Please note: Programmes include core modules (usually programme‑specific) and elective modules (open to all Arts & Humanities PGT students, subject to prerequisites). Your programme determines how many electives you may take.
For full guidance on choosing your elective modules, please go here.
Classics and Ancient History
CLAS40430 | Ancient Greek for Research (Element 1: must be taken with Elements 2 and 3)
English Studies
List C7
List C10
List C1
List C2
List C5
List C6
History
List C8
List C9
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
List C3
List C4
Music
Philosophy
Theology and Religion
THEO46430 | Faith and Reason (DL)
Please click on one of the lists below to see the available elective modules.
There is a description and a short reading list (where available) for each module in the lists as well as a link to the Faculty Postgraduate Handbook. Longer reading lists may be available upon request to the relevant department. Please be aware that the Faculty Postgraduate Handbook refreshes every year in June to reflect changes to content for the following year.
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ENGL46630
Neurodiversity and the Humanities
MELA46830
MUSI42330
PHIL41030
Latin for Research (Element 1: must be taken with Elements 2 and 3)
Transnational Cinema
Current Issues in Environmental Philosophy
* This module is also available in list C8, it has been deliberately listed twice for timetabling purposes; there is no variation in content. If you select the module from this list, all other modules appearing in list C8 will still be available to you.
MELA46230
THEO4XXXX
Shame and Modern Writing*
Narrative Transformations: Medieval Romance to Renaissance Epic*
The Nature of History: Approaches to Environmental History
Subtitling Theory and Practice
Current Issues in Ethics and Aesthetics
* This module is also available in list C10, it has been deliberately listed twice for timetabling purposes; there is no variation in content. If you select the module from this list, all other modules appearing in list C10 will still be available to you.
Creative Nonfiction*
Knowledge, Power, and Health
* This module is also available in list C5, it has been deliberately listed twice for timetabling purposes; there is no variation in content. If you select the module from this list, all other modules appearing in list C5 will still be available to you.
Qualitative approaches to Digital Humanities
Global Gender Histories: Archives, Power, Publics
World Drama: Themes and Trends
Current Issues in Metaphysics, Mind and Language
Museums, Heritage, Histories
Women and the History of Philosophy
* This module is also available in list C7, it has been deliberately listed twice for timetabling purposes; there is no variation in content. If you select the module from this list, all other modules appearing in list C7 will still be available to you.
Trinity, Incarnation and Creation: High Medieval Franciscan Theology (DL)
Faith and Reason (DL)
CLAS40330 Latin for Research – The aim of this module is to promote self-motivated study of Latin as a preliminary to, and as providing an essential tool for, research in the general field of Classics. Students will gain sufficient knowledge of Latin to enable them to read original sources in the language with the requisite aids (dictionaries, grammars, commentaries) to hand.
Reading list:
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CLAS40430 Ancient Greek for Research – The aim of this module is to promote self-motivated study of Ancient Greek as a preliminary to, and as providing an essential tool for, research in the general field of Classics. Students will gain sufficient knowledge of ancient Greek to enable them to begin to read original sources in the language with the requisite aids (dictionaries, grammars, commentaries) to hand.
Reading Greek, JACT (2nd edition, Cambridge, 2007). This comes in two parts: (a) 'Grammar and Exercises' and (b) 'Text and Vocabulary'.
Morwood, J. (2001). Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
CLAS41130 Religious Life in the Roman Near East - This module explores to what degree the religious cultures of the various places and regions within the Roman Levant were different from each other, and whether a common Near Eastern religion can be recognized. By the end of this module, students should have acquired a close familiarity with the wide range of relevant source materials, and be able to understand and appreciate the particularities of the various patterns of worship in the Roman Near East.
CLAS45230: Linear B: Mycenaean Greek and Homer’s World - This module aims to introduce students to the study of Linear B, the earliest written form of the Greek language, while also focusing on the socio-political structure of Mycenaean Greece to the extent that this can be reconstructed through the tablets and surviving material culture. Classes will begin with the introduction of the script and a first contact with historical linguistics before moving on to the actual reading of tablets and their association with the Mycenaean society and its Homeric echoes.
CLAS45530 The Unity of Virtues in Philosophy - This module seeks to compare ancient and medieval arguments with arguments offered by contemporary philosophical debates on the unity of the virtues. By the end of the module, students will be familiar with several approaches in ancient and medieval philosophy as well as with the ethical and epistemological systems offered by the authors discussed. Teaching will be by seminars organised around topics related to the unity of the virtues, along with brief introductory sessions on the authors, texts and arguments discussed.
CLAS4XXXX Research Skills in Ancient Visual and Material Culture
This module studies the aesthetics of the visual environment in Roman antiquity, including urban space, architectural materials, freestanding sculptures, sarcophagi reliefs, and interactions between cultures. The emphasis is on methodological approaches such as iconography, semiotics, sensory studies, gender, and digital reconstruction.
The focus is on a single region but offers opportunities for comparisons with other areas of the Roman Empire. There is an optional field trip to Hadrian’s Wall.
Those with prior undergraduate experience of Greek or Roman material culture will benefit most from the module, but there is no expectation of such previous study. This module can be taken in place of an ancient language.
ENGL41730: Romantic Forms of Grief - This module explores Romantic poets’ experimentation with poetic forms and expression of grief by attending closely to their representation of loss, memory, death, and mourning across a variety of genres (including the ballad, sonnet, epic, elegy, fragment, romance, and ode). The module will concentrate principally on questions of poetic achievement in the work of the poets studied, and will also invite students to compare and connect works by the poets. Attention will be given to both experimentation as well as continuities in poetic tradition and uses of genre. This approach will combine advanced formal literary analysis with a specialized understanding of the various cultural, historical, religious, political, and intellectual contexts reflected in and shaping these Romantic poetic representations of grief.
We shall study poetry by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Clare, Hemans and Smith.
Reading for first seminar:
In our first seminar we will explore loss and grief in Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poems (focusing in particular on ‘Lucy Gray’, ‘Strange Fits of Passion I have known’, ‘She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways’, and ‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’), ‘The Discharged Soldier’, and ‘The Thorn’.
Relevant websites include:
ENGL44530: Shame and Modern Writing - This module considers shame’s shifting position in the history of emotions from c1880 to the present day and explores its formal and ethical function through a range of modern literary texts. As well as thinking about affiliated terms, including modesty, embarrassment, awkwardness and humiliation, students will draw from theoretical works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Ruth Benedict and Silvan Tomkins, and from literary works by writers including Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, James Baldwin and Anne Sexton, to consider how modern and contemporary writing leads back to the scene of writing and to the exposed predicament of the writer.
To familiarize yourself with the range of this module’s themes and applications, consider reading the chapters listed under ‘Preliminary Reading’ in advance. Concerning the reading set for individual weeks, please note that chapters marked with a star are available electronically.
Preliminary Reading:
ENGL45030: Adventures in Reading: Romantic Books and Political Possibilities - This module tracks how Romantic writers, in a transatlantic age of revolutions and abolitionist movements, understood the technology of the book to participate in the perception and creation of political possibilities. The module will explore Romantic conceptions of the significance of where and when one reads books, as well as how the book’s structure of binding and pages, which encourages flipping around rather than linear reading, helps shape the significance of literature in the period. Methodologically, students will combine rigorous close reading and formal analysis with theories of the book and histories of reading in order to illuminate the play of meaning between poetics and format. One seminar meeting will be held in Special Collections at the Palace Green Library.
Primary authors will include John Keats, Jane Austen, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, William Hazlitt, Phillis Wheatley, and William Wordsworth, among others.
ENGL45130: Creative Nonfiction - This module will provide students with both a historical and critical knowledge of, and a practical training in, creative nonfiction. It will cover the three key forms of the genre—memoir, biography, and the essay—as well as variants and hybrids thereof. Students will read a selection of published creative nonfiction (mostly from the late 20th and 21st centuries), with a view toward writerly craft and technique. Many seminars will include a workshop component, in which students read and critique (in writing and / or in person) each other’s work. The workshop format is designed to give students an understanding of how their work is read and received; they may then incorporate such feedback into their edits.
ENGL46530: The Uses of Literature: From Power to Pleasure - Why bother reading, writing, or studying literature? And what is literature, anyway? These questions became particularly pressing in the Renaissance, when rapid and dramatic social, economic, religious, and political changes made defining the value of reading and writing literary works a matter of urgent concern. This module has two foci. First, it explores the Renaissance conception of literature as a means of intervening in the world and transforming the bodies and minds of readers. Second, it investigates how Renaissance ideas about the uses of literature continue to inform debates about the uses (or conversely, uselessness) of the humanities today. Seminar themes include political power, wealth, health, virtue, consolation, and pleasure. Set texts range from Renaissance drama, prose and poetry to contemporary novels, journalism, and political policy documents.
Some Indicative Reading:
ENGL45930: Neurodiversity and the Humanities - In this module, students will engage with a diverse range of literary, historical, and cultural texts that decentre the neurotypical experience in favour of an alternative that diverges from the norm within a given socio-political context. The module starts by interrogating the diagnostic basis of several conditions labelled as neurodivergent, bringing cognitive and developmental psychology into conversation with writings from neurodivergent advocates and activists. The module then moves on a weekly basis through various critical reconfigurations of neurodivergence and engagements with different media. The module makes use of a variety of media – including zines, comics, dance, theatre, stand-up comedy, and literary texts –to interrogate the accessibility of differing forms of presentation.
ENGL46130: Qualitative approaches to Digital Humanities - In this module students will consider a range of digital technologies and their application to humanities research and cultural heritage organisations. Topics can include: the history and development of Digital Humanities; the analysis and anatomy of digital projects; digital musicology; game cultures; textual resources and digital editions; spatial Digital Humanities and crowd-based methods; user studies and interface design; digital techniques in museums and cultural heritage (including field trips to the Oriental Museum and special collections); Digital Humanities beyond the English speaking world- international Digital Humanities and non-roman scripts; Sustaining and preserving digital materials. Students will investigate how digital resources are designed, used and preserved.
ENGL46630: Subaltern Futurism: Ecology, Agriculture and World Literature – In this module students will explore the literary and theoretical stakes of the global struggle for a post-capitalist food system. They will investigate the cultural logic of contemporary global peasant movements and postcolonial and indigenous food sovereignty movements, focussing in particular on their utopian imaginaries. Students are invited to consider the limits of dominant conceptions of modernity, culture and the future by engaging with literatures and theories of plural temporality, agroecology, eco-feminism, and anti-capitalist resistance.
First 3 works of prose fiction on the module (more follow later):
For a taste of the utopian promise of contemporary peasant movements, read:
For those of you who do not have a background in literary study, please familiarize yourself with the basics of literary analysis by consulting:
ENGL46730 - Cultures of Madness
This module explores representations of mental distress across different cultural contexts and creative modes of expression in often under-studied contemporary literary and visual material from the 21st century. Students will explore the multiple modes of representing and relating to ‘madness’ that are historically-rooted and culturally-salient. The question of what madness and mental health is, and how we can or should respond to those experiences, is of great public and popular significance. This module will not only appeal to students’ intellectual interests, but will also be relevant to them in a wide range of possible future careers, from journalism to teaching, from literary editing to third sector work.
Reading/watch list:
ENGL53630: Narrative Transformations: Medieval Romance to Renaissance Epic - This module will introduce students to varied forms and practices of fiction from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Students will explore the processes whereby some of the great story-matters of the Western Tradition have been transformed over the centuries. Studying this module will provide a basis for possible future research in Medieval or Renaissance literature. Content will be drawn from a range of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance writers normally including Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, Marie de France, Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Gower, Malory, Spenser and Shakespeare.
HIST42730: Negotiating Life in the Early Modern Era - How do we uncover and appreciate the lives and experiences of ordinary people, particularly when they lived hundreds of years ago? This module offers strategies for finding, understanding, and writing about the majority of the early modern population: ordinary women, children, and men, whose lives are sometimes left out of the historical record. Discussing travel and migration; the nature of community; work and labour; homes and housing; sexuality; wealth and poverty; and health and the body, we will study the cultural and social history of the early modern world, and will learn about best practices for source recovery, archival analysis, and the re-centring of everyday lives and voices from the past.
HIST45730: A Safe Democracy? Constitutionalism, Extremism, and Political Violence in Modern England, C. 1890-1939 –
The Brexit victory in the 2016 referendum was about many things, including, for some, a sense that England was unique. One historically persistent and significant expression of this exceptionalism has been the view that England was a uniquely stable, constitutional, liberal, consensual, practical and successful nation-state, unlike the unstable, strife-torn and dogma-ridden nations of Europe, which sooner or later end in revolution, authoritarianism, and tyranny. This is certainly a comforting view, not least for a cross-party political class; but is it a correct view? The objective of this module is to explore this terrain by clarifying its conceptual bases, examining both published and manuscript primary sources, and engaging closely with problems of historiography. This module examines the political currents that shaped England during the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century, with a particular focus on questions of state and paramilitary violence, and the rise of political movements such as sydnicalism, fascism, and communism, which seemed to challenge some of the core assumptions underpinning British parliamentary democracy.
This module considers the development of museums and heritage sites from the 18th century to the present day, examining how they contribute to a sense of historical time and the creation of cultural and social identities. The module introduces students to key debates and methodologies in museum and heritage studies and equips them with an understanding of the histories of museums and other institutions involved in collecting, conserving, displaying, or interpreting the past. Although the module views these practices through a global lens, it also gives students the opportunity to investigate connections with museum and heritage practices in the Northeast, weighing up how – and whether – heritage institutions today are using their own histories to address contemporary challenges.
This module explores the emergence and the transformation of political dispensations (in many instances called ‘states’) across the medieval and early modern Islamicate world. We want to think about state formation through the different political, economic, social, and cultural contexts they effected and that shaped them in turn on a global scale. Starting with a conceptual introduction, the course will move from the Caliphate of Cordoba to the Deccan Sultanates, from the North Caucasus to Northern India and from Ottoman Anatolia to China. Our case studies will include empires, local states, nomadic formations and military slavery dispensations. Our main aim is to think about the period from 1000 to 1800 as one of fundamental political change across the Islamicate world and to introduce students to the many different global and transregional contexts needed to make sense of those pasts.
HIST46330: The Nature of History: Approaches to Environmental History
Environmental history is one of the fastest-growing subfields of the historical profession. Rising interest in the mutually constitutive relationship between humans and the environment has spurred new approaches to historical research. The objective of this module is to provide a thorough introduction to environmental history from a global perspective. It will examine the development of environmental history and explore some key debates within the field. As a team-taught course, individual seminars will be taught be a variety of regional specialists working on a wide range of historical periods.
HIST46730: The City in History -
It is projected that by the middle of the twenty-first century, two thirds of humans will be city dwellers. Yet the dramatic urbanisation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is only the latest wave in a long-term process. Cities have centres of innovation and change for thousands of years; human history is a story of the growth of the city. This module will ask what it means to think of the city as an object of historical study, tracing the contours of urban history from ancient through medieval to modern times. We will explore how city-building gave shape to imperial power and how urban segregation inflected the creation of racial ideologies and religious practices. Some weeks will take particular cities as case studies, while others will adopt a wide, thematic lens. This is a team-taught module led by specialists from a range of historical subfields who will introduce students to a range of approaches to understanding the city and urban life.
HIST47430 - Global Gender Histories: Archives, Power, Publics
Global gender history encompasses—among other things— women’s histories, queer histories, and histories of masculinities. The global lens on gender enables historians to better understand the interplay of local, regional, and planetary processes at work. The aim of this module is not to provide students with comprehensive narratives of change but rather to introduce and explore the methodologies and evidence used by historians who have attempted to gender global histories and to understand local gender histories in global contexts. These global gender histories are concerned with the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, (dis)abilities and draw on interdisciplinary methodologies, to explain how people and publics have experienced, enforced and transformed gender. As a team-taught module, individual seminars will be taught by a variety of regional specialists working on a wide range of historical periods. While topics will range from medicine and economics to performance and law, the seminars will each attend to gender’s historical relations to archives, power, and publics. They will also encourage students to develop their own areas of expertise.
MELA45630: Visual Modernities – In this module students will explore how cultures around the globe have used visual mediums to imagine themselves as ‘modern’, and how avant-garde and modernist ways of seeing help construct social realities in modernity. The module studies particular forms of representation in a variety of colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial cultural contexts, including Latin America and the Caribbean, North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Levant, Southeastern Europe, and the Jewish diaspora.
MELA46130: Selected Topics of World Literature – This module will use selections from different literatures from around the world, to interrogate the concept of “World Literature”. The module is organised around themes that recur in different literatures and traditions as they speak to the experience of living in the (modern) world. Texts will be read in translation, but students will be encouraged to engage with texts in their original language if they are able to do so. Topics may include (but are not limited to) the following: postcolonialism; translation; migration; gender; authoritarianism; futurism. The module will use a variety of texts to ask what it means to be write literature in the world and if that is the same as writing World Literature.
MELA46630 - Transnational Cinema
This module offers a focused overview of transnational cinema with a non-exclusive emphasis on the recent cinemas of the Global South. Firmly grounded on a solid practical understanding of film and visual culture analysis, this module provides a focused overview of the theories, debates and interpretive tools that constitute transnational cinema as an influential approach to the study of cinema beyond the English-speaking world. The module demonstrates the importance of studying, analysing and interpreting the varieties and genres of global cinema through an emphasis on different geo-linguistic areas and contexts. Case studies will rely on local genealogies and historically relevant detail and we will also explore aspects of local, regional and hemispheric filmmaking that both transcend and imply national, transnational and global phenomena.
MELA46230: Science, Technology and the Remaking of Nature - This module will analyse how the arts - and culture more broadly - have engaged with technological invention and scientific discovery, taking inspiration from their promise while also criticising their amenability to ideological exploitation. A combination of topics taken from across the globe and over the course of history will enable students to explore debates about the relationship between nature, culture and technology. An indicative range of topics and periods for consideration will include scientific revolutions; the Enlightenment and colonial science; evolution and the rise of industrial capitalism; the porous borders between science, technology and fiction; the Anthropocene, citizen science and technological life.
MELA47530: Subtitling Theory and Practice - This module is designed to prepare students for work in the fast-growing Audio-Visual Translation (AVT) sector of the language industries. It develops students’ understanding of the semiotic features of subtitling, and of the linguistic and technical constraints and challenges of subtitling. It also provides hands-on training with audiovisual material taken from various sources (e.g., films, documentaries), aiming to enhance students’ technological competence and skills in using professional subtitling tools to do spotting and to produce accurate, relevant, and reader-friendly subtitles in a broad range of genres.
MELA47830: World Drama: Themes and Trends – This module approaches world drama through a focus on specific playwrights and theatre movements that are structured around specific themes such as bodies and subjects, borders and migration, land and ecology, translation, justice and rights, colonial and postcolonial histories, illness and disability, science and technology.
The module offers a chronologically and generically diverse range of dramatic texts from the modern and pre-modern period which will be read in translation but with the option of engaging with the texts in their original language.
MELA4XXXX: Translation Practica and Work Placement - This module aims to develop students’ understanding of contemporary translation practices through interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic transfer, including asymmetrical rendition, transcreation and audio-description. It introduces modern practices used in today’s translation industry and intercultural projects and addresses the complexities of managing multilingual and multicultural projects in a business context, with an introduction to key project management methods and practices. Students will develop advanced practical, analytical and transferable skills for working across languages, cultures and media, and will apply these in a professional environment through either an external or in-house work placement, in the UK or abroad, in accordance with University regulations, gaining experience from practitioners while taking responsibility for their professional development.
MELA46830 - Crossing Cultures: Word, Text and Image in Transit
What is culture? What is translation? How does culture travel across space and time? We will explore concepts and case studies from the perspective of cultural materialism and the new philologies and migratory texts through the lens of reception theory, cultural materialism and migratory aesthetics. Case studies are likely to include: keywords of culture and society and the inter-medial space they occupy between literature, society and art; canonical as well as non-canonical texts and their travels across cultures and time; iconic and less familiar images, their prehistories, afterlives and legacy across cultures. There will be a strong transhistorical element with cultures of the global past engaging in fruitful dialogue with cultures of the present. At least one case study will involve practitioners reflecting on and theorizing their own exercises in cross-cultural translation or adaptation.
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MUSI42330: Audiovisual Media Creation for Research - This module will discuss and demonstrate advanced techniques of recording and editing audio and video, teaching how to produce high quality digital audiovisual media. In addition to developing practical skills, students will explore structure and narrative in audiovisual production and develop an understanding of the use of audiovisual media within academic research. Students will acquire a theoretical framework, comprising elements of visual anthropology and visual arts, and will be expected to reflect critically on their work.
MUSI4XXXX, Studies in Electronic Music
This module explores the diverse world of electronic music, from early innovations to cutting‑edge work. Students will engage critically with electronic music history, technology and creative practice, gaining hands‑on experience through activities such as live coding and circuit bending. There will be chance to explore many historic and contemporary movements within electronic music; Stylistic areas encountered will include electroacoustic art music, synth pop and electronic dance music, experimental electronica such as ambient, glitch, and noise, jazz and improvisation with electronics, and sound art. The module culminates in an independent research project, which may be essay‑based or take the form of a practice-led performance or composition with critical commentary.
PHIL41030: Phenomenology, Pragmatism and the Sciences of the Mind –
The first half of the module, will address themes in the phenomenological tradition. Indicative topics include embodiment, interpersonal relations, and competing conceptions of the nature of human experience. We will consider both historical and contemporary contributions.
In the second half of this module, we will look at the attempts to understand the mind and its ability to represent the world developed by American idealist and pragmatist philosophers at the end of the nineteenth-century. We will be looking at some classical issues in philosophy (such as truth and intentionality), but also some issues concerning the birth of psychology as an empirical science.
PHIL42130: Current Issues in Environmental Philosophy - This module seeks to address some of the pertinent philosophical questions raised by environmental issues. This includes but is not limited to the following topics: our moral duties to non-human sentient beings, biocentrism, the preservation of endangered species, moral duties to ecosystems, ecologism and political ideology, the idea of wilderness, phenomenology and environmental philosophy, naturalness, epistemic and moral issues surrounding anthropogenic climate change.
PHIL42630: Knowledge, Power, and Health - The topics covered in this module may develop in response to events in both the world and the literature, and will include well-developed literatures such as the essentials of philosophy of medicine, epidemiology and public health, the literature on social determinants of health, as well as issues coming to prominence more recently such as the epistemology and politics of expertise, race and medicine, the ethics, epidemiology and ontology of intercultural medical disagreement, and the decolonisation of public health.
PHIL42730: Current Issues in Metaphysics, Mind and Language – This module will cover a number of foundational texts in analytic philosophy of metaphysics, mind and language, homing in on a number of cutting-edge contemporary debates and topics including: the mental causation debate, the metaphysics of science, the philosophy of linguistics, and the nature of human action and perception.
PHIL42930: Science, Technology and Society: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives - The module aims to explore conceptual issues arising in science, technology and society such that, by the end of the module, students will have obtained skills in understanding and interpreting philosophical theories and arguments concerning science, technology, and society in contemporary and historical perspective. We will cover topics in the philosophy of science, technology, and society, including themes such as scientific evidence, explanation, method, revolutions, artificial intelligence, science communication, and truth. Topics in the history of science, technology, and society, including themes such as scientific revolutions, Darwinism, science and religion, and the continental drift controversy will also be considered.
PHIL4XXXX: Women and the History of Philosophy - This course showcases Durham’s world-leading expertise around women and the history of philosophy, a pioneering field that exploded during the 2010s. We’ll explore the theoretical issues posed by neglect of women philosophers within the history of their discipline. We’ll also dig into the work of historical women philosophers, ranging widely through history. The figures will vary from year to year but will include the likes of ancient philosophers Aspasia and Diotima, medieval philosophers Dhouda and Christine de Pizan, early moderns Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish, or modern philosophers Anna Julia Cooper and the Oxford Quartet. Along the way, we’ll consider philosophical issues especially pertaining to women, such as feminism.
PHIL4XXXX: Current Issues in Ethics and Aesthetics - This module will cover a number of foundational and cutting-edge issues in ethics and aesthetics. Indicative topics are, in Ethics: Metaethics, Axiology, Moral Reasoning, Moral Naturalism and, in Aesthetics: The Modern System of the Arts, Artistic Tradition, one of: aesthetics of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno, Merleau-Ponty.
THEO46030: Conceiving Change in Contemporary Catholicism (Distance Learning) - In this module we will explore the ecclesial and theological dynamics of conceiving change in the Catholic Church through an in-depth examination of the concept of catholicity, approaches to understanding the development of tradition, and the potential for receptive Catholic learning in relation to key sites of stress within the Catholic ecclesial system. Texts for study and discussion are generally drawn from 20th -21st century Catholic teaching and theology, although key 19th century texts are also examined (e.g. Möhler and Newman).
THEO46130: Twentieth Century Catholic Theology (Distance Learning) - This online module will combine an exploration of the breadth and range of 20th century Catholic theology with a deep engagement with its two most challenging and influential thinkers, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Students will be enabled to read deeply in Rahner and Balthasar and reflect on the different theological style and ecclesial orientations of their ouevres. Student will encounter a range of other important figures and theological movements and will have a chance both to explore these and to reflect on their relationships to the differing theological visions of Rahner and Balthasar.
THEO46230: Catholic Social Thought and Practice (Distance Learning) - The end of the 19th century marked the beginning of a significant new tradition of Catholic papal teaching: the social encyclical. This module attempts to map the emergence of key themes, trajectories of thought, principles and propositions within the broad CST field. It explores the encyclicals chronologically and thematically. It relates the development of theory to praxis and reads the tradition critically. In addition to the popes, students will encounter the work of Joseph Pieper, Simone Weil, Gustavo Gutierrez, Dorothy Day, Charles Taylor, Ivan Illich, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, John Courtney Murray amongst others.
THEO46330: The Theology of Thomas Aquinas: Selected Topics (Distance Learning) - This module will offer an in-depth exposition of key aspects of Aquinas’s theology, such as, for instance, how Aquinas conceives of Sacra Doctrina and its relation to philosophy; the divine attributes and the Trinitarian understanding of God; theory of analogy; creation; the human person as made in the image of God; the Christian life of virtue; salvation in Christ; the active and contemplative lives; sanctification. It will also consider the sources, influence and legacy of Aquinas’s theology.
THEO46430: Faith and Reason (Distance Learning) - This module examines the ways in which Christian tradition has conceived the relationship between ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ and concomitantly theology and philosophy. Diverse ways of framing the question of the relationship between reason and faith, philosophy and theology, will be presented chronologically through engagement with a series of primary texts taken from key thinkers in the Christian tradition. This module will typically include texts from antique, medieval, early modern and modern periods in Christian thought, and will be framed by contemporary approaches.
THEO46530: Trinity, Incarnation, and Creation: High Medieval Franciscan Theology (Distance Learning) - This module will offer an in-depth exposition of the key contributions to Christian doctrine made by the leading Franciscan thinkers of the 13th and 14th centuries. Through engagement with the relevant primary sources, it will familiarize students with the highly innovative theological and philosophical contributions made by the early Franciscan masters. The areas of doctrine studied will include areas such as: Trinitarian theology, the Incarnation, the doctrine of creation, human nature and cognition, the relationship between faith and reason, and the purpose and nature of theological enquiry.
THEO46630 - Theology, Nature, Environment
This module aims to broaden and deepen students’ understanding of the scope and tasks of Christian theology by means of an advanced study of 'nature’ in theological perspective.
We will look at various topics including; the relationship between ‘theology’ and ‘ecology’ as disciplines; the history of ‘nature’ in the Western tradition; theological analysis of contemporary environmental and ecological debates; theological ethics of the environment and nonhuman life; the relationship between nature and 'the sacred'; the place of human beings in the natural world and the so-called 'wilderness debates' and 'the end of nature'.
THEO56730: Ritual, Symbolism and Belief in The Anthropology of Religion - This Ritual, Symbolism and Belief module explores these core concepts through a conversational method between social-cultural anthropology and theology. It embraces ideas of gift-grace-charismata, merit-meaning-salvation, embodiment-incarnation-sacrament, mortality, and death transcendence. A mini-ethnographic project on an appropriate group is also undertaken and presented to the class.
THEO4XXXX The Theological Quest - Christian theology is characterised by a creative tension between tradition (what is ‘handed on’) and the need to engage critically with wider ecclesial, cultural and intellectual developments. This module is concerned with the advanced study of Christian theology’s quest for continuity, renewal and creative development within wider ecclesial, cultural, political, scientific and philosophical contexts. It is therefore concerned with the practice of Christian theology and its creative endeavours towards renewal and development, in keeping with the ressourcement theologies of the twentieth century. The special theme in 2026-2027 will be conceiving change in Catholic theology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both within the Catholic tradition and ecumenically.
THEO4XXXX Biblical Reception - Students can expect to study closely some particular examples of biblical reception in their social and historical contexts, and to consider their significance, in dialogue with modern scholarship both in biblical study and more widely within in the study of theology and religion. The case studies will vary from year to year, depending on the expertise of the staff teaching it; the focus for a particular year will be advertised in advance.
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