Medieval and Modern Languages
The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford is one of the world’s leading centres for the study of multiple literatures and cultures in one of the biggest and most vibrant languages faculties in the world.
These literatures embrace over a thousand years of human experience and invention, encompass both the formation of traditions and the wildest of innovation, and offer spaces for imaginative experiments in making, shaping, and representing worlds, identities, pasts, and futures.
Our graduate students work on projects that engage with these literatures and cultures from medieval and early modern literature and culture through to modern and contemporary literature, film and cultural history, investigating literature’s ability to address the formation and, in some cases, breakdown of political, aesthetic, and racial relations. Areas of particular interest that span our different languages and period specialisms include History of the Book, Performance and Voice, Translation and Adaptation, Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, Gender and Diversity, Ecology and Environmental Humanities, Cognitive Literary Studies, Medical Humanities and Life Writing, and Comparative Literature. As a student on one of the faculty’s one- and two-year master’s courses, you may develop a more general study programme in your chosen language or choose to focus your study on Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Enlightenment Studies, Medieval Literature, Slavonic Studies, or Yiddish Studies.
With academic staff working across Czech, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Slavonic, and Spanish, an internationally renowned research collection in the Taylor Institution Library, and widespread links with universities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, our graduate programmes offer a vibrant and unique environment with supervision in medieval, early modern and contemporary literature in each language.
Courses