A programme of events, seminars, talks and activities which run alongside your modules throughput the academic year. These are not credit bearing or compulsory, but are aimed at helping you do well in your degree and beyond.
The programme has been designed by staff and students (lecturers, student representatives, peer supporters, the English Society), in the English Department, alongside colleagues from central student support services (counselling, King’s Wellbeing, the library, the English Language Centre) .
How will it help you?
- A chance to work on some foundational academic skills which will complement your modules (revision, understanding feedback, essay writing etc.), and also to think about your intellectual wellbeing more broadly (beating procrastination, coping with stress).
- Students from different backgrounds and at different stages of their English degree need different kinds of support – the programme is structured around and responsive to the needs of all students in the Department (Commuter’s Club).
- A way to get involved with the department – to be part of our community, meet people.
- A way to connect to the central support services the college offers all students.
We offer an exceptionally wide range of modules within a framework that supports and structures students’ learning.
Our students encounter materials from different time periods, genres (e.g. poetry, novels, drama and film) and literary cultures, approached from a variety of critical perspectives:
- Our first-year modules provide a stimulating foundation for later study, focusing on particular forms of writing (e.g. Reading Poetry), approaches (e.g. Introducing Literary Theories, Writing London, Classical and Biblical Traditions of English Literature), and literary cultures (e.g. Medieval Literary Cultures, Early Modern Literary Cultures, Introduction to American Literature).
- Second-year modules cover areas rarely studied by undergraduates (e.g. Early American Literature, Australian Literature and Film, Palestinian and Israeli Literature, Unlocking Early Modern Letters, and Writing Africa) and training in specialist skills such as Creative Writing or the translation of Old English.
- Third-year modules stretch students through specialist modules that focus on areas of current critical concern (e.g. Critically Queer, Activist Texts, Identity in Contemporary Britain, and Imagining Britain: Medieval Places, Journeys, Maps) or offer new approaches to individual authors such as George Eliot, John Milton, William Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf. Students are also supported in developing their own dissertation projects.
One of the things the Department of English champions is ‘research-led teaching’. By the final year of your degree, students can expect to work closely with staff members who are world-leading researchers in their fields and who have developed modules closely aligned to their research.
As a result, students are in touch with the latest thinking about specific areas of literary and cultural studies, and seminars provide a way for staff to think through real research questions. Coursework that requires students to undertake their own original research takes centre stage in a number of modules.
Take a module like Activist Texts: Literature and Politics, 1910-1938, which links British writers in the first half of the twentieth-century to the socio-political movements and struggles of that period. In addition to reading and thinking about a wide range of novels and other literary texts, students have learned how to undertake original research and write it up.
Using the rich resources of London’s archives, students are given the freedom to explore the richness of letters, diaries, newspapers and other materials that are the foundation of research.