History and English with Foundation Year

Are you a student from the UK interested in studying History and English but your personal or educational circumstances have meant you are unlikely to achieve the grades typically required for Oxford courses? If so, History and English with Foundation Year might be the course for you.

The Foundation Year is completely free for UK students and is designed to be a one-year intensive academic course which will bridge any gap between school and our academically challenging undergraduate courses. The programme is carefully designed to build and develop your study skills, subject knowledge and capacity for independent study. Students that pass the course will be awarded a nationally recognised Certificate in Higher Education (CertHE) qualification. If you pass the course at the required level, you will be automatically admitted into Oxford as an undergraduate student if you wish to be, without the need to re-apply. For more information on this course please visit www.ox.ac.uk/fyhumanities

A joint undergraduate degree in History and English requires students to think critically about how we define ‘history’ and ‘literature’, and about how the two disciplines interrelate and, to a large extent, overlap. Close attention is given to changing methodologies, to the nature of evidence and to styles of argument. It is assumed that historical documents are just as much ‘texts’ as poems, plays or novels, and are therefore subject to interpretation as works of narrative, rhetoric and, fundamentally, language. In turn, it is assumed that poems, plays and novels represent historically-grounded ways of interpreting a culture. Interdisciplinary study has become a thriving area in its own right as scholars have moved away from what would once have been thought of as ‘purely’ historical or literary criticism to a more comparative way of thinking about the written records of the past (including, of course, the very recent past). For more information on this course please visit ox.ac.uk/ughe.

This course is for UK state school students who meet the eligibility criteria. For more information about the eligibility criteria please visit foundationyear.ox.ac.uk/eligibility.

International students are not eligible to apply.