English and Philosophy MA (Hons)

This course is a degree for people who are interested in how stories provoke us to think. How ideas and conversations can be socially transformative and creative. Questions you will take on include:

• Why is creative critical thinking important for social justice, democracy, and the environment? 
• Can stories hold open ways of living and thinking otherwise?
• Who decides what a text means: the writer, the reader, or the language itself?
• Why do we seek out horror, and what does fear tell us about freedom?
• How does cinema change the way we see the world, and ourselves? 
• Can a film philosophise? Can a comic think? Can a video game care? Can a play argue? 
• What happens to literature, and to authorship, when a machine can write?

In English you will study novels, poetry, plays, comics, and film. You will have the opportunity to develop your own creative writing. Topics range from Shakespeare and Austen to the Romantic poets and the innovators of avant-garde Modernism.

Choose to study the Gothic novel or science fiction. You can study the African novel alongside contemporary Scottish writing. Film studies run alongside the literature. You will explore from film noir and classic Hollywood to the French New Wave and Italian neorealism.

Dundee is also a world leader in comics studies, and you can study how stories move between books, comics, and film. Creative writing runs through the degree too — you will learn the craft of short fiction, poetry, or screenwriting.  

In Philosophy you will engage critically and creatively with contemporary issues, as well as the history of ideas. You will be supported to articulate your own considered arguments in response to issues that matter to you. These can include issues such as climate justice, AI, gender and sexuality and mental health. You will develop the skills that host events that bring people together across differences.

This course is unique in Scotland for its specialism in the European tradition. You will study philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Kristeva, Irigaray, Foucault, and Malabou. These will sit alongside non-Western and decolonial thinkers as Lorde, Spivak and Bachir Diagne.

While some texts you will read have a traditional academic form, others are experimental. These weave ideas, stories, and images together, such as Plato’s dialogues, Wittgenstein’s ‘language games,’ Cavell’s film philosophy and Haraway’s speculative fables about future human generations fused with butterflies.

The city of Dundee is part of the course. We work with Dundee Rep Theatre, Dundee Contemporary Arts, The McManus, Dundee Comics Creative Space, Dundee Schools, and V&A Dundee.

Our students run JOOT, the university drama group, and write for DURA, our review magazine.

In 2025, a student on this degree relaunched a student newspaper at Dundee, the Jute Journal. This is significant as it had been thirty years since Dundee's last student paper folded.

In fourth year, you can also apply for an internship with Localising Philosophy. This is a joint Philosophy and Education project that runs philosophy and art sessions with pupils in local schools. 

English and Philosophy at Dundee are not two subjects studied side by side. It's a single training in thinking ethically, critically, and creatively.