Film & Media Studies

The course traces key critical approaches to film and television audiences. Starting with an exploration of 'apparatus theory' and understandings of the cinema-goer as 'spectator', classes then examine challenges to these models, and the emergence of scholarship around 'social' audiences and historically-contingent viewing practices. 

This course focuses on the most significant visual and artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Beginning prior to WWII, the course examines how new design emerged as its own discipline in the United States. It also explores topics including material culture, kitsch, and feminism in design as it traces the progress of global visual culture to the current state.

This practical and theoretical course explores debates about the value of creative arts in engaging with aspects of Scottish history. Focusing on recent theoretical perspectives on 'multiple relations with the past', the course involve students making creative outputs on an aspect of Scottish history (either individually or in groups) and reflecting on their own practice. The course is co-taught by staff from the School of Culture and Creative Arts and the School of Humanities, thereby seeking to develop new ways of learning and teaching through an interdisciplinary approach.

From the lenses of cultural studies and gender studies, this course examines how fiction throughout various eras has treated, whether directly or indirectly, questions of seduction, femininity, masculinity, and the meaning of virility. It explores the manner in which political and ideological disruptions have modified the figure of the seducer and vamp, and how this is presented in various cultural productions of stories, novels, poems, frescoes, paintings, opera, film, television series, and video games. 

This course examines news, media and current concerns of Quebec society and other French-speaking societies.

This course explores the historiography of media portrayal of crime in Ireland from the 1970s to the present. The course studies newspaper reporting of crime in Ireland; the broadcast media and emotive reporting; the role of the Garda Press Office; missing persons reportage; media ownership and white collar/blue collar crime; and the rise of the crime correspondent in both the print and broadcast media. Students also explore the blurred distinctions between fiction and reality in both US and Irish TV crime dramas; media stereotyping of crime and its influence on public discourse; and the complexities of media ownership in Ireland and the notion of ethical gate-keeping.