About
Belfast Queen's University Open Learning Programme
Queen’s University, Belfast has a long and proud history of providing educational opportunities to the community it serves. As early as the 1850s, the University was offering lectures to the local community at 7.00am, before the working day had started.
This marked the beginnings of a lifelong learning tradition that has become an important dimension of the University’s mission of public and civic engagement.
The Queen's University Open Learning Programme offers a wide range of adult education courses and research. The Programme has three main strands:
- a large Humanities curriculum featuring daytime, evening, weekend and online courses meeting the needs of the community,
- a Continuing Professional Development Programme, delivered in partnership with voluntary and statutory organisations, and
- an Outreach Projects Programme focused on the Grand Challenges of our time, including migration and the wellbeing of older people, and developed in partnership with local, national and international partners.
Professor Tess Maginess studied literature at Trinity College, Dublin (BA), Queen’s University, Belfast (MA) and York University, Toronto (PhD). She worked in community and rural development, arts and journalism before joining Queen’s in 1995. She is Director of the Open Learning Programme. Tess has pioneered innovative adult education programmes, often using arts-based approaches. She has published on literature, adult education, mental health, older people’s wellbeing, environmental health humanities and medical humanities. She is also a published poet. She lives on the Armagh Tyrone border, where she was born, with her husband, Ian and dog, Khal.
University of Hyderabad, Master’s program in English
The University of Hyderabad is a highly ranked research-intensive public university in India. It offers mainly post-grad courses across all disciplines. Bestowed the “Institution of Eminence” status by the government, its disciplines like English, Chemistry, Life Sciences and Physics figure regularly in the QS rankings. A very cosmopolitan university, it attracts students from across the nation.
The Master’s program in English is a premier program in the oldest department of the University. It is a combination of traditional literary studies and cutting-edge elective courses in fields like Human Rights and Literature, and Vulnerability Studies, and attracts students from all over the country.
Professor Anna Kurian is Faculty Fellow, UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies in the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. She specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern, Children’s and Young Adult Literature and cultural politics. Her work has appeared in Radical Teacher, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, Scene, ANQ, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. She has edited seven Literature Readers for Cambridge University Press, for use in middle-to-high school classes, and is the author of Shakespeare from Orient BlackSwan. Besides these, she occasionally writes for newspapers and periodicals on contemporary cultural politics and higher education. She is the Principal Investigator of the world’s first OER for Indian Writing in English. She has been cited in The New Oxford Shakespeare and The Year’s Work in English Studies.
Prof Pramod K. Nayar holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies in the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. He has published on Human Rights and Literary-Cultural Studies, Posthumanism, Graphic Novels, and English writings on India. Among these are Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny, Human Rights and Literature, Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India, Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture, The Extreme in Contemporary Culture, The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right, Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs: Poetics of the Forgetting Self, Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity. His essays have appeared in Photography and Culture, Gothic Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Text, Celebrity Studies, Ariel, Changing English, Orbis Litterarum and other journals. He received the Visitor’s Award for Best Research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (2018) from the President of India and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the English Association.
Credits
This website has been designed by Dr Federica Ferrieri.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Web Support team in Digital and Information Services at Queen’s University, Belfast for their great work in supporting the development of the website, and, in particular, the dedication and expertise of Peter Crowther.
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