Our joint honours BA History and English Literature course allows you to explore the richness of English literature alongside the rich history and variety of human experience. Discover a thousand years of history whilst experiencing all the specialist areas on offer at the University of Reading. The History Department's expertise covers a wide range of regions, from Europe and Africa to America, South Asia and the Middle East. The University of Reading is ranked in the top 200 in the world for History (QS World Rankings 2023, by Subject).In your first year, your core History modules will explore people, politics, and revolution – finding out how people struggled for power in past societies – and the culture and concepts those societies developed. We will teach you the skills you need to study and research history through an individual project of your choice. In 2022, we achieved a 94 percentage satisfaction score for BA History (National Student Survey 2022). In your English literature modules, you will read more of authors and genres that you may already know (from tragedy to Gothic, from Shakespeare and Dickens to Plath and Beckett). But you will also encounter aspects of literary studies that may be less familiar to you, from children’s literature to publishing studies and the history of the book. Our academics have published research on everything from medieval poetry to contemporary American fiction.