The essay task for the MA NTS 2026/27 applications is now online!
As part of your application, the MA NTS programme requires an original scholarly essay from you (and no letter of motivation). Please find this year’s essay topic below. For further details about the application process, please see here.
Representing transnational mobilities
The often-adapted distinction between roots and routes has remained a mainstay of scholarship exploring different and at times intertwined forms of mobility, with migration, diaspora, exile, and postcolonial studies among them. At a fundamental level, the homophones “roots and routes” (Clifford) on one hand denote the overlaps between mobilities and on the other evoke the complexities of home and belonging. Over the past century, many of these complexities have arisen from violent displacements that European colonialism and, more generally, regimes of coloniality (Quijano) have wrought upon large swathes of the globe. Crucially, these dislocations are ongoing processes, not least in the face of multiple and often violent displacements that mark the current moment.
Literature and the arts have always allowed for the representation and negotiation of the conditions and possibilities of human (and more-than-human) experiences. For this essay we ask you to draw upon a text*, a piece of artistic expression, or use an example from linguistics to analyse and explain how it engages with the notion of ‘transnational mobilities.’ To give you an idea of what kinds of questions you might engage with:
- How does a particular work of art represent multiple and intersecting forms of mobility or displacement?
- How can literature, media, language, and the arts facilitate and/or subvert conceptions of “mobility” and whom they include?
- How do these cultural forms register the uneven distribution of vulnerabilities that often mark transnational movement?
- How can narrative structures expose or obscure epistemic power and colonial legacies in our understanding of mobility?
Please bear in mind that your analysis must be rooted in literary and cultural studies/philology, linguistics, or book studies and needs to demonstrate your ability to work within one of these fields.
Your essay must meet accepted standards of academic writing (with respect to both form and referencing) and the word-count should be approx. 2,000 words. If your essay contains plagiarism and/or has been generated using AI, your application for a place on the MA NTS programme will inevitably be rejected.
*As an English Department, we use ‘text’ in a wide sense here, encompassing but not limited to novels, drama, poetry, books as artefacts (book studies), museum exhibits, films, (new) media, video games, architecture, activist practices, music and music videos, etc. We encourage you to choose a text that allows you to draw on your own disciplinary knowledge acquired during your BA studies and connect it to transnational perspectives.