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School of English and Drama

Graduate Life in London

Senate House Library

London is one of the best cities in the world in which to undertake graduate study.

As a graduate student at Queen Mary you will have the chance to work in an impressive range of libraries, archives, and specialist collections as well as the opportunity to visit the city’s numerous galleries, museums, and theatres, many of which have close connections with Queen Mary.

London’s single most important intellectual resource is the British Library. The library contains over 13 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, and has unrivalled manuscript holdings. There are also a host of other research institutions within the city including the British Film Institute National Archive, the Poetry Library, the Women's Library, the National Art Library, and the Warburg Institute.

The University of London (of which Queen Mary forms a part) also provides students with excellent facilities. The Institute of English Studies and the Institute of Historical Research, both located in Bloomsbury, organise a wide variety of seminars, reading-groups, training initiatives, and one-off lectures which you will be welcome to attend. These events attract world-class speakers and enable our students to meet those with similar research interests at other London colleges. Among the most popular of these groups with Queen Mary students are the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar, the London Modernism Seminar, the Enlightenment and Romanticism Reading Group, and the London Shakespeare Seminar. Students can also use the University of London Library at Senate House, which boasts an internationally renowned collection of books, and an extensive selection of journals and e-resources.

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