English

Our unique BA (Hons) English programme allows you to stretch both sides of your brain. On the course, you will gain a foundation in literature, creative writing, and linguistics, working with professional published authors, active researchers, and HEA-accredited lecturers. This broad foundation allows you to gain a wide range of key skills, from creativity to data collection, and to pursue careers in a variety of fields, including publishing, research, teaching, the arts, museums and heritage, marketing, copyediting, and media and public relations.

You will study a range of classic and contemporary literature and theory, exploring contemporary topics such as queer approaches to poetry, gothic horror in young adult fiction, Shakespeare in performance, and how twenty-first century writing engages with the climate crisis. You will have the opportunity to specialize on the distinct Literature and Creative Writing and Literature and Linguistics pathways, or to select options from both routes on our flexible English degree programme.

Our course makes full use of our location in Suffolk. The county’s coastal villages and towns attract writers and artists from all over the world and feature in classic novels by Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Arthur Ransome. The richly intriguing historical development across the region also makes East Anglia a fascinating dialect area for linguistics studies. Special class trips, partnerships, and competitions such as the Student New Angle Prize will help you to explore this region and develop your own independent research and writing. The degree allows you to practise key skills in sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, psycholinguistics and literary linguistics.