Comparative Literature/History

Comparative literature is the study of literary works across cultural and national boundaries, engaging with texts from different languages, traditions, periods, and genres alongside the critical and theoretical frameworks that help us understand how literature works across these differences. It is a discipline that resists the narrowness of national literary canons, asking instead what happens when we read across borders and what the patterns, differences, and shared concerns across literary traditions reveal about human experience. Pairing it with history adds a rigorous empirical and archival dimension, grounding the comparative study of literature in the actual contexts of its production.

At the University of Glasgow this four-year, full-time Joint Honours programme develops your engagement with both disciplines within a university that has exceptional strengths in literary studies and history. You will read works from across languages and periods, developing your critical vocabulary and your ability to engage with different scholarly traditions, while also studying historical methods, archives, and the major debates in historiography from different periods and regions. A year abroad is built into the programme, giving you the opportunity to study at a partner university in another country and to encounter different literary and historical cultures at first hand.

Graduates of comparative literature and history move into careers in publishing, journalism, academia, the civil service, education, heritage, and the cultural sector. The research, analytical, and communication skills the combination develops are valued across a wide range of professional contexts, and many graduates are distinctive in the graduate job market because their training spans disciplines and cultures in a way that most single-subject degrees do not. Further study at postgraduate level in comparative literature, literary theory, history, or a related field is a natural next step for those who want to develop specialist expertise or pursue academic research careers.