Global and Area Studies

A variety of training routes  are offered through a range of specialist Master’s pathways and doctoral programmes.
The 1+3.5 pathways start with one of the following Master's programmes:

• MSc African Studies
• MSc Latin American Studies
• MSc Contemporary Chinese Studies
• MSc Japanese Studies
• MSc Modern South Asian Studies
• MSc Russian and East European Studies

The +3.5 route is open to new applicants with prior core training that meets the ESRC 2022 Training Guidelines.

For their doctoral study, students can be based in OSGA or in a number of other disciplinary departments (see the pathways in Anthropology; Digital Social Science; Economics; Economic & Social History; Geography; International Development; International Relations; Politics; Social Policy and Intervention; Sociology):

• DPhil Area Studies

Teaching in OSGA is linked with academic faculty’s active research and engagement in the world. Each MSc programme is sustained by a vibrant research culture and programme of seminars and workshops reporting the latest findings as well as student exchanges with other universities. 

Faculty spend much time each year carrying out fieldwork in the regions they study, and interviewing people from all sectors of the societies they study – from pollution victims in China, company CEOs in Japan, women Dalits in India, civil society activists in Latin America and drug enforcement officers in the Middle East, to second-hand goods traders in Africa and defence policy-makers in Russia. 

Global and Area Studies graduates will be equipped with a range of valuable skills which will enable them to enter a variety of different careers – in the civil service and policy-making bodies in Britain, Europe and further afield, in non-governmental organisations concerned with development, in the charitable sector, in journalism, public and private sector research and consultancy, law and academia.