A year abroad can really open up new opportunities and give you valuable life experience to take into your future career.
According to the UK Universities International Report (March 2017):
Graduates who were mobile during their degree were less likely to be unemployed (3.7% compared to 4.9%), and more likely to have earned a first class or upper second class degree (80.1% compared to 73.6%) and be in further study (15% compared to 14%).
Those in work were more likely to be in a graduate level job (76.4% compared to 69.9%) and earn 5% more than their non-mobile peers.
The study abroad experience is intense, and because of this special quality and the quality of emotional investment in this period students are likely to make particularly strong friendships and have particularly memorable experiences. There are all sorts of opportunities that students will find access to because of location or circumstance that they wouldn’t necessarily get in London- one former student was offered a role in a professional production in New York, students on exchange with Howard University have inbuilt work experience and opportunities on Capitol Hill with the US government, students in New York might seek out opportunities with the UN.
We’re delighted to announce that as from 2018 the following undergraduate BA (Hons) degrees can include a year abroad:
Please note we are still offering our Semester Abroad in the second year of all of our courses with the following institutions:
Columbia University, New York; Howard University, Washington DC; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; The George Washington University, Washington DC; University of Miami, FL; University of Richmond, VA; The University of Texas at Austin; University of Melbourne; University of Sydney; The University of Toronto; University of Ottawa, Canada; The University of Auckland, NZ; University of Hong Kong; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; Seoul National University; Waseda University, Tokyo; Renmin University, Beijing.
New opportunities for semester abroad and/or year abroad are being developed at universities in Europe, North America, New Zealand and elsewhere. These will be offered as they become available.
Advice and Guidance
If you would like any advice on Study Abroad opportunities within the School of English and Drama please contact:
We have some eye-opening events coming up for those aged 16-18 including a Frankenstein themed Halloween event, a chance to hear from The Good Immigrant editor Nikesh Shukla, an expert discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale and a free A-Level revision day in early 2019.
Students are invited to a film screening, fancy dress lecture and Halloween Monster Mingle celebrating two hundred years of Mary Shelley’s gothic horror and feminist classic.
Queen Mary, University of London and Wasafiri invite you to a reading and conversation with Nikesh Shukla and Bidisha. This is a chance to engage in lively discussion with some ground-breaking writers of the moment.
Experts from our School of English and Drama come together to discuss Margaret Atwood’s famous dystopian novel. This panel discussion will explore the extent to which we can describe The Handmaid’s Tale as a feminist text.
It will challenge many opinions that readers hold regarding the novel, as well as placing it within the current political climate in the UK and USA. You will have the opportunity to question our experts, as well as having the chance to speak with undergraduates about what it is like to study literature at university level. This taster course is open to year 12 and 13 students. You must be studying English at A-level or SL/HL IB.
Dr Charlotta Salmi who uses street art and comics to understand social movements has been awarded funding by the British Academy to carry out research on gender-based violence in Nepal.
Dr Charlotta Salmi, from Queen Mary’s School of English and Drama, will investigate representations of gender-based violence (GBV) in graphic art forms in Kathmandu and Pokhara, Nepal.
This episode features Wasafiri magazine editor Susheila Nasta, Medieval broadcaster Hetta Howes, podcaster Raifa Rafiq (listen to her on BBC radio here), researcher Emma Shapiro and puppeteer Edie Edmundson.
After an exciting first outing we’re excited to welcome the following speakers for our next edition:
Tasters include:
Looking at Atrocity in Graphic
Narratives Charlotta Salmi
Devising from Games Mojisola Adebayo
Gothic magic and science in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Markman Ellis
Writing Now: Caryl Churchill Jen Harvie
And don’t miss special performances by our very own theatre company presenting Stage 3 which is an immersive theatre show about the citizenship processes.
The School of English & Drama at QMUL mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in suitably scary style on Halloween. Join us for a screening of early Frankenstein films and a fancy dress lecture, followed by some scary socialising.
London Modernism Seminar: Insects and Robots Saturday 6 October, 11:00-13:00
Senate House, London
Co-organised by our very own Suzanne Hobson (English) this first outing features: Rachel Murray (Bristol), ‘Shell Sense: Modernism and the Insect Body’ Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes), ‘Modernist Machine Women: Robots, Radio and Typewriters’.
The venue provides students with a 3×2 ticket deal and we are sharing the code with academics who might be interested in promoting the event among their students and we thought of you. (the booking code is: L0VEL3TTERS).
DICE Festival Saturday and Sunday 7 October 2018
Camden People’s Theatre, LondonDaniel Oliver (Drama) will host on the Sunday programme.
The Queen Mary Centre For Religion and Literature in English Seminar Series: “W. H. Auden—Bless what there is for being” Wednesday 10 October 2018, 12:00
ArtsOne Room 1.31, QMUL – Mile End
W. H.Auden who had a natural talent “bordering on wizardry” was the poetic voice of the younger generation in the 1930’s. About 1940 he rediscovered the Christian faith. Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, will argue that this took the form of giving Auden a relish for every aspect of life in all its details. This paper comes from Harries’ latest book “Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith”.
This presentation brings together a feminist scholar and an artist who have worked together on two projects, including a participatory art installation on unknowing. They will discuss how unknowability figures in their own work and what it enables.
The work of contemporary artist Anne Bean defies categorisation, encompassing performance art, public interventions, videos, and writings, all pursued as a ‘continuum’. Dominic Johnson explores Bean’s ‘life art’ project in the 1970s and considers her efforts to blur the boundaries between art and life in the context of theoretical writings she was working through at the time.
The Verbatim Formula: Making Listening Visible Wednesday 17 October 2018, 17:00-18:30
Senior Common Room, Queen’s Building, QMUL – Mile EndThe Verbatim Formula (TVF) is an AHRC funded participatory performance-based research project based at QMUL and which partners with other universities in London. In TVF, we ask care-experienced young people and care leaver students to share their experiences of higher education.
You are warmly invited to join us for the launch of the new series of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar on Friday 19 October 2018. As our guest speaker for this opening event, we are delighted to welcome Marc Porée, Professor of English Literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. A renowned scholar, critic and translator, Marc is also Paris Director of the London-Paris Romanticism Seminar. His talk, entitled A Grammar of Surprise, will be followed by a discussion and wine reception, to which all are invited.
Marx In Bloomsbury Sunday 21 October 2018, 14:00-15:30
Senate House, London
This walking tour, led by author of Bloomsbury: Beyond the Establishment (2017), Matthew Ingleby (English), explores Bloomsbury’s links with Marx himself, in this his 200th anniversary year, but also the neighbourhood’s wider relationship to Marxism and socialism more broadly, exploring Bloomsbury’s significance for figures such as the arts and crafts revolutionary William Morris, the socialist feminist Isabella Ford, and the Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James.
Inspired by African -American author Octavia Butler’s epigraph New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival is a day of talks, workshops, screenings and feminist discussion at the Barbican features our very own Nisha Ramayya (English).
Writers, artists, academics, poets and publications will explore contemporary feminism through the lens of mythology, discussing topics as varied as the #MeToo movement, occult poetry, bodies and sex work.
Charlotta Salmi (English) has been awarded funding by the British Academy to carry out research on gender-based violence in Nepal. Charlotta uses street art and comics to understand social movements. Read more
Susheila Nasta (English) will annoucnce SI Leeds prize with Bidisha at the Ilkley Festival on the 3rd October and also doing an event there on Writing post-Windrush with Bidisha and Jeremy Poynting.
Wasafiri magazine (based at QMUL) are announcing the winners of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize at Marlborough House on the 25th October. All staff invited and the news is that QM will be funding it from 2019 which is Wasafiri’s 35th Birthday year and the 10th year of the prize. Attend the event
Queen Mary Postcolonial Seminar is starting up again with the following events in September:Work-in-progress Seminar ‘Dinkar’s China Writings: The 1957 Chinese Literary Sphere in Hindi’*
Adhira Mangalagiri, QMUL
4 October, 18:00, ArtsTwo 2.17
*please email a.mangalagiri@qmul.ac.uk for a copy of the paper
Public Lecture
‘Reading for the Planet: Environmental Crisis and World Literature’
Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University
30 October, 18:00, ArtsOne Lecture Theatre
Our contributions to Being Human Festival including The Last of The London (Nadia Valman – English) are now live for booking. Read our blog post for details
Show and Tell is a series of TED-talk style events where speakers from the arts, humanities and creative industries tell their stories at Queen Mary University of London. Find out more: bit.ly/showandtell18
This episode features Wasafiri magazine editor Susheila Nasta, Medieval broadcaster Hetta Howes, podcaster Raifa Rafiq, researcher Emma Shapiro and puppeteer Edie Edmundson. Full biogs below.
The show is introduced by Beverley Stewart and hosted by Charlie Pullen from the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary.
Charlie Pullen
Charlie Pullen is a PhD candidate and Teaching Associate in English at Queen Mary University of London, where he researches education in the work of various early twentieth-century novelists, including H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, and Dorothy Richardson. His background is in widening participation and outreach and he writes for Times Higher Education.
Susheila Nasta
Professor Susheila Nasta, Prof of Modern and Contemporary Literature at QMUL, Emerita at Open University is a renowned critic, broadcaster and literary activist. Editor-in-chief at Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, which she founded in 1984, she has published widely on South Asian Britain. www.wasafiri.org
Hetta Howes
Dr Hetta Howes is a lecturer in Medieval Literature at City, University of London. Her research specialises in women’s devotion in the Middle Ages, and as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker she is committed to sharing that research with a wider audience.
Raifa Rafiq
Raifa Rafiq is a trainee solicitor at one of the leading international law firms in the UK. She is also creator and co-host of the Literature and popular culture podcast Mostly Lit – named by the Guardian and the BBC as one of the top podcasts of 2017. mostly-lit.com
Emma Shapiro
After graduating with a BA in English and French from Queen Mary, Emma Shapiro was awarded a scholarship to complete an MA in London Studies, where she specialised in the Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon’s London fiction. Following her studies, Emma worked as a voluntary researcher for the Migration Museum project and as the graduate trainee at Pembroke College Library, Cambridge, where she curated an exhibition on the poet and co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Kamau Brathwaite, working in collaboration with the George Padmore Institute.
Edie Edmundson
Edie is a puppeteer and theatre maker who graduated from Drama at QM in 2015 and went on to train at the Curious School of Puppetry. Since then she has worked with Emma Rice at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Puppet Theatre Barge. She also writes and directs her own work, and is co-founder and associate director of Wondering Hands Theatre. She is currently puppeteering in ‘The Butterfly’s Spell’ at the Puppet Theatre Barge and is puppetry director for ‘The Comedy of Errors’ at the RSC.
Gender pay gaps, precarious work, paltry paternity leave – what does it mean to be a mother working in the creative arts?
Explore the role of motherhood in contemporary society and how it informs the work of writers and artists in this workshop at Museum of Childhood #BeingHUman18
Bring your little ones to this one day workshop exploring motherhood & making with workshops with (@LittleArtists_) & child-friendly talks from @CJessCooke
Follow tea’s journey from the docks of the East India Company, via London’s forgotten Chinatown and the warehouses of the East End, to wholesale sites in the City in Tea’s London walking tour
As night descends on the Whitechapel Road, see the derelict Royal London Hospital building come to life one last time as words and photographic projections evoke the ghosts of its past with our very own Nadia Valman
#IWriteMyWorld family workshop led by with our very own Karina Likorish Quinn allows children and their parents to remember, reflect, and discuss place and memory and write about what it means to them to have heritage from around the world.
Academics from Queen Mary University of London have led a series of workshops with year seven students from five east London schools exploring how Victorian Londoners protested against their pay and working conditions.
Workshop organisers, Dr Vivi Lachs and Dr Nadia Valman from Queen Mary’s School of English and Drama, drew upon their research on the musical and political culture of nineteenth century Jewish immigrants to the East End. Students learned Victorian protest songs, made placards expressing demands and wrote their own political speeches and chants.
On Tuesday 25 September the students paraded along the streets of Whitechapel with professional musicians from the Great Yiddish Parade marching band. The parade followed the same route where east Londoners protested in the Victorian period, drawing upon the wave of strikes that spread across East London in 1889.
The songs of the parade were sung in Yiddish, the language spoken by the Jewish immigrant population, who made up the majority of poorly paid workers in Victorian east London.
After parading up Whitechapel Road, the students finished with performances in Altab Ali Park. The aim of the workshop and parade was to promote awareness of the local heritage of protest to enable students to articulate their own versions of protest through writing, design and song.
“Singing songs helped raise the morale of Victorian workers who were enduring terrible conditions in factories and workshops, and brought messages of hope that collective action could bring about change,” said Dr Lachs.
“We hope that this project will give students a glimpse into east London’s rich local history of protest,” added Dr Valman.
More information
The workshop, Protest in Victorian Whitechapel, was led by Dr Vivi Lachs and Dr Nadia Valman from Queen Mary’s School of English and Drama. Five schools from London’s East End participated:
Relax and unwind with your fellow students watching a movie voted for by you! There’s free drinks and snacks and you could win some ace prizes in our raffle.
Apart from sitting on a beach or simply melting in the July heatwave here in London, how did you spend your summer? Tell us by email or Tweet / Insta with the hashtag #SEDsummer to enter to win one of two £25 Amazon vouchers.
Whether working 72 hours a week at the Edinburgh Festival, doing admin in PR, starting your own blog, work shadowing at a magazine, shelf-stacking in Sainsbury’s, teaching Theresa May to dance, tour guiding at Buckingham Palace, interning with the Civil Service… whatever you have been up to, we would love to hear from you.
Describe the achievements of your summer in 75 words or less and email it to sed-web@qmul.ac.uk or tag us on Instagram or Twitter @qmulsed and include the hashtag #SEDsummer
2 entries will win a £25 Amazon voucher. Deadline: 5pm on Friday 5 October 2018.
Show and Tell is a series of TED-talk style events where speakers from the arts, humanities and creative industries tell their stories at Queen Mary University of London.
This episode features publishing wizz Sarah Garnham, poet Bridget Minamore and dance artistic director Alex Whitley. Full biogs below.
The show is introduced by Patricia Hamilton, Charlie Pullen and features Rupert Dannreuther from School of English and Drama at Queen Mary.
Rupert Dannreuther
Rupert is responsible for marketing within Queen Mary’s School of English and Drama. He has worked for numerous organisations including Cineworld, Hackney Empire, The Yard Theatre and Rose Bruford College. In his spare time he runs To Do List a website about offbeat things to do in London. todolist.org.uk
Sarah Garnham
Sarah graduated from QMUL with an English degree in 2016. She now works as a PR Executive in the busy children’s books department at Egmont Publishing and has worked for other publishers including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Canongate. uk.linkedin.com/in/sarahjanegarnham
Bridget Minamore
Bridget Minamore is a British-Ghanaian writer from south-east London. She is a poet, critic, essayist, and journalist, often writing about pop culture, theatre, race and class. Titanic (Out-Spoken Press), her debut pamphlet of poems on modern love and loss, was published in May 2016. bridgetminamore.com
Alexander Whitley
Alexander Whitley is a London-based choreographer working at the cutting edge of British contemporary dance. As artistic director of Alexander Whitley Dance Company he has developed a reputation for a bold interdisciplinary approach to dance making. He has also created work for several of the UK’s leading companies including the Royal Ballet, Rambert, Balletboyz, Candoco and Birmingham Royal Ballet. www.alexanderwhitley.com
Featuring short and engaging talks from academic researchers, broadcasters, creative writers, and theatre practitioners. Show and Tell is a celebration of arts and humanities education and the creative industries for those interested in studying or working in literature, theatre, art, media, and culture more broadly. The evening promises to be entertaining and relaxed. Speakers will each deliver a TED-style talk, and these will be followed by a chance for guests to ask questions, before the evening ends with socialising and networking over refreshments. Show and Tell runs on the evenings of the 5, 12, 19, and 26 of September 2018, taking place between 18:00 and 20:00 at the Arts One Building on the Mile End Road of Queen Mary’s Mile End campus.
Everyone is welcome from sixth-form students, new QMUL freshers, alumni, school teachers, researchers and anyone who has a general interest in the arts and humanities.
If you have any questions or would like to register a group please email: showandtell@qmul.ac.uk
Sadly you missed…
Wednesday 5 September
Sarah Garnham: Publicity Executive, Egmont Publishing
Alexander Whitley: Artistic Director of Alexander Whitley Dance Company
Bridget Minamore: British-Ghanaian writer from south-east London.
Wednesday 12 September
Edie Edmundson: Puppeteer at Shakespeare’s Globe (Drama graduate)
Early career researchers seeking support for their application to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme are invited to get in contact with us as soon as possible
Deadline for applications: midday on 14 September 2018
The School of English and Drama invites early career researchers seeking support for their application to the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme to get in touch by sending (1) a two-page outline research proposal, (2) a one-page list of publications and (3) a CV to: Dr Huw Marsh, Research Manager, sed-research@qmul.ac.uk, by no later than midday on Friday 14 September 2018. Please state ‘British Academy PDRF’ in the subject line.
This proposal, list of publications and CV should demonstrate:
that you are eligible according to the BA’s criteria and
the excellence of
your research track record;
your academic record;
the publishable research you propose, how you will structure, pursue, and complete it in the time frame, and its importance;
the relevance of QMUL SED to your research and vice versa;
who you would like as a mentor and why.
You are strongly encouraged, before submitting your application and time permitting, to find a mentor, provisionally agree their support, and get some feedback from them on a draft application.
All outline proposals will be considered by our Directors of Research and those that we give institutional support to will have approximately one month to finalise their online application, due on 17 October, 2018.