Your journey studying English at King's starts here

Congratulations on your offer! We've curated this hub to support your next steps.

Although this content was up-to-date at the time it was produced, some changes to courses and teaching staff may occur. Please make sure you check our website course pages or contact us directly for the very latest information.

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Hear from our course lead Dr Lara Feigal and Head of Department Professor Anna Snaith as they run through the details of our English degrees.

• Learn more about the Department of English at King’s, including its research strengths and the support available to you throughout your studies
• Hear from current students about their experience on the English course, including how they’ve tailored their studies through a wide range of modules, along with practical tips to help you get off to a strong start

London on and off the Page (semester one module)

London On and Off the Page will take you out into the city that King’s calls home. The labyrinthine city, the city of strollers and wanderers, of illicit and excessive pleasures, of riot and surveillance, of pretence and vulgarity, of ‘quality’ and taste, of aggressive capitalism and imperial dispossession, and of endless variety: these are just some of the tropes that help us interpret and define the sprawling mass that is ‘London’.

Through this module we will explore how urban space can be ‘read’ and ‘written’, but we will also tune into sonic, visual and embodied experiences that elude textual capture. You may study soundwalks, monuments and performances as well as the work of novelists, poets and essayists, and will reflect on the complex relationships between the living body and the written word. Taking a transhistorical approach, lectures and seminars will dig down into the layers of London’s accumulated meanings. From Roman remains to contemporary performance, the module draws on the breadth of expertise in the Department of English to give critical context to your experience of the city.

The module also helps lay the foundation for your own life in London over the course of your study at King’s. In one of the most stimulating environments in which to engage with cultural production on and off the page, and the first semester of your first year marks the start of an exciting relationship to the city.

• Arinzé Kene, Misty (Nick Hern Books, 2018)

• Jen Harvie, Theatre & The City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), especially pp.xi-22 and 40-69

• Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber & Faber, 2009)

Reading Theory (semester one module)

Reading Theory provides an essential and exciting part of your degree. In this module, you’ll be introduced to a range of influential methodologies that will fundamentally reshape how you read and think about texts. Rather than focusing only on plot or character or setting, we will ask deeper questions: How is meaning constructed? Whose voices are heard or silenced? How do language, form, and context shape interpretation?

Reading Theory aims to transform the way you engage with literature while encouraging you to see the world differently. You’ll explore approaches such as feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis, each offering distinct tools and perspectives. As you begin to recognize how texts reflect and challenge social and cultural assumptions, you’ll become more attuned to how ideas about identity, power, and knowledge operate in everyday life.

Crucially, Reading Theory will strengthen your work across your degree. It provides strategies for engaging with complex ideas and with a vocabulary for developing sophisticated, nuanced, original arguments. Whether you are analyzing a Shakespeare play, a contemporary novel, or a piece of digital media, the skills you will gain on the module—close reading, critical thinking, and theoretical awareness—will help you approach texts with greater confidence, creativity, and insight.

If you want to get a head start on Reading Theory over the next few weeks, pick up a copy of Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (OUP). This clear (and genuinely very short!) book will equip you well for encountering theory for the first time at university level.

If you’re keen to go even further, you might have a look at some of the texts we’ll likely be discussing:

• Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks

• Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

• Edward Said’s Orientalism

• Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble

Writing Race, Writing Gender (semester two module)

Writing Race, Writing Gender will introduce you to a range of non-canonical, experimental, and ‘difficult’ writing, developing your confidence in close reading across a variety of genres including fiction, poetry and life writing.

This module asks what subversive or difficult literatures can tell us about the lived categories of identity—race, gender and class, for example—as well as how these literatures instruct us in the often-mystifying systems that hold notions of literary value in place. What makes a literary text experimental? Whose work is labelled ‘difficult’ and why? What institutions, and which modes of reading, have led to the absorption of some texts into The Canon while others are seen as ‘minor’ texts?

To further enhance your understanding of literary form and technique, you’ll also be given the option of developing your own creative work.

• Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (1926)

• Amiri Baraka [writing as LeRoi Jones], The Toilet (1964)

• Gloria E. Anzladúa, ‘La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness’, in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

• Ali Smith, ‘The Poet’, in Public library and other stories (2015)

Blogs and articles

• Deep Dive into the BA English Curriculum to get a taste of what you will be studying.
• From helping human trafficking survivors to disability representation in art — how King's humanities research is impacting society
• Professor Clare Pettitt's - Emily Brontë’s fierce, flawed women: not your usual Gothic female characters
• Dr Edward Sugden - Moby-Dick doesn’t deserve the ‘difficult’ label – this sea romance was once loved by office workers, sailors and children
• Dr Adelene Buckland - Wuthering Heights casting row: most adaptations struggle with picking the right Heathcliff and Cathy, but we deserve better in 2024
• Professor Anna Snaith - Mrs Dalloway at 100: Virginia Woolf’s timeless novel is a work of pandemic fiction
• Dr Emily Rowe - Juliet and Romeo strains to be meaningful but never earns its emotional crescendos
• Dr Emily Rowe - Shakespearean References in White Lotus Season three.

Podcasts

• Listen to Professor Lara Feigel on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row talking about VE Day literature
• Listen to Professor Lara Feigel in a new BBC Radio 4 Artworks series on DH Lawrence
• Listen to Dr Daniel Starza Smith (Early Modern English MA) on the New Books Network podcast talking about letterlocking

Visit the English BA course page to discover more on:

• Module lists
• Assessment information
• Teaching methods

Joint Honours

For those with an joint honours offer holders, here is a link to the other subject hubs:

• Film studies offer holders
• Modern Languages offer holders

Read our blogs to find out more about student life: 

• Faye tells us what she wished people knew about an English degree
• Evie tells us why she chose to study an English BA
• Take a look at the summer reading list for English BA offer holders
• Sophia talks about the jump between year 1 and year 2 for English and Modern Languages

Where could your degree from the faculty of Arts and Humanities take you?

Meet Robin Stevens from King's Careers & Employability Centre, who runs through all the services available to help you find your dream job.

Find out about career paths that students have taken after studying English.

• Chat with current students on Unibuddy
• Follow our Arts & Humanities Instagram
• Hear more about accommodation, funding and student life by signing up to our in-person and online events.
• Visit us on a tour of the Strand campus