Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - History and English Literature

This BA History and English Literature gives students the opportunity to study two subjects that speak closely to each other.

Just as poems, plays and novels can offer historians different ways to look at the past, historical documents can also be read as texts to be interpreted as works of narrative.

Students will start this joint degree with a core module that will teach them the skills of close analysis of literary texts. Reflecting on poetry by Danez Smith and Sylvia Plath, Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9 as well as work by Shakespeare and Zadie Smith, they’ll discover new ways of thinking about what literature is, and how to read it.

Throughout their course, the common link between the two disciplines will be students' analysis and interpretation of texts. The skills they’ve learned in their close reading of fiction are in many respects the same as those they will apply to their analysis of historical documents.