London Consortium

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The London Consortium is a graduate school in the UK offering multidisciplinary Masters and Doctoral programs in the humanities and cultural studies at the University of London. It is administered by Birkbeck, University of London, one of the constituent colleges of the University of London, and falls under the Humanities list of courses at Birkbeck. [1] The London Consortium is a federation comprised of Birkbeck, the Architectural Association, Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum and the Tate Gallery. It offers courses taught by faculty from across all five constituent institutions, including professors from Birkbeck and the Architectural Association, curators from the Tate and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, as well as external faculty drawn from various institutions in London and across the UK. Classes are taught in venues at Birkbeck, the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Architectural Association. The Consortium's permanent and adjunct faculty include figures such as the psychoanalytic theorist Parveen Adams, cultural theorist Steven Connor [2], architectural theorist and philosopher Mark Cousins, Tate curators Marko Daniel and Richard Humphreys, film theorist and producer Colin MacCabe, artist and writer Tom McCarthy, film theorist Laura Mulvey, cultural theorist Stuart Hall, psychoanalytic theorist Juliet Mitchell, writer Salman Rushdie, writer Marina Warner, film and cultural theorist Peter Wollen, and psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Its current chair is the lawyer and writer Anthony Julius.

The Consortium is unique in the U.K. in that the PhD comprises a taught component. First year PhD students follow the same core courses as those studying towards the MRes, courses designed to give a grounding in multidisciplinary research. The core courses for the academic year 2008/2009 are 'Catastrophe', 'Cultures of Collecting', 'St. Paul', 'Flat Baroque: "Special Effects" and the Rigging of the Whole Wide World"', and 'Godard's Contempt: Text and Pretext'. Previous core courses include 'Shit and Civilization', 'Metamorphosis', 'Stoicism: Fate, Chance and Uncertainty' and 'Whiteness'. Through courses like these, the Consortium could be thought of as developing an original conception of Cultural Studies. While the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University - founded by Richard Hoggart and for a long time the institutional home of Stuart Hall - conceived of Cultural Studies as the study of contemporary popular culture, the London Consortium has sought to develop a research and teaching climate where the study of older historical periods, on the one hand, and of 'high' culture on the other, can take its place alongside the more traditional foci of the discipline. This also entails a different approach to interdisciplinarity. Where interdisciplinary studies had often been content to merely ignore the traditional academic disciplines, and run roughshod over disciplinary boundaries, the London Consortium prefers to describe its activities as multidisciplinary, reflecting the belief that while the best research will benefit from being approached from two or more disciplinary perspectives, it must also stand up to the most exacting standards of the disciplines.

The Consortium was founded in 1993 by the late social philosopher Paul Hirst (1947-2003), Cousins, Humphreys, and MacCabe. Until 1999, the British Film Institute was part of the Consortium. After the BFI removed its involvement (due to policy changes and external pressures at that institution), it was replaced by the Institute of Contemporary Arts [3].