King's College London

Our dynamic English BA degree offers a varied literature syllabus with areas of study ranging from medieval performance to contemporary poetry, global fiction, and creative writing. With many optional modules to choose from, you can shape your own specialism by selecting the topics that interest you most.

You’ll learn how to apply a range of theoretical and historical approaches to literary study and develop essential skills in critical thinking, expression, and research at one of the oldest English departments in the country.

Your central London location will encourage you to engage with the literary history and culture right on your doorstep, with sites such as Shakespeare’s Globe and the British Film Institute a short walk away. You’ll pair this with a deep understanding of global literature gained via a curriculum that explores writing from beyond the UK to include the US, Anglophone Africa, Ireland, and South Asia.

By choosing an English degree at King’s, you will encounter literature that stretches back through the centuries and reaches out across the globe. You’ll be given the freedom to shape your own syllabus from the first year, with an excitingly diverse range of modules that span genre, period and place and include creative writing.

This BA in English combines contemporary literary theory, close textual examination and historical study to offer open and imaginative approaches to classic English texts.

Many modules are offered in collaboration with cultural institutions and local archives, including the Globe Theatre. This enables you to move beyond the university and see literature in its largest cultural contexts.

You will learn from research-active academics who bring their findings into their teaching and will introduce you to current developments in the discipline, both in the classroom and at numerous extracurricular activities and events. Your teachers will include award-winning novelists, poets, essayists, biographers, non-fiction authors and literary critics.

Your first year of your English BA will introduce you to the full historical range of global literature. It will equip you with the key skills you need for your degree: the study of poetry, and literary and critical methods. You will also get to immerse yourself in London and its literary representations across the centuries.

The first semester of your degree in English will include a module taught by your personal tutor, who will support your academic progress and general well-being as you progress through your studies. You’ll get your first opportunity to tailor your syllabus with one optional module in the first year. You could choose to study classics, digital humanities, film studies, theology and religious studies, or languages, literatures and cultures. You could even pick up a second language with a King’s Language Centre module.

The second year of your English BA is divided in half, with one set of modules centred on literature up to 1800 and the other looking at literature from 1800 to the present. You’ll get to choose from a variety of modules but will spend at least half of the year focusing on literature up to 1800. This will include one medieval module;you could also choose to study medieval science fiction, performance in medieval culture, or more. The other half of your second year will comprise modules exploring literature from the 1800s until now.

You will get the chance to read American and African literature and think about literature alongside the environment, psychoanalysis, and scientific discovery, amongst a variety of optional modules. Questions of gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity come in throughout the course of this English degree, and literature is read alongside the most urgent social and historical questions of its times. During the second semester of your second year, you could study abroad at a partner university located in Germany, Singapore, Australia, the US, or Canada.

The final year of your degree in English is comprised entirely of optional modules. This freedom will empower you to truly specialise in the topics that interest you most, whether that’s learning about literature, culture and queer theory or testimonies of genocide, race and empire in the 19th Century, Black and Asian writing in Britain, and beyond.

You may choose to focus on specific writers, with modules on James Joyce and Ulysses, Shakespeare’s London, and Virginia Woolf and the politics of reading, or opt to learn creative writing in workshop modules. It’s possible to conclude your English BA studies with an optional dissertation that answers a research question of your choice. Produced under the guidance of a supervisor, you’ll undertake your own piece of research that you present in a written dissertation.

By joining one of the oldest English departments in the country, you’ll enjoy access to a range of extracurricular opportunities. Alongside invites to a wide range of cultural events, you’ll also be encouraged to get involved in writing and editing the student magazine or to participate in the many drama and music groups at King’s.

You’ll also benefit from being based in central London, at the heart of the arts and media district and close to historic literary locations. Just a short walk away, you’ll find Shakespeare’s Globe and the site of the Tabard Inn, where Chaucer’s pilgrims started out on their journey.

Even closer at hand are the Inns of Court, Covent Garden, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which is London’s oldest working theatre, and countless other sites and buildings with literary associations. Just across Waterloo Bridge is the South Bank arts complex, including the IMAX Cinema, as well as the BFI Southbank, which contains the BFI Mediatheque, a studio cinema, and a gallery, among other facilities