Graduate life at Queen Mary

Graduate students at Queen Mary are an important part of academic life in the Department. We aim to provide our students with world-class tuition and facilities, creating a stimulating intellectual environment in which to work.

In addition to regular seminars and supervisions, you will be invited to attend the student-run Queen Mary Research Seminar. Each week participants in the seminar listen and respond to a research paper presented by a visiting speaker, a member of staff, or a graduate student in the Department. Recent guest speakers have included Mark Currie (East Anglia), John Barrell (York), and David Norbrook (Oxford). As well as providing the chance to discuss research going on both inside and outside the Department, the seminar is a regular opportunity for the academic community to get together and socialise.

Queen Mary also hosts a series of larger, annual events in Mile End. In association with other departments in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences we help to organise Arts Week – a week celebrating the Arts and Humanities at the College. Among the many contributors to this event in 2007 were the Renaissance scholar James Shapiro, and the Trainspotting and 28 Days Later director Danny Boyle. The Department is also involved in running two annual public lectures: the Jacob Bronowski Lecture, and the HarperCollins Biography Lecture. Past biography lecturers have included the historian and broadcaster David Starkey, and the biographer Amanda Foreman. Among the eminent Bronowski lecturers have been the writer and politician Michael Ignatieff, the stage director Peter Sellars, and the broadcaster Lord Melvyn Bragg.

In the past couple of years the College has opened a new Graduate Centre, housed in an historic building alongside the Regent's Canal. Adjacent to the Arts Building, the Graduate Centre includes comfortable study areas, networked computer facilities, a seminar room, and a common room. The open spaces around these buildings have been landscaped to create an Arts Square. Taken together, these developments form the core of Queen Mary’s new ‘Arts Quarter’, and provide some of the most inviting facilities in London for graduate study.

For general information about graduate life at Queen Mary, please visit the postgraduate pages on the main College website [new window].

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