BA English

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.

The flexibility of this course encourages discovery. We have expertise in all the major literary periods and you will encounter many new literary worlds and new ways of understanding familiar ones, from the Knights of the Round Table to contemporary literature on global questions like migration or the environment. 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. We are also proud of our educational expertise, offering small group teaching, a special programme of study that introduces you to university level study when you join us, and individual attention at all stages of your degree. We want to ensure that you are confident, happy and academically successful.

Studying at one of the UK's 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, Children's 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.

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.

We have a number of generous scholarships available specifically for English students to recognise achievement.