MPhil Overview

Introduction

The MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies provides rigorous advanced training in the multi-disciplinary study of gender. The course is designed for those students who wish to prepare for PhD or further research and also, for those who want to enhance their understanding of 'gender' by undertaking a 9-month MPhil only.

The primary objective of the course is to introduce students from a wide variety of academic, business and policy backgrounds to the traditions, methods and front-line research that shape an advanced gender analysis of human society. Up to 25 different departments within the University of Cambridge come together on this course to address a range of topics such as:

  • Conflict
  • Globalisation
  • Labour Market inequality
  • Public Policy
  • Bio-medical advances
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Human Rights and Justice
  • Literature and the Arts
  • Culture and Antiquity

A key theme of the MPhil programme is 'intersectional' approaches to gender inequality. Systems of gender inequality cannot be properly understood, analysed or addressed without taking into consideration specific histories of the ways in which issues of sexuality, race, colonialism, class, disability and more inflect gender analysis. This approach is taught in the programme in Gender and Methods and Theory, Controversy and Methodology seminars, and throughout the diverse seminars in our Multi-disciplinary Text Seminars series.

Graduates from this MPhil should emerge as highly desirable candidates for a wide range of careers including those specialising in government, policy, business, NGO, journalistic and academic careers. Former students have gone on to work with the Centres for Migration and Labour Solutions, The European Commission, for Policy Research in India, with the UN Development Programme and UN Women.

The Research Dissertation

Applicants may apply to study any gender related topic - we will match students with an appropriate academic supervisor from across the University to guide the research. MPhil research topics have included:

  • Sister-Wife Suffragettes: Political Activism in the Woman's Exponent
  • Lesbians Take Photographs: Tessa Boffin’s Lesbian and Queer Dyke Safer Sex Representations, 1985-1993
  • Displaced Tendencies: Family Ties In\Against UK Asylum Narratives and Policy
  • Of Monsters and Ornaments: Yellow Femininity, Animacy, Form.
  • Transgenderism, Transnationality and the Race/Gender Analogue
  • Gender, Sexuality and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire

Eligibility

Applicants will have the equivalent of at least a high 2:1 undergraduate honours degree in the British university system, in any subject.

Enquiries

Please contact the Centre Administrator, University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies at gender@gender.cam.ac.uk