English and History

English and history, taken together, offer two complementary ways of making sense of human experience across time. Literature records how people have felt, imagined, and argued about the world they lived in, while history reconstructs the events, structures, and ideas that shaped those lives. Studying the disciplines alongside one another allows you to read literary works in their historical contexts and to bring literary sensitivity to the reading of historical sources, developing an unusually flexible and nuanced set of analytical tools.

At Keele University this three-year degree, studied full-time, brings English literary studies and historical inquiry into genuine dialogue. You will investigate how the formal properties of texts, including their genres, narrative structures, imagery, and rhetoric, develop in relation to the wider conditions of the periods in which they were produced, and you will build connections between major events in global history and the imaginative responses they generated. The programme develops your powers of close reading, archival research, and critical argument, as well as your ability to communicate complex ideas clearly in writing and discussion.

A sandwich year offers the opportunity to undertake a professional placement, and the option of a year abroad broadens your cultural and intellectual horizons considerably. Work placement experience is integrated into the programme, giving you direct professional exposure alongside your academic study.

The combination of skills this degree produces is genuinely versatile. Graduates enter careers across education, publishing, journalism, public policy, the civil service, heritage and museums, media, cultural organisations, and the charity sector. The capacity to read carefully, think historically, and write persuasively is valued by employers in many fields that are not obviously literary or historical in character, including law, marketing, public relations, and human resources.

For those who wish to continue in academia, the degree provides strong preparation for postgraduate study in either English literature or history, as well as in interdisciplinary fields such as cultural studies, gender studies, or postcolonial studies.