Overview

Our joint honours course allows students to pursue their own areas of interest within English Literature and History whilst also providing them with a solid foundation in both disciplines and a range of personal and professional skills which will serve as a springboard for their future career development. The programme is carefully designed to enable students to gradually develop their knowledge and skills and become autonomous, effective and independent learners.

English Literature offers students the opportunity to study British and world literatures through a model of progressive specialisation that teaches advanced literary critical skills in the context of periodised, thematised, formal and theoretical modules. History is about far more than studying the past. It enables students to discover why people act the way they do and to explore how societies develop.

Learning and assessment

In year 1, you’ll build the skills and understanding you need for undergraduate literary studies with modules in critical theory and global literatures. You’ll develop historiographical skills whilst studying a range of materials from the beginnings of Europe’s colonisation of the rest of the world, to more recent discussions of race and the environment.

In year 2, you’ll broaden and deepen your knowledge of literature in relation to movements and cultures past and present. You’ll explore more specialist historical issues like what the Jack the Ripper case tells us about Victorian society or how thinkers like Charles Darwin have influenced our culture.

In year 3, you’ll have the freedom to focus on what you care about most, including your dissertation subject. You can explore literary topics like urbanisation, utopian societies, artificial intelligence, sustainability or even witchcraft. You might explore city life in Renaissance Italy, or examine the downfall of the Russian monarchy.