MA in Biography

Course Outline

This cutting-edge programme is unique to Buckingham. A course with wide appeal, it is aimed at anyone who has an interest in biography or in researching and writing biography for themselves. The varied mix of backgrounds and interests that students bring to the course, the experience and commitment of the programme director and the friendly small-group setting allow a lively, enjoyable and intellectually rigorous exchange of ideas. Graduates have gone on to publish their own books, and to win prizes. Some have embarked on further research for the MPhil or the DPhil in Biography.

When it was founded in 1996, the Biography MA was the first of its kind. Since then Life Writing has become part of the postgraduate menu, but the Buckingham course has kept its distinctive edge. Unlike most Life Writing degrees, it is not linked to Creative Writing, and there is a strong emphasis on research and historical biography. The programme is consistently rated ‘excellent’ by external examiners and inspectors.

Location

Teaching takes place in central London, usually at a venue close to  Marylebone station.

Timetable

The course offers entry points in September and January and runs for a calendar year if taken full-time. Teaching takes place on one day a week over three terms running from September to December, January to March and April to June; the term from July to September is devoted to independent research. The programme may be followed part-time over 2 years. In the first year part-time students follow the taught courses and the second year is normally devoted to the dissertation. A detailed programme is shown here.  Suitably qualified students with a major research topic in mind may be accepted for the higher degrees of MPhil (two years full-time/four years part-time) or DPhil (three years full-time/six years part-time).

Course structure

Students have a choice between following the taught MA, or opting for the MA by Research. The taught MA gives an opportunity to produce written term papers on a variety of topics as well as a dissertation of up to 20,000 words. Students accepted for the MA by Research are required to produce written work which includes an extended dissertation of up to 40,000 words. All students produce coursework for the Research  Methods module: an annotated bibliography and a short biography, with supporting material, produced according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography format.

All students on the MA Programme – both taught and research – are required to attend the weekly seminars, as are MPhil and DPhil students in their first year. These classes are one of the most distinctive and valuable elements of the MA and take place as follows:

• Autobiography (September to December)
• Special Paper in Biography (January to June)
• Research Methods (January to June)

The modules on Biography and Autobiography are designed to combine the study of classic biographies and memoirs with contemporary writing. In addition, the Research Methods module provides an invaluable and innovative training, especially devised for biographers.

Guest seminars on the course are led by leading biographers, critics, publishers and agents. Teachers and speakers on the course have included Andrew Motion, Kathryn Hughes, Frances Wilson, Frances Spalding, Jeremy Lewis, Rupert Shortt, Caroline Dawnay, Andrew Lownie and Miranda Seymour.

Research support

One of the distinctive features of the programme is the value attached to the supervision which is provided for students working on dissertations. One-on-one supervisions are held every two or three weeks during term. While the dissertation must be the candidate’s independent work, it is the supervisor who offers advice on refining the topic (if necessary), on primary sources, on secondary reading, on research techniques and on writing the dissertation. Regular group discussions between research students at all degree levels (MA, MPhil and DPhil) allow the exchange of reseach experiences and mutual support.

Programme director

Professor Jane Ridley founded the Buckingham Biography MA in 1996. She is an Oxford-trained historian and biographer, and her publications include The Young Disraeli (1995) and The Architect and his Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens (2002), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. She has contributed widely to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and she is a regular reviewer for publications such as the Spectator, the Literary Review and the Times Literary Supplement. She is currently completing a biography of Edward VII, for which she was awarded a research fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.

Costs

Details of tuition fees and methods of payment, including discounts for advance payment, can be found on our postgraduate tuition fees page. Students taking research degrees (MA by research, MPhil or DPhil) are eligible to apply for the one Exhibition (worth £1000) available annually.

What our students and alumni say

Anna Thomasson
I came across an advert for the Biography MA, one afternoon, whilst idly trawling the internet at the magazine publishing house where I was working. I had graduated in English from Bristol University in the previous year. Though the magazine work was interesting, it was the research that interested me most and I was desperate to write something longer than 100 words. I eventually decided to do an MA but I didn’t want a course that just felt like a continuation or a development of my first degree. So when I saw the advert for the Buckingham course I was immediately intrigued. As an avid reader of biographies I was excited by the prospect of studying the history and development of biography writing and, more importantly, by the opportunity to write a biography of my own, under the guidance of a respected and prize-winning biographer.

I was not disappointed by my decision. Very early on I decided to do the MA by research so that I could write a larger dissertation, rather than as a taught course with a number of smaller assignments. In 2007 I was upgraded to MPhil because of the quality and extent of my research. And in that year my biography was shortlisted for the Daily Mail Biographers’ Club Prize.

Jane Ridley is incredibly friendly, knowledgeable and supportive. As a published biographer she knows the business of writing and publishing biography inside-out and as a historian she encourages thorough research, good writing and an academic engagement with the subject. My fellow students were a fascinating mix of people, both younger and older and from all walks of life. The course has given me access to agents, publishers and many well-known biographers. I am so glad that I made the decision to study Biography at Buckingham, I now have a book that I’m hoping to publish. The course is fascinating and I would strongly recommend it to anyone wanting to do an MA, but one that’s a little bit different to the rest.

Nigel Collett
After twenty years in the Army, I set up a ships’ crewing business to employ the Gurkha soldiers with whom I’d served. I settled for a while in Buckingham and took the MA in Biography from 2001-2002, attracted by the course’s unique melding of history and literature. Highly stimulating and great fun, the course offered a perfect balance of theory and the study of an eclectic range of biographies, giving students scope to study subjects of their choice. I found the dissertation subject I had chosen was of such interest that I carried on with the research after gaining the MA and turned it into a book. This, The Butcher of Amritsar, a life of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, the perpetrator of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, was published in 2005.

The Biography MA gave me the tools to launch out on a career as a biographer: the theoretical framework; a knowledge of the major biographical figures, texts and techniques; an exposure to British research resources and an introduction to agents and publishers, one of whom published my book. Above all, it gave me a thirst to write.

As a result of launching my book in Hong Kong, where I now live, I was invited in 2005 to become a moderator for the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, and am now a member of the Festival’s Authors Committee. I review regularly for the online Asian Review of Books and occasionally for other journals. In 2008, with others, I founded and still chair the Hong Kong Tongzhi Literary Society, a group dedicated to the fostering of local literature in both English and Chinese. I am still writing, and am now working on a life of Leslie Cheung, a hugely popular Hong Kong film and pop star.

Wynn Wheldon
Bernard Shaw once remarked that youth is wasted on the young, and much the same can be said for education. I managed a Third Class degree in English from New College, Oxford, and then spent thirty years properly educating myself in preparation for an MA in Biography at Buckingham. Where there had been stress, here was pleasure, where there had been intellectual pride, here was genuine curiosity, where there had been tortuous essays on Donne, here were enjoyable bibliographies to compile.

Jane Ridley’s gently sardonic approach, combined as it is with an understated rigour and first rate academic proficiency, makes the course agreeably sociable as well as intellectually stimulating. Indeed, in many ways it is perhaps as close to a Platonically ideal notion of what being at university is for as it is possible nowadays to get.

I applied in order to be made to write about my father, Huw Wheldon; this was initially a need, not a want, but the unfailing support and encouragement I received from Jane and from other tutors (and fellow students) made it less an act of piety than an act of literary endeavour (though I hesitate to go so far as to say an act of scholarship).

I heartily recommend this course to anyone with an interest either in themselves or in someone else: it will demonstrate that biography is not simply a way of seeing an individual, but is also a way of seeing a world