Core Course

The Core Course aims to equip students with advanced skills, theoretical and methodological frameworks essential for the study of gender in an interdisciplinary context at postgraduate level. It further aims to give students the opportunity to apply these methods, concepts and theories in both general and more specialized contexts. The Core Course is a junction of intersecting disciplines used in the arts and humanities, social sciences, development and built environment, laws and historical sciences. It introduces students to the ways in which different disciplines inform, complement and challenge each other in matters of gender. The course aims to foster students’ ability to think critically, and to carry out independent research.

Teaching is carried out in the form of lectures and seminar groups employing a variety of methods. The lectures are complemented by discussions which provide an opportunity to explore and scrutinize issues from different angles, and develop student learning.

Classes are held on a weekly basis throughout the First and Second Terms, while the Third Term focuses on dissertation writing and presentation. Teaching schedules are issued separately.

The Core Course is taught on an interdisciplinary basis whereas individual topics are presented by subject specialists. You will hear different voices almost from week to week, and topics will be approached in different ways and from different angles. The structure of the Core Course will help you to incorporate this multitude into meaningful frameworks. There are four main clusters of topics around which essential issues revolve. Each one has its own coordinator who will be present at most of the sessions and teach at least one of them. The coordinator will re-enforce the coherence of the course and point out relations between the different lectures / seminars.


You will be expected to have read certain texts in advance of most classes. It is important that you come well prepared, as intensive critical discussion of key texts is very much part of the learning process at graduate level.

You are expected to write one 2,500-word practice essay and two 5,000-word assessed essays. The practice essays are not part of the formal assessment, but essential element in the learning process. The feedback you will receive on these essays will guide and improve your writing skills.

You are required to attend all classes and do all the preparatory reading. The programme however allows and indeed encourages you to concentrate on those topics or areas of particular interest to you and to develop these further in essays and through independent reading. 


Information correct for 2011-12 academic session