Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies

MPhil: a standalone, one-year (full-time) research degree. Students will undertake their own research project, concluding in the submission of a 25,000-word dissertation. Students may have the option to audit units from our taught master's courses if they are relevant to their research.

PhD: a research project undertaken across three to four years (full-time), culminating in an 80,000-word thesis. As well as having the option to audit taught units, there may be the potential for PhD students to teach units themselves from their second year of study onwards.

The MPhil and PhD can be studied via distance learning.

MPhil: An upper second-class degree (or international equivalent). Please note, acceptance will also depend on evidence of your readiness to pursue a research degree.

PhD: A master's qualification, or be working towards a master's qualification, or international equivalent. Applicants without a master's qualification may be considered on an exceptional basis, provided they hold a first-class undergraduate degree (or international equivalent). Applicants with a non-traditional background may be considered provided they can demonstrate substantial equivalent and relevant experience that has prepared them to undertake their proposed course of study.

See international equivalent qualifications on the International Office website.

Bristol is one of the great Atlantic ports, linked historically to the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds. We work on the nature of connections in large national, international and regional collaborations, such as the 19th-century International Hispanists Network, LUDENS (sport and football), the New Woman project, and the UK Latin American Historians Network.

We have ongoing research collaborations with universities across Europe and Latin America, such as the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the Universidad Pontificia Catolica in Chile and the University of Las Palmas. The Ramon Llull Institute supports our work in Catalan Studies.

We welcome applicants with cross-disciplinary projects. A high number of our postgraduates are supervised across multiple disciplines (for example, anthropology, education, history, history of art, music, and translation studies).

From memory to sport, visual arts to history, and linguistics to literature, our work matters to multiple academic fields. Collectively, we value and explore the composite nature of our subject. Our students collaborate with their postgraduate colleagues across multiple disciplines, for example in the graduate-led Literary and Visual Cultures group, and through Migration Mobilities Bristol. Among our current cross-disciplinary projects are:

• Atlantic Studies;
• Digital Cultures;
• Environmental Humanities;
• Landscapes and Soundscapes;
• Sport;
• Transnationalism;
• Linguistics.

Our wide-ranging work reaches beyond academia. We encourage students to have a wider impact beyond their written research. Each year we hold a Cultural Week (Semana Cultural): in 2023 this revolved around the MEMPAZ project with 20 participants visiting us from Colombia. Our researchers have worked with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Parliamentary Committee on Guinea-Bissau, rural communities in Peru and the Prince's Teaching Institute.