Women's Studies

The main focus of the MPhil and PhD degrees is in research and the writing of a thesis.This Women's Studies degree is delivered by University of York .

Quick Facts:

• Dr Rachel Alsop: Gender and migration; gendered violence; contemporary developments in feminist theory; issues of body image (particularly in relation to aesthetic surgery); masculinities; girls' rights.
• Dr Boriana Alexandrova Medical humanities; disability theory; modern and contemporary global literatures; contemporary women’s writing and performance; trauma theory and survivors’ narratives; embodiment; feminist and queer art-activism; ethics; literary multilingualism and translation; postcoloniality.
• Dr Clare Bielby: Violence, representation and gender; violence, subjectivity and affect/emotion; terrorism and gender; the field of perpetrator studies. History of feminism, particularly German feminisms; queer studies and feminist queer theory; masculinities; subjectivity and narratives of the self; gender, sexuality and representation.
• Dr Asha Abeyasekera: Marriage and kinship; the everyday practices of intimacy and care; and the gendered impacts of global capitalism on women’s homemaking in contemporary South Asia. The gendered dimensions of urban poverty and precarity; the materiality and emotional dimensions of intimate relations and domestic violence; and the creative strategies women use to survive, resist, and flourish even as they claim ethical lives.

• Research: The main focus of the MPhil and PhD degrees is in research and the writing of a thesis.

• Taught modules: All students will audit one or more modules to support their research and to develop their research skills.
• To ‘audit’ a module means to fully participate in the seminar reading, preparatory exercises, and class discussion, but to omit the assessment.
• The choice of modules is decided in consultation with a student’s supervisor. Most students new to CWS will take some core modules in year one (see the MA program for details).