
School of Humanities and Social Science
SLEW courses
The cluster for Screens, Languages, English and Writing offers a range of study options from open access courses through to PhD research. Explore a sample below.
FutureLearn open access online courses
- Film and Television Studies explores historical and contemporary concepts of film and televisual scholarship.
- Film, Media, Culture provides an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of our complex relationship with media.
- Hollywood and Beyond studies Hollywood films in the wider context of cinema from North, Central, and South America.
- Popular Culture and Society introduces students to various scholarly frameworks, theories and perspectives on popular culture.
- Reading English Literature introduces key skills and concepts in the study of English literature and creative writing.
- Stories in Context: Fiction, Drama, Film explores the ways that authors, cultures and other factors bring meaning and messages into a story.
- Children's Literature provides a representative survey of children's literature.
- Creative Writing: Short Fiction offers a practice-led approach to understanding and applying the techniques used to create short stories.
Undergraduate degree level courses
The courses below are taught on a rotation in the areas of English & Writing, Film, Media & Cultural Studies, as well as Language Studies in French, German and Japanese. Courses feature prominently in the Bachelor of Arts, the Diploma in Languages as well as a number of other programs at the University of Newcastle. Please click the links for further details.
- ENGL1000 Reading English Literature
- ENGL1090 Critical Reading and Writing
- ENGL1101 Classics of World Literature
- ENGL1201 Creative Writing: Introduction
- ENGL1650 Stories in Context: Fiction, Drama, Film
- ENGL2000 Key Concepts of Literary Studies
- ENGL2005 Mind and Monstrosity: Victorian Novel
- ENGL2006 Modernisms
- ENGL2011 Children's Literature
- ENGL2021 Sex and Death on the Renaissance Stage
- ENGL2101 Creative Writing: Short Fiction
- ENGL2102 Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction
- ENGL2103 Writing for Arts and Culture
- ENGL3012 Crime Fiction: Mutations of a Genre
- ENGL3013 Women's Writing
- ENGL3045 Indigenous Australia in Literature: Listenin' Up
- ENGL3101 Reading Across Borders: Modern World Literature
- ENGL3302 Creative Writing: The Novel
- FMCS1000 Film, Media, Culture
- FMCS1100 Communication and Culture
- FMCS1200 Film and Television Studies
- FMCS2000 Media in Transition
- FMCS2200 Popular Culture and Society
- FMCS2300 Hollywood and Beyond
- FMCS3100 Digital Culture
- FMCS3110 Social Media & Network Culture
- FMCS3201 Peak TV
- FMCS3600 Documentary Cinema
- FMCS3701 Contemporary World Cinema
- FMCS3900 Screening Sex and Gender
Postgraduate taught degree level courses
Honours degree level courses
The Bachelor of Arts Honours degree provides students with high levels of proficiency in their previous Arts degree (GPA 5.0 and above) with the opportunity to take their studies to an advanced level. Many students take Honours simply because they want to keep studying our key areas of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, English and Writing, French and Japanese. However, Honours also provides students with credentials testifying to their ability to engage in high-quality independent study and is a necessary preparation for their careers as well as postgraduate study.
Semester one begins with two courses, HASS4000 BA Research and for students in our cluster’s research areas, HASS4002 BA Theory and Practice in Screens, Languages, English and Writing. Both courses are available on Callaghan’s campus and via Zoom video conferencing. Then in semester two students enrol in HASS4003 BA Thesis I and HASS4004 BA Thesis II to write their thesis with the guidance of an academic supervisor. These give students the opportunity to put the skills they have acquired into practice in the form of a substantial 15,000 word research-driven project. This can be in one of three formats: 1) scholarly; 2) work-integrated learning; and, 3) creative/digital.
Honours pathways
English and Writing offers students the chance to complete an independent critical or creative project on a topic of their own choice. Sample theses include:
- Putting Humpty back on the wall: why aren’t we talking about nursery rhymes in the digital age?
- Myth in Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist
- “Two Hours North”: How the liminality of a regional setting impacts on queer identity - short fiction
- Kâao Nôk Naa - Rice outside the paddy fields: Illegitimacy, family secrets and Third Culture Kids in Thailand - a memoir
- “Tarare”: cannibalism and medicine during the French Revolution - a historical fiction
- Better is Relative - story sequence based on fairy tales
Film, Media and Cultural Studies allows students to focus on carefully selected theories and methods in the process of analysing practices, institutions, systems, texts and experiences of contemporary life as played out within the fields of film, media and culture. Sample theses include:
- Queer Action Heroes
- A Systems View of Advertising Creativity
- Writing Identity: The Limits of Sex and Gender in Second Life
- One is Not Born, but Rather Becomes, a “Geek”: How Homosociality and Reflexivity Shape the Performance of Geek Masculinity in The Big Bang Theory
- Making Fans in Japan
- ”What Would You Prefer?”: Managing Fandom in Multi-Platform Narratives
French allows students to further their written and spoken French skills or to focus more specifically on their chosen area study while increasing their reading comprehension skills in French. This means that students can choose to write their thesis in French or in English. Sample theses include:
- Novels of Amélie Nothomb (in French)
- Le petit sauvage by Alexandre Jardin (in French)
- French politician Ségolène Royal (in French)
- Armance by Stendhal (in English)
Japanese offers students the opportunity to undertake advanced study in Japanese that involves research in the fields of language, society and culture, using Japanese language source materials.
Higher Degrees by Research (HDR)
Our SLEW staff supervise a range of research thesis topics for Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in their specialist areas of expertise. We encourage students to discuss criteria and topics with their potential supervisors well in advance of their application.
Learn more about thesis guidelines
Research topics
We offer PhD and Master by Research pathways in four areas:
- Film, media and cultural studies
- English and writing
- French
- Japanese
Applications are invited in the following areas:
- Detective Fiction
- Theory and History of the Novel
- 19th Century Literature
- Comparative Literature
- Renaissance Literature
- Women's Writings
- Literary Computing
- Indigenous Literature
- Modern and Contemporary British/ American Literature
- Postcolonial Studies
- Critical Theory
- Indigenous Studies
- Contemporary Australian and World Poetry
- Popular Culture
- Children's Literature
- Fantasy Literature
- Creative Writing (Literary Nonfiction, Short Fiction, Novel and Poetry)
- Film theory and history
- Television studies
- Gender and sexuality in the media
- Popular music and culture
- European cinema
- The Internet and social media
- Postcolonial studies
- Contemporary world cinema
- Race and ethnicity in media cultures
- Identity and taste in consumer culture
- Media structures and institutions
- New media technologies
- Crime Fiction (French and Anglo-Saxon), especially the Série Noire
- Translation projects, both practical and theoretical
- Twentieth-/twenty-first century French literature, especially the works of Boris Vian
- Japanese studies in general
- intellectual and cultural history
- military history
- social history
- classical and modern literature
- Japan's relations with East and Southeast Asia
The University of Newcastle acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands within our footprint areas: Awabakal, Darkinjung, Biripai, Worimi, Wonnarua, and Eora Nations. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.