BA (Hons) English/History

Year 1

In the first year of your degree, we’ll introduce you to the undergraduate study of English and History. Our modules will give you the skills you need to start undertaking literary and historical research, and advice on how to combine the two disciplines.

English

Core modules

Your core modules in English are designed to lay the foundation of literary study for your whole degree.

Get a feel for the shape of literary history by studying works from the medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic, and modern periods.

• Approaches to Literature I: Writing Modernity

• Approaches to Literature II: Other Worlds

Establish important critical and methodological contexts for the study of literature. You will develop strategies for essay writing, engaging with criticism and critical theory, and revising work to improve its fluency and persuasiveness, as part of the Department’s innovative Writing at York provision.

• Key Concepts: An Introduction to Genre, Theory, and Writing

History

Core modules

Your core modules in History will cover topics such as:

• Evidence and Methods

• Group Research Project 

• Knowledge and Beliefs in World History

Year 2

Core module

• Texts and Histories

Our bridge module is designed specifically for English/History students and taught by a member of staff from each department. This module is the cornerstone of your combined course programme; it will provide you with a range of critical and analytical skills that are applicable across periods, and that will highlight the possibilities offered by studying two disciplines.

In addition, you’ll choose from a range of intermediate modules across the English and History departments.

English

Option modules

You will choose from the same breathtaking range of English options as our single subject students. These include Writing Now, Research Now, and our Intermediate Option Modules, which allow you to deepen your understanding of the relationship between literary works and the cultural, historical, and political contexts in which they were produced. These may include topics such as:

• The Shock of the New: Medieval Literature

• The Renaissance

• Inventing Britain, 1700-1830

• Victorians: British Literature, 1832-1901

• Age of Extremes: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature

• American Literature: From the First World War to the End of Empire

You'll also be able to choose from subjects included in our World Literature modules. Recent offerings have included:

• An Introduction to Greek and Latin Literatures

• European New Cinema

• French Poetry 1844-1898

• The Literature of Hispanic America

• Medieval Arabic and Persian Global Literature

• Muslim Translations of Britain

• Old Norse Literature

• The World of Beowulf

History

Option modules

You will choose from a selection of Histories and Contexts option modules. Recent examples have included:

• Ancien Régime France, 1500-1787

• Ending European Empires: Decolonization after 1945 in Comparative Perspective

• From Grave Robbers to Gene Therapy: The Rise of Modern Medicine

• Histories in Public: Understandings of the Past in Today's Society

• Kingship, Rule and Mythmaking: England 1065-1307

You will choose from a selection of Explorations option modules. Recent examples have included:

• An Inconvenient Truth: Climate and Capitalism in the Modern World

• Catherine the Great 1763 – 1796

• From the Global Shadows: Africa and the World since the 1950s

• Knowledge and Empire, c.1760-1965

• The British Atlantic World, 1576-1692: From Roanoke Colony to the Salem Witch Trials

• The Good World: Visions of Rule and Power in Italy, 1200-1400

• The Long Black Freedom Struggle in the U.S. since 1865

• The Making of England, c.850-1066

• The Pursuit of Happiness: The Politics of Leisure and Pastime in Twentieth-Century America

• Uniting the Kingdom: Britishness and the Four Nations, 1707-1815

Year 3

In your third year you will concentrate on your dissertation as well as choosing topics to focus on with our option modules.

English

Option modules

In English, you will choose from the department’s Advanced Option Modules. These reflect the wide-ranging and cutting-edge research expertise of the Department, and our options cover literature from the classical period to the twenty-first century, as well as film and creative writing. Students can typically choose from around 25 options.  Recent offerings include:

• American Independent Film

• The Body in Modern American Literature and Culture

• Charles Dickens

• Fashion in the 18th Century

• Found in Translation

• From Tennyson to Tolkien: The Middle Ages & Modern Literature from 1843 - 1940

• Green Romanticism: Nature, Ecology, Calamity

• Modernism's Queer Spaces

• Poetry Boot Camp

• Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Romance and Popular Fiction

• Researching the Renaissance

• So Funny it Hurts: Irish Comic Fiction

• Villains of the Romantic Gothic

• The Writer's Notebook: A Prose Fiction Workshop

History

Option modules

You will choose from a selection of History Special Subject option modules. Recent examples have included:

• Francis Bacon: Myth, Magic and Morals

• From Colonial to Post-Colonial States? The Twentieth Century Caribbean

• Improvement, Modernization or Violence? 'Development' in Historical Perspective

• Inquisitors and Heretics in the High Middle Ages

• Ireland in the Age of Revolution

• Ploughing the Sea? The Spanish American Wars of Independence, 1750-1830

• Possession: Objects and Ownership in Early Modern England, c.1650-c.1750

• Reading and Writing in Late-Medieval England

• Rebellion and Revolution: The British Civil Wars, 1637-51

• Revolution in the Streets: Faith, Poverty, and Religious Ferment, c.1200

• Second-Class Citizens: Migration in Modern Europe

• The French Wars of Religion, 1559-94

• The Ghosts of Gandhi: India and Africa since the Late Nineteenth Century

• The Russian Revolution, 1917-21

Dissertation 

• Bridge Dissertation