As always, we were pleased to welcome a group of keen students to our part two Communications at Work module, and they undertook a range of placements across marketing, commerce, charities and journalism.
In addition, all students can undertake academic placements linked to any English Literature module they are taking. This is a selection of those placements for this year:
- Two students went to Reading Repertory Theatre Company for the second-year ‘Modern Drama’ module, one looking at marketing and the other at the way the fourth wall works in modern drama.
- A student wrote articles for Today magazine for the third-year ‘Black British Fiction’ module.
- Exploring the Berkshire Record Office helped a third-year student on the ‘Decadence and Degeneration’ module write a placement report on insanity, poverty, class and the female criminal.
- The ‘three-minute novel’ broadcasts on the Junction 11 radio station were a great success for a student on our second-year module ‘Nineteenth Century Novel’.
- ‘How does Waterstones package literature?’ was the title of the placement report by one of our third-year students on the ‘Packaging Literature’ module.
- The ‘Jane Austen and the Courtship Novel’ module lent itself well to a placement at Chawton House, Jane Austen’s former home.
- Two of our Creative Writing Pathway students undertook to design and edit this year’s creative writing anthology and produced placement reports focusing on this creative process.
- Our second-year ‘Modernism’ module allowed three students to undertake academic placements in the archives and special collections here at the university.
- One student who had successfully completed an academic placement last year chose to do another one this year: this time as part of the module ‘Sex and Sensibility’
- Reading Repertory Theatre Company also took an academic placement student from our ‘Shakespeare on Film’ third-year module, giving her the chance to compare portrayals of madness on film and on stage.
- We saw two students on our second-year ‘Women’s Writing’ module undertake placements in the library archives. One looked at depictions of femininity in Mills and Boon publications over several decades, whilst the other considered images of motherhood offered by Ladybird books.
- This year, for the first time, students were given the chance to carry out independent research and produce screencasts as placement outcomes. Four students rose to the challenge and they produced screencasts on Shakespeare on Film, Victorian Women’s poetry and the connections that might be made between poetry and science in the Victorian Age.
