French Studies

With a strong heritage dating back to 1896, French Studies at Manchester is the oldest in the UK.

It's also one of the largest, with over 120 students registering on its various programmes each year.

You will be taught by experienced academic staff of international distinction, including three winners of University and Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards, and a dedicated team of specialist language tutors.

Among our staff, over 70% are native speakers of French and we teach you in that language from Year 1.

Our innovative language-teaching programme, which follows an enquiry-based learning approach, is central to a curriculum that offers an extremely wide choice of course units.

These cover the Early Modern period to the present and fall into the four broad categories of history and politics, literature, popular and visual culture, and linguistics and translation.

You will benefit from our rich Library resources - including precious manuscripts, a vast French literature collection, and contemporary digital media - and from our long-established partnership with the Alliance Française de Manchester, which hosts cultural events throughout the year such as film screenings, talks, plays, concerts, exhibitions and intensive language classes.

You will also benefit from our collaboration with the Institut de Touraine in the Loire Valley, which hosts Easter and Summer French language classes that are appropriate for ab initio students and finalists.

The course unit details listed below are those you may choose to study as part of this programme and are referred to as optional units. These are subject to change and are the latest example of the curriculum available on this programme. Although language units may show here as optional, they are a mandatory part of your modern languages degree and you will take the units relevant to your level of language in each year of study. It Is compulsory to study language at all levels of your modern languages degree.