Facilities and Opportunities

There are a variety of enriching opportunities available when you study with us, including an annual writing retreat, collaborations with prestigious literary institutions, and engaging in cultural experiences like the Hay Festival. Students actively participate in shaping the MA Anthology, form specialised reading groups, and engage with interdisciplinary research centres. Additionally, students benefit from postgraduate conferences and extensive library resources, fostering a dynamic and supportive research environment. These diverse elements collectively contribute to a vibrant and supportive research culture within the department, encouraging intellectual growth and academic achievement for postgraduate students.  

MA Anthology

You can also unlock your creative potential with the MA Anthology. Every year, students have the exciting opportunity to contribute, design, and edit an anthology showcasing their exceptional creative and critical work.  

Our MA anthology is proudly supported by funding from the 'Imaginary Homelands' project, a collaborative initiative with the Centre for Creative Wellbeing. This funding is part of a two-year agreement with Broken Sleep Books to publish the Creative Writing MA Anthology, a central feature of the Writer as Professional Module in the ECW department. This initiative allows our students to immerse themselves in the creation, design, and editing of an anthology that not only showcases their exceptional creative and critical work but also grants them their first publication opportunity.

Managed entirely by Creative Writing MA students, the anthology’s theme explores concepts of home, displacement, change, place, and identity. For many students, this may be their first opportunity to become published writers.

For more details about the Imaginary Homelands project, please contact Dr Naji Bakhti at anb106@aber.ac.uk

 

Writing Retreat 

You will have the opportunity to join our annual captivating writing retreat designed to ignite your research and writing endeavours.  

Publishing placements  

Postgraduate students in the department also have the chance to work with leading literary and cultural institutions such as New Welsh Review — Wales’s foremost literary magazine — and Honno Welsh Women's Press.  

Specialist Reading Groups  

We offer support in setting up specialist reading groups of your own, to ensure that postgraduate students are given the chance to play an active part in developing the Department’s overall research culture. Contributions that build on the Department’s foundational research strands of ‘Creative Wellbeing’, ‘Place and Belonging’, and ‘Emotional Lives’ are particularly encouraged.  

Research Centres  

Research students have the opportunity to engage with work fostered by specialist research centres, such as the Department’s Centre for Creative Wellbeing, and other cognate research centres within the University such as the Centre for the Movement of Peoples, the Centre for Material Thinking, and the Centre for Welsh Politics and Society.  

Postgraduate Conference  

Research students have the chance to work as a team to build the Department’s annual postgraduate conference – in order to showcase the work, interests, and achievements of your research degree community in any particular year.  

Arts and Culture  

An annual feature in our calendar are trips to the world-famous Hay Festival, plus you’ll have access to subsidised performances at Aberystwyth Arts Centre.  

Teaching  

For research students later in their degrees we offer opportunities to gain paid experience of university-level teaching, including workshops, seminars, lectures, and marking undergraduate work. (These opportunities vary according to availability, year on year.) Additionally, research students involved in teaching can participate in the Teaching for Postgraduates at Aberystwyth University (TPAU) programme, which is accredited by Advance HE at the Associate Fellowship level. 

Staff/Postgraduate Research Seminars  

You can be part of an engaging and interactive seminar series where staff, students, and guest speakers come together to share and showcase their research.   

Library Facilities 

The Department is located in the Hugh Owen Building, which also houses the main University library, the Hugh Owen Library. As well as an eclectic rare books collection and the Horton Collection (over 800 items relating to Eighteenth and Nineteenth century children’s literature), research at Aberystwyth is supported by extensive resources including access to a wide range of electronic materials. 

The University is very fortunate to have the National Library of Wales – one of only five copyright libraries in the UK – located just five minutes’ walk from the campus. This is an exceptional resource for postgraduate study: the National Library holds roughly 6 million books as well as extensive collections of journals and newspapers - and the number is constantly growing.  It has incomparable collections of primary texts, including the Hengwrt MS of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, an internationally prestigious collection of Welsh writing in English, and a vast stock of Renaissance, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, and twentieth-century literatures. In addition, it holds extensive historical archives – comprising personal papers of public figures and organisations, church records, census data, legal and municipal records, printed material, sound recordings and electronic records – which range in date from the Middle Ages to the present day.