English BA (Hons)

BA English allows you to choose from a diverse and extensive range of modules, covering works across time, cultures, genres and geographies. Offering more than 40 modules from across a thousand years of English, American and global literature, English at Royal Holloway is a particularly wide-ranging subject which allows you to develop your passions, debate cutting-edge ideas, and to pursue, if you wish, your own creative writing.<br/><br/>The flexibility of this course encourages discovery: from the Knights of the Round Table to contemporary literature on global questions like migration or the environment, you will encounter many new literary worlds and new ways of understanding familiar ones. Most importantly, you will discover your own voice as a writer in an environment which places particular value on independence of mind and intellectual creativity. Alongside expertise in all the major literary periods which ensures that our students are informed by deep knowledge, the English department prides itself on educational expertise, offering small group teaching, a ‘transition’ programme when you join us and individual attention, to ensure that our students are confident, happy and successful academically.<br/><br/>Studying at one of the UKs most dynamic English departments allows you to develop a strong understanding of key periods, genres, authors, and critical concepts. After a first year which gives you firm foundations, you can choose from a huge range of options both innovative and traditional: for example, Drama and Witchcraft, Sensation Fiction, World War I Poetry, Science Fiction, Childrens Literature, African-American Literature, the Girl in the Book, Queer History as well as courses on the Medieval period, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Eighteenth-century and Victorian literatures, Modernism and Postmodernism. In your third year, you can write a dissertation on a specialist subject of your own choice.<br/><br/>You will be taught by nationally and internationally known scholars who write prize-winning books, talk or write in the national media, or advise cultural bodies like Liberty or the Charles Dickens Museum. Outside the vibrant community of the English department, you can take courses in other departments, and even opt to study abroad for a year.<br/><br/><br/>- Study literature from across time and space.<br/><br/><br/>- Choose from innovative, interdisciplinary modules on the relationship between literature and the digital, film, music, the visual arts, and the creative industries.<br/><br/><br/>- Opportunity to gain work experience through our micro-placements scheme, at an organisation such as Penguin, the Press Association or the BBC.<br/><br/><br/>- Study abroad for a year at one of our international partner institutions.<br/><br/><br/>- Take options in creative writing and/or modules in another department.-<br/>