English and Film with a Year Abroad

English and film make natural intellectual companions because both are fundamentally concerned with representation: how stories are told, how meaning is made, and how cultural values and ideas are expressed and contested through narrative. English literature developed over centuries as a discipline for reading texts with care, understanding their historical and cultural contexts, and arguing about their meanings. Film studies brings those same analytical impulses to the moving image, examining cinema as an art form, an industry, and a carrier of ideology, using critical, theoretical, and historical methods to understand what films do and how they do it.

At Queen Mary University of London, this four-year full-time degree with a year abroad develops expertise in both disciplines in parallel. You will study English literature across a range of periods and traditions, developing close reading skills, critical writing, and engagement with literary theory, while exploring film through analysis of specific works, directors, genres, and movements, and through the theoretical frameworks that film studies has developed to understand the medium. The year abroad, specified in the course title, will broaden your academic and personal perspective significantly, situating your literary and film study in a different cultural and educational context.

You will develop sophisticated interpretive skills, the ability to construct and defend arguments about complex cultural material, and the capacity to engage with both written and visual texts at an advanced critical level. These skills are widely valued in professional contexts where analysis, communication, and cultural literacy matter.

Graduates from English and film degrees move into careers in journalism, broadcasting, film production, publishing, screenwriting, arts administration, education, the civil service, advertising, and public relations. The analytical and communication skills the degree develops are also relevant in law, management, and many other fields. Postgraduate study in English, film studies, or related disciplines is a well-trodden path for those drawn to research or further specialisation.