Cambridge University formally inaugerated its first course in media studies last month. The launch included the showing of a new film by Isaac Newton and Colin McCabe about the director Derek Jarman, who died in 1994. The event at the Law Faculty was attended by Cambridge alumna Tilda Swinton, who starred in many of Jarman’s films, as well as in major Hollywood pictures such as The Beach and Vanilla Sky.

The MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures took its first students in Michaelmas of this year. Although based in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, the course is an interdisciplinary venture encompassing departments and faculties as diverse as English, Music, Art, Architecture, Oriental Studies, Education, Social Anthropology, SPS and the Judge Business School. Speaking to Varsity, course director Professor David Trotter said that he hoped this broad departmental base would help students “explore screen media from a range of different perspectives”, going beyond the “arguably narrow terms” thus far established by film and media studies.

The course offers students the opportunity to develop an understanding of the historical and theoretical relations between a moving image and the cultures which gave rise to it, with research projects running the gamut from sitcoms to news reportage.

In recent years, courses in film and media studies have come under fire in the press, often portrayed as lacking academic and intellectual rigour. Responding to potential concerns about the reputation of the field among British universities, Trotter stressed that the course did in no way aim to “improve the standing of media studies (or, for that matter, film studies)”, but rather hoped to promote the benefits of approaching screen media of all kinds, including film and television, from a number of disciplinary angles.

Dr Eric Griffiths, a fellow of English at Trinity College, suggested that the media themselves were often to blame for the negative portrayal of the subject, unhelpfully employing blanket labels, such as ‘media studies’, “which are useful only for the purposes of fabricating ‘story’ and not for informed discussion”. The new course welcomes students from a broad range of undergraduate backgrounds, including those who have a first degree in film or media studies.

When asked whether or not he thought the MPhil course might prove to be a springboard to the development of an undergraduate course in the subject at Cambridge, Trotter seemed uncertain. “We’d better learn to walk before we try to run”.

Tom Barker