Choice and Flexibility across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
The innovative and flexible Liberal Arts degree enables our students to tailor their learning from a wide range of options in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. They gain a wide-ranging qualification that encourages them to explore London and develop interdisciplinary skills: a degree that will enhance their employability and provide an ideal platform for a variety of different fields of work or postgraduate study. No two Liberal Arts students experience exactly the same programme.
Liberal Arts students study a combination of required and optional modules, and choose a major subject in which to specialise while continuing to experiment with other ideas and modules in other disciplines throughout their degree. They have further opportunities to study a language, spend time abroad, and/or undertake an internship along the way.
Major subject options include Classical & Hellenic Studies, Comparative Literature, Digital Culture, English, Film Studies, Geography, History, Modern Languages, Music, Philosophy, Politics, and Theology & Religious Studies.
Year One: Exploring Disciplines, Exploring London
Liberal Arts students are initially given the opportunity to try out a variety of different subject areas, one of which they will select as their major subject by the end of their first year. Alongside a selection of specially-chosen gateway modules in different disciplines and departments, they will study a modern language and undertake core modules that are designed to support their multidisciplinary scholarship and give them a nuanced and intellectually stimulating sense of the vibrant context for the entire degree: London.
In ‘Lives of London’, we use London as a laboratory for interdisciplinary learning in the Liberal Arts. In ‘Writing Liberal Arts’, students develop their skills in written communication to support their multidisciplinary studies.
Year Two: Opportunities to Study Abroad or gain Professional Experience
In their second year, Liberal Arts students begin to investigate their chosen major subjects in earnest while continuing to explore a huge variety of optional courses from the many departments that they have access to as part of the degree. This is also the year where many students choose to participate in Study Abroad for the whole second semester, visiting and studying at one of the College’s global partner institutions, including the National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), New York’s New School, and the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Second-year students can also take an optional, extra-credit internship module. This supports students in their pursuit of a work placement, both within the department and using special resources and contacts from the King’s Careers and Employability office. By writing a report at the end of the module, students can earn academic credit from their internships.
Year Three: Achieving your Major and Undertaking a Group Project
In their final year, Liberal Arts students will be undertaking sophisticated study in a variety of departments and subject areas. Many choose to select a dissertation module within their major discipline, producing a long-form piece of written work based on a more extensive research effort.
To help make sense of the diversity of their studies and find useful connections between them, the third year core module ‘Translation Across Disciplines’ offers a venue for collaborative, multi- and interdisciplinary teamwork. Third-year students will be invited to investigate a shared problem or research question across a broad theme, taking advantage of their unique combination of studies and experiences and showcasing the real value of a Liberal Arts degree. Students work across disciplinary boundaries, bringing together and integrating methods, approaches, questions, and perspectives from the diverse subjects that they have studied during their time at King’s. Recent project titles include:
- Conflict Between Institutional Identity and Gender Non-Conformity
- Fragmented Utopias: London 2040
- Gentrification Theory versus Reality
- Ways of Seeing: Fragmented Perceptions of Sexuality in Art Through the Ages
- Johnny Cash Prison Albums
- From the sugar plantations to the modern gym: Capoeira in 21st century London
- How can social media be an effective way to mobilise people in the face of climate change?
- Modes of Movement in London