Master of English and New Media Studies’ candidates will explore the increasingly important nexus between new media and spoken, written or visual communication in English. The programme culminates in a two-semester research project of an experimental, theoretical, creative or practice-based nature. Candidates’ projects might deploy online analytic tools (twitter analytics, google trends) to examine trends in social media, or use conventional analytic practices (corpus analysis, multimodal analysis, critical discourse analysis) to investigate emerging forms of web communication, such as internet memes. Candidates could investigate the potential of online virtual worlds or explore complex issues of virtual identity, with many applications, including those for language or literacy learning and teaching. Those interested in translation and interpreting might research the effectiveness of online machine translation tools. More creative-based projects could explore the performative potential of multi-platform transmedia narratives, geo-located augmented reality (AR) sites, games and storyworlds.

Career opportunities: Dependent on the specific area of interest that a candidate brings to the programme, career opportunities might involve: new and social media research language and literacy education online journalism public relations new and social media practice translation and interpreting advertising the arts and cultural industries travel and tourism content development for virtual and augmented realities