Postgraduate study
MA Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Our interdisciplinary master's course is designed specifically for students interested in investigating the relationships between gender, sexuality, and culture.
This course will introduce students to new approaches in gender and sexuality studies as theoretical, social, cultural, political, and historical fields of investigation.
Alongside a core course unit focused on key concepts for understanding gender and sexuality within culture, students will have an opportunity to select options across a divergent range of academic disciplines, including:
- English and American Studies;
- Art History and Cultural Practices;
- Politics;
- History;
- Modern Languages;
- Religions and Theology;
- History of Medicine, Sociology and Social Anthropology.
For more information, please visit the MA Gender, Sexuality and Culture course profile page.
Postgraduate research
In addition to the MA, teaching staff associated with CSSC supervise PhD students across a range of academic disciplines engaged with research at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and culture.
Below is a list of current and recent PhD students supervised by members of the Centre.
Current PhD students
Luan Cassal is a psychologist from Brazil and PhD candidate in Education.
His current research analyses the British government's discourses and policies on gender recognition for trans and gender-nonconforming adolescents.
His main interests are educational psychology, queer theory, LGBT rights, and decolonial studies.
Millie Lovelock is a PhD student in English and American Studies.
Her research explores representations of feminism and social media in contemporary women's literature, film, and television with particular emphasis on questions of trauma, self-help culture, and celebrity.
Kimberley's research explores the changing boundaries of female masculinity and transmasculinity through autobiographical writing.
Her work locates ‘butch’ as a historical category and traces it through to new and contemporary articulations, asking questions about its supposed disappearance.
Kimberley proposes the elements of butchness and butch as an embodied experience can be found in contemporary transmasculine narratives.
James Lawrence Slattery (they/them) is a PhD candidate whose work argues for an understanding of queerness as a political mode of subjectivity that problematises late-capitalism.
The frameworks used to make this claim are theories of temporality, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and film studies.
This research is funded by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. They co-organise the Manchester Queer Research Network which runs regular reading groups and events. They are also a freelance journalist.
Elia (Eli) Cugini is a PhD student in English and American Studies.
His thesis research is on excavating antisocial and anti-family sentiment in contemporary autofiction, with a theoretical focus on family abolitionism, queer and trans theory, and life-writing studies.
He also works and presents on intimacy and horror in contemporary trans fiction, and his critical writing on queer literature and culture is published widely.
Dyuti Gupta is a PhD candidate and a John Bright Fellow in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. Her thesis focuses on narratives of care that have the First World War, nursing, and constructions of racial difference at their centre.
Her research brings together the fields of care studies, gender theory and memory studies with an aim to develop a new way of remembering and representing the war.
Born and raised in India, Dyuti received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Delhi (2018) and Master’s degree from Ambedkar University Delhi (2020).
Ellie’s research is on queer/trans experimental speculative fiction: texts which imagine other worlds and enable new, unexpected ways of reading.
Her research uses queer/trans, materialist, and psychoanalytic theory and a dialectical method to articulate a trans futurity.
Recently completed PhD students
Tessa Harris is a writer and poet currently at the Centre for New Writing as a Commonwealth PhD candidate.
Her areas of interest are the formal techniques used in the combinations of text and of image in narrative work and the complications of representation that reproduces the violence it seeks to critique.
She was born and raised in Windhoek, Namibia, and has had had short stories, poetry, and non-fiction published in Namibia, South Africa, and the UK.
Janelle Hixon is a PhD candidate in Art History and Cultural Practices.
Janelle’s thesis explores the production of home in moving-image work after 1989 through the out-of-reach structures of longing.
Informed by feminist and queer debates, this thesis aims to generate more nuanced understandings of the complexity of place with implications for discursive debates about a global art world that moves beyond the burdens of global relevancy and national and cultural binding.
Stian Kristensen is a PhD student in English and American Studies, and co-founder of the HIV Humanities Research Group at The University of Manchester.
His thesis is on constructions of HIV, intimacy, and masculinity in contemporary fiction, with particular interest in how anxieties pertaining to HIV/AIDS linger in contemporary texts in a cultural moment that sees a widespread incitement to historicize and memorialize the AIDS epidemic.
Previous degrees include a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Oslo (2015) and an MA from Goldsmiths, University of London (2017).
Sabine (Bean) Sharp is a PhD student in English and American Studies.
They recently defended their thesis 'Monsters, Time-Travel, and Aliens: Tracing the Genealogies of 'Trans' through Feminist Science Fiction Writing and Film', an interdisciplinary research project funded by The University of Manchester.
They are now exploring how trans-authored speculative fiction writing might offer ways to interrogate and intervene in debates on trans rights.