The London Consortium is a multi-disciplinary graduate programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. We are a collaboration between five of London’s most dynamic cultural and educational institutions: the Architectural Association, Birkbeck College (University of London), the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum, and Tate.
Unlike most traditional courses, our students benefit from being taught and supervised by both internationally renowned academics and experienced cultural practitioners working within our constituent institutions. Our teaching faculty and supervisors are drawn from a diverse range of institutions and disciplines, and include architectural theorists and designers, specialists in art history and curatorial work, cinema critics and film-makers, historians, literary scholars, artists, political theorists and philosophers.
In addition we challenge and enable our students not just to work across academic disciplines, but to take their learning outside of the seminar rooms and lecture theatres.
Our students are encouraged to make use of the resources of our collaborative institutions, developing ideas for projects through which the Consortium and its institutions can together produce events and work that satisfies the Consortium’s multi-disciplinary, cutting-edge, and challenging ambitions.
The London Consortium has been running postgraduate courses for 10 years. Our students graduate with a Master of Research degree or a PhD from the University of London. Our aim is that they also take with them a series of rigorous but exhilarating academic and practical experiences.
Our Aims
- to provide distinctive and challenging Masters and PhD degrees, which enable students to engage in multi-disciplinary course-work and to research a thesis, undercareful academic supervision;
- to help to develop new kinds of intellectuals who have knowledge and competence not only in a number of academic disciplines but also in working within key institutions which are shaping the future direction of the culture.
The Consortium Masters and PhD programmes are centered in Cultural Studies and the Humanities and set out to have a strongly contemporary edge. The programme is:
- multi-disciplinary, considering broad and complex problems, but on the basis that students must acquire disciplinary competences;
- committed to the study of modern and popular culture, new arts and new media, whilst not rejecting the past, traditional practices of criticism, or high culture;
- theoretically grounded and committed to avoiding the pitfalls of relativism with respect to truth and values;
- aware of the need to analyse modern culture in its social context and to bring to the analysis of culture the knowledges of the human sciences;
- exploratory and committed to combining cultural analysis with cultural production;
- dedicated to sharing its research into pressing cultural questions with the general public, in the form of conferences
