MA in Children's and Young Adult Literature

From September 2021, the School is delighted to announce the Masters of Arts in Children’s and Young Adult Literature degree programme will now also be offered as full-time option.

The MA programme benefits enormously from the participation of national and international experts in the discipline, as well as from the enthusiastic commitment of its students.

Why Choose the MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature at DCU?

• The School of English is proud of its ground-breaking history in initiating the academic study of children’s literature as a postgraduate discipline in Ireland.
• Members of the lecturing staff are experts in their fields, publishing and researching widely in the discipline, and co-founding national organisations (such as the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature).
• The programme offers students the opportunity to study children’s and young adult literature in a supportive environment; small class sizes ensure that everyone has a voice, and typically promote a close and mutually supportive relationship between students; lectures and seminars are lively and varied, and promote an interactive and participative environment.
• The wide range of modules on the programme ensures that students get the best opportunity to study their particular interests.
• The programme is supported by the activities of the Centre for Research in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, including talks by world-renowned specialists in the discipline, such as Prof Emeritus Peter Hunt (Cardiff), Prof Emerita Maria Tatar (Harvard), Prof Karen Coats (Cambridge), Dr Marah Gubar (MIT) and Dr Lucy Pearson (Newcastle).
• Students of the programme have access to the special collections of children’s literature held at O’Reilly Library (DCU Glasnevin Campus).

Why Do This Programme?

Students on this programme often express a long-standing fascination with children’s and/or young adult literature, and enrol for a variety of reasons. Some students, for example, undertake the programme purely to find an outlet for their love of children’s and young adult literature, while others do so because they see it as a pathway to career development. Our graduates have used the programme as a means of furthering their ambitions as writers, while others have gone on to doctoral study. The programme facilitates these several motivations/aims, offering students a wide-ranging course of study in the history and development of children’s and young adult literature from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and introducing them to critical areas of research.

Part-time students read widely during the course of their first year, when the programme considers a range of topics, including the art and politics of children’s literature; form and genre; and the ever-evolving perceptions of what is deemed ‘suitable’ reading for children and young adults.

In their second year, part-time students concentrate on a specific area of research and, with guided supervision, write their dissertations.

Full-time students complete all elements of the degree programme in one year.

Programme Aims and Objectives

The MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature degree programme aims to

• illuminate children’s and young adult literature, and demonstrate its literary and cultural significance;
• deepen students’ appreciation of children’s and young adult literature, and enable them to engage with such literature on both a critical and an imaginative level;
• develop students’ practical skills, so as to enable them to approach reading, writing and research with greater confidence;
• encourage students to recognise the transferrable nature of the skills that they develop during the course of this programme.

Programme Structure and Content

From 2021, the MA in Children’s and Young Adult Literature degree programme will be offered both as a full-time option and as a part-time over two years.

Typically, for part-time students, the programme is taught on two evenings per week in Year One (usually Tuesdays and Thursdays from 16.00 to 18.00).

In Year Two, formal lectures only take place one day a week in both semesters; in Year Two students also meet occasionally with their dissertation supervisors, at mutually convenient times, to complete a minor dissertation of circa. 12,000 words.

To meet the requirements of the Masters in Children’s and Young Adult Literature degree programme, students must take six taught modules, which are assessed by means of essays, and produce a minor thesis of circa. 12,000 words.

Modules are subject to review and amendment. The modules below are provided for the purposes of illustration only to give part-time students a sense of how the programme is usually structured (full-time students take all modules in one academic year):

Year 1:

• Histories and Contexts
• Theories, Critics, Research Methods
• Picturebooks and Film
• International Children’s Literature

Year 2:

• Colonial, Adventure and School Stories
• Fantasy and Poetry
• Dissertation (which includes supervisory sessions with a research supervisor; research and writing seminars; and, student presentations)

Find out more about the course by clicking HERE