Student work

Prospective students who wish to learn more about the kinds of work produced in Film Studies can read some of the winning essays in the two annual awards that celebrate the work of students in the Department - the Richard Dyer Prize and the Anita Loos Award. These awards showcase the diverse range of topics and approaches covered by students in Film Studies.

In your final year you have the opportunity to do a dissertation on an advanced topic in Film Studies. Students produce a wide variety of work, building on the Department's research-led teaching to generate original research across film, television and other media.

Recent dissertation topics include:

  • Warrior Women on Asian and Western Screens: How Michelle Yeoh performs action, gender and identity in a globalised world
  • Captured Durations and Aesthetic Intuition: A Metaphysical and Phenomenological Analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975)
  • Hark Ye Sound Scholars! An Analysis of A24 Sound
  • How does Naomi Kawase use the film poem to explore intimacy and maternal relationships in her ‘Grandmother Trilogy'?
  • The Role of the Village in Bulgarian Film at the Beginning of the 21st Century
  • Masking Misogyny: A Feminist Criticism of the Work of Quentin Tarantino
  • Sex, Drugs and Gender Roles: An examination of the articulation of the feminine experience through the use of substances in Andrea Arnold's Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey
  • Butterflies and Black Moths: How the Romanticist visuals of Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak facilitate an exploration of humanity's relationship with the natural world
  • Inside the Film World: Film Exhibition, Entertainment and Cinema Experiences
  • War Films and the Collapse of an Empire
  • Searching for the Invisible: Reading Asexuality into The Lord of the Rings and Ghost in the Shell
  • Techno-Scopophilia in Contemporary Sci-Fi Cinema: A Fetishized Representation of Female A.I.
  • Exploring the Way in Which Gender is Experienced, Interacted With, and Intended to Be in Assassin's Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft, PlayStation 4, 2020)