School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds

Cultural Studies has been taught at Leeds since the mid 1980s when a group of scholars from Sociology, English, Philosophy, History of Science, Fine Art and Modern Languages first came together across their disciplinary boundaries to share common ground in thinking about culture through new methods and approaches that were called cultural studies. Since then we have run an internationally reputed MA programme and attracted over 30 PhD students in the field. Cultural Studies as it is studied and practised at the University of Leeds offers an introduction to ways of thinking about ourselves and the world we inhabit, its formative histories and changing formations, the languages of images, bodies, gestures, spaces, places, and power, the possibilities for radical changes, and the constraints and failures of modernity. It will give you tools to think with, perspectives through which to reconsider yourself and your selves. We hope it will help and encourage you to become a critically aware, reflective and excited citizen supplied with a range of concrete knowledges, analytical methods and ‘transferable’ skills, which can be used in any number of ways, in many fields of work – including scholarship and education, of course, a domain in which we place enormous value at every level.

Cultural Studies Degrees