduate Supervisor and in 2023 I was shortlisted in the Champion for Students category.

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Professor Helena Taylor

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

My research focuses on the intellectual and literary history of early modern France, particularly the seventeenth century. I am interested in cultures of learning, women's varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, cultural quarrels, and translation studies.

My first book, published with OUP in 2017, examines the reception of the life of the ancient Roman poet Ovid in 17th-century French culture; my second book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern Franceis forthcoming with OUP. I am currently leading a five-year project, Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, originally awarded as a European Research Council Horizon Europe Starting Grant and now funded by UKRI.

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Dr Natalia Pinazza

Senior Lecturer in Portuguese Studies (Lusophone and Latin American Culture) (E&S)

I was awarded my BA in Languages and Literature at the University of São Paulo. I hold an Academic Excellence Awards funded MA with distinction in European Cinema and an Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme funded PhD (Globalisation and the National Imaginary in Contemporary Agentine and Brazilian Cinema) from the University of Bath. I worked at the Cultural Sector of UNESCO headquarters in Paris. In 2012, I was awarded the UNESCO Keizo Obuchi Fellowship to explore intercultural dialogue through visual arts at the University of Ottawa, Canada. I taught content and language modules at the University of Cambridge, University of Sheffield, Regent’s University and Birkbeck College, University of London. 

My research focuses primarily on journey narratives, film industry and issues of transnational cinema with a particular focus on Latin America and the Portuguese-speaking world.

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Professor Michelle Bolduc

Professor in Translation Studies

Michelle Bolduc, Professor in Translation Studies at Exeter, is an internationally recognized scholar of Translation Studies and Comparative Medieval Literature (French, Occitan, and Italian), and has published extensively on medieval literature (translatio) as well as on modern rhetoric--the New Rhetoric Project--and its translation. Under the direction of Barbara K. Altmann and F. Regina Psaki, she took a PhD in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Medieval Literatures from the University of Oregon; she has held positions at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Arizona.

Author of Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric(2020) and The Medieval Poetics of Contraries (2006), she has published extensively on medieval literature and rhetoric.

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Dr Eliana Maestri

Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies

Dr Maestri graduated in Modern Languages and Literature (English and French) from the University of Parma, Italy (2000) and obtained her PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Bath (2012). She was a EUOSSIC Erasmus Mundus Post-Doctoral Fellow in European Studies at the Universities of Bath and Sydney, Australia (2011-2012). She was also the recipient of the 2014 MEEUC Research Fellowship at the University of Monash, Melbourne, working on Italian Australian second and third generations as 'self-translators'.

Dr Maestri’s research focuses on the interplay between translation, migration, mobility, gender, literature and visual culture. Australia has inspired her, informing her research and approach to translation.

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