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What makes English Literature and History at Worcester special?

Studying English Literature and History in combination enables you to explore prose in varied contexts alongside investigating different aspects of history across a broad range of periods. You’ll examine written texts to determine intent and meaning, developing analytical and critical thinking skills as you explore the historical context and its impact.

The joint honours course is taught through lectures and seminars from specialist academic staff who focus on creating a supportive and friendly learning environment. Students graduate with a multitude of skills relevant to jobs in a range of different industries.

Overview

Overview

Key features

  • A long, established and evolving course with highly-skilled and enthusiastic lecturers who are experienced teachers and published researchers
  • Strong emphasis on the development of advanced literacy, research, analysis and communication – all of which are highly valued by employers
  • A wide range of modules in British, European and World History from the sixteenth through to the twenty-first centuries and encompassing both ‘canonical’ and ‘marginal’ texts
  • Opportunities to gain work experience, to study abroad for a semester and to play an active role in local and regional literature festivals
  • Ready access to the nationally significant resources of Worcestershire County Archives Service, which is based in The Hive (the university library)
  • Tailor your course to your individual needs with a joint honours course
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Joint 10th for Graduate Prospects in the UK

Our English courses are joint 10th for Graduate Prospects in the UK (The Complete University Guide 2024.)

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Entry requirements

Entry requirements

104
UCAS tariff points

Entry Requirements

104 UCAS Tariff points 

Study options

Full-time or part-time study available

Toni Brookes, English Literature graduate

“Studying English at Worcester undoubtedly provided me with three of the most academically stimulating years I’ve had so far. I was given the opportunity to study literature from the 16th century through to the contemporary, with the chance to focus on specific research interests through the final year dissertation project. We covered a diverse range of periods and genres, with assessment including traditional academic essays, creative portfolios, reflective journals and group presentations. Throughout my studies I always felt supported, both personally and professionally, by academic staff who were encouraging, responsive and passionate about their subjects.

"Since graduating from the University of Worcester I have held professional roles in copywriting, marketing more generally, and currently, higher education. Having enjoyed my final year dissertation so much, I also decided to pursue postgraduate study and recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Contemporary Literature and Culture, obtaining a distinction classification. There is no doubt that the skills in critical thinking and analysis I developed throughout my degree were fundamental to successfully completing postgraduate work, and I often find myself thinking about the wonderfully transformative environment I was able to study in as an undergraduate.”

Great lecturers who care and want to help as much as they can to help me achieve the best possible grades. Interesting new modules which I would not have considered taking prior to my undergraduate degree.

BA History student

Course content

Course content

Our courses are informed by research and current developments in the discipline and feedback from students, external examiners and employers. Modules do therefore change periodically in the interests of keeping the course relevant and reflecting best practice. The most up-to-date information will be available to you once you have accepted a place and registered for the course. If there are insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, this might not be offered, but we will advise you as soon as possible and help you choose an alternative. 

Year 1

Mandatory

  • Britain since the Reformation (30 credits)
  • Reconstructing the Past: Academic, Public and Popular History (30 credits)
  • Literary Forms and Genres
  • Ways of Reading, Ways of Writing
  • Writing Worcester Past and Present

Year 2

Mandatory

  • Exploding the Canon: Literary Theory and Practice

Optional

  • Movement and Migration
  • Politics, Sex and Identity in the Early Modern World
  • Shakespeare: Stage, Page and Screen
  • Gothic and Romantic Literature
  • Spaces of Modernity
  • Children’s Literature
  • Work Project
  • Historical Research: Method and Practice (30 credits)
  • The American Century, 1917-2001 (30 credits)
  • The German Empire, 1862-1918
  • History Work Experience Module
  • War and Peace: The Making of Modern Ireland (30 credits)
  • ‘A People’s War?’ Britain and the Second World War
  • Georgian Britain and the Atlantic World, 1760-1820.

Year 3

Optional

  • Independent Research Project/Dissertation
  • Justice and Revenge: from Tragedy to the Western
  • Postcolonial Encounters
  • Writing and the Environment
  • War and Conflict
  • Gendering Voices
  • Partnerships and Rivalries
  • Literatures and Cultures: International Explorations
  • Queer Bodies, Queer Texts
  • Literature and Culture – Local Heritage
  • The Good War: USA in World War Two
  • The Atlantic Slave Trade
  • Nazi Germany
  • Research Experience Module
  • British Imperialism, c.1857-1972
  • Gender, Sexuality and Welfare. The Body in History.
  • Witchcraft and the Devil
  • Japan's World, 1854-1951 
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Joint Honours

Discover our full range of joint degrees and read about how your degree will be structured.

Find out more about studying a joint honours course
Teaching and assessment

Teaching and assessment

For more information about teaching, learning and assessment on this course, please see the single honours course pages for English Literature BA (Hons) and History BA (Hons).

Programme specification

For comprehensive details on the aims and intended learning outcomes of the course, and the means by which these are achieved through learning, teaching and assessment, please download the latest English Literature programme specification and History programme specification documents.

Meet the team

You will be taught by a teaching team whose expertise and knowledge are closely matched to the content of the modules on the course.

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Professor Darren Oldridge

Darren Oldridge is a specialist in sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious history. His interests include witchcraft and the Devil, the supernatural, and the religious context of the English Civil Wars. A recurring theme of his work is the rationality underpinning apparently strange beliefs: this is reflected, most recently, in the new edition of Strange Histories (Routledge: 2017). More broadly, he is interested in the relationship between poetry and film and the past.

At Worcester Darren teaches modules that reflect these interests, including The Early Modern World and Witchcraft and the Devil. At present he is editing the third edition of The Witchcraft Reader, to be published by Routledge in 2018.

Dr Lucy Arnold

Dr Lucy Arnold is a specialist in Contemporary literature, with particular research interests in contemporary gothic, narratives of haunting, contemporary women’s writing and psychoanalytic criticism. Her teaching experience spans a wide range of periods and genres but focusses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her published work to date has concerned the writing of Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel, with her monograph, Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades, published with Bloomsbury in 2019.

Candid headshot of Suzanne Schwarz

Professor Suzanne Schwarz

Suzanne Schwarz’s teaching at the University of Worcester focuses on the transatlantic slave trade and West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She also focuses on developing historical research skills for students through the study of regional and local history. She was the recipient of two student-led teaching awards in 2013 and 2014.

Professor Neil Fleming

Neil Fleming's research and teaching focusses on aspects of British, Irish and imperial history since the late nineteenth century.

Dr Wendy Toon

Wendy Toon is an historian of the United States of America, specialising in the twentieth century. She is currently writing Images of the Enemy: American Constructions of the Germans and Japanese in World War Two (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).

Wendy joined the University of Worcester in September 2002. She previously held positions at Staffordshire University and Keele University, and was a Royal Historical Society Fellow (Peter Marshall Fellowship) at the Institute of Historical Research.  

Dr Paddy McNally


Paddy McNally's teaching and research interests are focused on Irish history from 1690 until 1848, German history from 1870 to 1945, and the history of political thought. He is author of the book, Parties, Patriots and Undertakers. Parliamentary politics in early Hanoverian Ireland and numerous articles on eighteenth-century Irish history. He is currently writing From the Boyne to the Famine. A thematic history of Ireland, 1690-1848, to be published by Routledge. He teaches specialist modules on Irish history 1690-1848, German history 1870-1945, and Nationalism. He has successfully supervised PhD and MPhil students to completion and welcomes expressions of interest from prospective postgraduate researchers in most aspects of British and Irish history from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Anna Muggeridge

Dr Anna Muggeridge

Dr Anna Muggeridge is a historian of modern Britain with a particular specialism in women’s and gender history. She researches histories of women’s political activism, with a particular focus on the local. Currently, she is researching a history of women in local government in interwar England and Wales, as well as working collaboratively with colleagues at a number of other institutions on projects related to women’s activism in the twentieth century.

Dr Elspeth King

Dr Elspeth King

Elspeth King joined the university in August 2022 after 8 years of being an Associate Lecturer. Her research and teaching interests are in twentieth-century British history, especially the First and Second World Wars and Women’s History.

Elspeth is also interested in social class and the impact this has on the lived experience of people in everyday life.

Careers

Careers

Employability

Many English Literature graduates will take a fourth year postgraduate Certificate in Education before entering the teaching profession. Other students will take a certificate in TEFL and become teachers of English as a second language at home or abroad. Those graduates who achieve particularly good results in their first degree will choose to progress to a Masters course, which will then often lead to a career as a researcher or further study to PhD. Many students progress to careers requiring good communication skills such as Public Relations or develop research careers with media or publishing companies. Throughout the English Literature degree there is a focus on developing employability which includes attractive opportunities for work experience on a work project module. Students are also strongly encouraged to take up the opportunity to study abroad for a semester.

History graduates from Worcester have progressed in recent years to take up work in a variety of career sectors, including teaching, accountancy, law, the media industries, local government, the police, retailing, administration, marketing, management and university lecturing and research. A growing number of our graduates progress to postgraduate research in history, both at the University of Worcester and at other universities. Thus, History remains an attractive and personally satisfying degree to study, with a strong track record of supporting graduate employability in a range of professional, managerial, administrative and media-related careers.

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Careers and Employability

Our Graduates pursue exciting and diverse careers in a wide variety of employment sectors.

Find out how we can support you to achieve your potential
Costs

Fees and funding

Full-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard fee for full-time home and EU undergraduate students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £9,250 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

International students

The standard tuition fee for full-time international students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £16,200 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Part-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard tuition fees for part-time UK and EU students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the academic year 2024/25 are £1,156 per 15-credit module, £1,542 per 20-credit module, £2,312 per 30-credit module, £3,083 per 40-credit module, £3,469 per 45-credit module and £4,625 per 60 credit module.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Additional costs

Every course has day-to-day costs for basic books, stationery, printing and photocopying. The amounts vary between courses.

If your course offers a placement opportunity, you may need to pay for an Enhanced Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) check.

Accommodation

Finding the right accommodation is paramount to your university experience. Our halls of residence are home to friendly student communities, making them great places to live and study.

We have over 1,000 rooms across our range of student halls. With rooms to suit every budget and need, from our 'Chestnut Halls' at £131 per week to 'Oak Halls' at £221 per week (2024/25 prices).

For full details visit our accommodation page.

How to apply

How to apply

Apply through UCAS

English Literature and History BA (Hons) - QV31

UCAS is the central organisation through which applications are processed for entry onto full-time undergraduate courses in Higher Education in the UK.

Read our How to apply pages for more information on applying and to find out what happens to your application.

 

 

UCAS Code

QV31

Get in touch

If you have any questions, please get in touch. We're here to help you every step of the way.

 

Dr Sharon Young

Admissions Tutor, English Literature

Professor Neil Fleming

Admissions Tutor, History