Film Studies and Music

Film studies and music are two disciplines that share a concern with how meaning is made through time-based art forms, and their combination at SOAS University of London creates a particularly distinctive intellectual environment. Film studies examines cinema as an art form and as a social and cultural practice, asking how films construct meaning, how they represent the world, how genres and movements develop, and how film functions within different cultural and industrial contexts. Music, studied at SOAS, carries a strong emphasis on the world's musical traditions, approaching the discipline from an ethnomusicological as well as a Western classical and popular perspective.

Together, the two subjects develop a rich and genuinely global engagement with culture and its forms.

At SOAS, this three-year full-time programme includes a foundation year, making it accessible to students who want a supported introduction before entering the full degree. SOAS's particular strength in non-Western and global cultural traditions means that both film studies and music are taught with an international breadth that is unusual in British higher education. Your film studies work will draw on cinema from across the world rather than focusing narrowly on Hollywood or European art cinema, while your music studies engage with traditions from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere alongside Western music history and theory.

This breadth encourages you to think comparatively and to question assumptions about what counts as culture, quality, or tradition.

Throughout the programme you will develop analytical and critical skills in writing and argument, the ability to engage closely with both visual and sonic texts, and an understanding of how cultural forms relate to their social, historical, and political contexts.

Graduates from film studies and music programmes pursue careers in the cultural industries including film, television, and music production, arts programming, journalism and criticism, music and media education, archiving and curating, and cultural policy and management. Postgraduate study in film, music, ethnomusicology, or cultural studies is a natural progression for those with research ambitions.