This distinctive, flexible and varied degree combines the study of English literature with workshop-based practical theatre work, allowing you to explore performance from both creative and critical perspectives. You’ll study literatures in English from the medieval to the contemporary period, exploring richly diverse literary texts across different genres, including fiction, poetry and drama. You’ll be equipped with the knowledge and skills to understand literature in the context of a variety of historical periods, places and cultures. Reading and understanding literature can help us to find out about ourselves and see the world from other perspectives. Through engaging with different kinds of texts from across the globe and from different periods of history, you can learn how language reflects and shapes human experience. Literature modules explore themes relevant to how we live today, including race and ethnicity, gender, climate change and nature, social class, disability, and wellbeing. You will also develop your skills as an artist-researcher through practical workshops led by our own theatre specialists. With compulsory and specialist optional modules spanning theatre, performance, applied theatre, design, digital performance, directing, musical theatre, event management, acting and collaborative practice, you’ll be able to follow a broad range of interests suited to your own academic and professional development. Throughout your degree, you’ll learn through a combination of seminars, lectures, workshops, practical experimentation and working with both specialist and readily available digital technologies. This degree encourages you to integrate your literary and theatrical interests through a wide range of literature, theatre, and performance options. It provides you with a challenging and rewarding opportunity to combine ambitious, collaborative practical projects with rigorous critical thinking. You’ll develop your skills as a critical reader and a persuasive writer, while reflecting upon the impact that performance has on cultures and societies across the world. You'll become an advocate of the creative arts, developing collaborative, creative, critical thinking and project management skills that will benefit you in a wide range of careers.Graduates in English and Theatre & Performance have progressed to a wide variety of career destinations, including professional theatre and media, publishing, writing, events management, marketing and business, as well as further academic study.Our FacilitiesStudents on this joint honours programme have access to a wide range of theatrical resources that are unrivalled at any UK University, including four theatres, two fully equipped black box studios, and multiple rehearsal spaces.On this programme, you’ll have access to our excellent range of performance and rehearsal spaces – fully equipped with lighting, sound, and digital technologies – which are used for teaching and group work on theatre and performance modules. Our Workshop Theatre has been pioneering theatre studies since 1968 and counts among its alumni leading theatre practitioners, dramatists and educators. Our stage@leeds building in the centre of campus houses a professional theatre, dance studio and Alec Clegg studio. Facilities for teaching also include specialist black box studios, the Banham Theatre and rehearsal spaces where you’ll develop your own creative practice within small groups. You will have the opportunity to use advanced digital technologies such as VR headsets, 360-degree cameras and binaural microphones and the opportunity to work with external partners and community groups which may include: Leeds Playhouse, Opera North and local theatre companies, schools, galleries, museums and institutions within the criminal justice system.