MA Modern Languages
Graduate Taught (level 9 nfq, credits 90)
The MA Modern Languages reflects the current need to provide high-quality education in the area of modern foreign languages, with a significant global reach. It will develop the communicative and analytical skills of its students through specialist study within and across the subject areas of French, German, Italian and Spanish, their cultures and languages. Students can specialise in one or two languages and draw on a range of supporting theoretical approaches.
Please visit our website for more information: https://www.ucd.ie/slcl/study/postgraduateprogrammes/mainmodernlanguages/
Small-group seminars taught by leading experts in a variety of fields
Subject-specialist, comparative and interdisciplinary analyses of Europe and beyond
Open and friendly academic learning environment with a strong international dimension
Vision and Values Statement
The MA in Modern Languages offers students with a high level of attainment in one or more foreign languages at undergraduate level an opportunity to pursue specialist study within and across the subject areas of French, German, Italian and Spanish, their cultures and languages. Offering advanced education in the area of foreign languages, and with a significant global reach, it aims to develop students' communicative and analytical skills to a sophisticated level of proficiency.
Students engage with current research and develop the advanced analytical, critical and theoretical tools necessary for sophisticated engagement with literature, culture, and language. The programme aims to combine choice with coherence, flexibility with focus, depth with the opportunity to broaden one's cultural horizons. Students choose an area or areas of specialisation from a broad range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary modules.
Whether deepening existing knowledge or exploring new areas of study, students enjoy intensive interaction with academic specialists in small-group seminars. Individual supervision on an independent academic research project culminates in the preparation of a minor thesis on an original subject.
Individual and group presentations, symposia, literature reviews, bibliographical research and extended written projects are central elements of the programme's design. As postgraduates, MA students join in School research seminars as full members of the academic community.
Programme Outcomes
Students should have established a sophisticated level of expertise in one or more of the programme's languages.
deepened a contextually informed understanding of and engagement with the literary and cultural production of communities speaking one or more of the programme's languages.
developed a familiarity with prominent critical and theoretical schools and tendencies.
identified and circumscribed an independent and significant research problematic that extends current thinking.
investigated the chosen research problematic in a systematic, critically and theoretically informed way, presented an analysis in appropriate academic form and language, and evaluated the conclusions of that analysis in relation to previous work in the area.
increased expertise in oral presentation and communication, especially in presenting and discussing substantial research questions in formal and specialist fora (seminars, symposia etc.) and to diverse audiences of experts and peers.