English Literature and History

English literature and history is a combination for students who want to understand the past in all its dimensions, examining what people wrote and how they thought as well as what they did and how the world was organised around them. Literature offers the historian a window into lived experience, belief, anxiety, aspiration, and imagination in ways that official documents often cannot. History offers the literary critic context, causation, and a sense of the social and political structures within which texts were produced.

Each discipline enriches the other, and students who study both develop a more complete and more subtle understanding of the past.

At the University of Northumbria at Newcastle this three-year full-time programme makes the most of this complementarity, developing your skills in close reading, historical research, and extended argument simultaneously. You will engage with English literature across a range of periods and genres alongside the tools and evidence of historical scholarship. The programme includes a sandwich year, a year abroad, and work placement opportunities, giving you the professional experience and international perspective that strengthen both employability and intellectual development.

Graduates from English literature and history programmes are exceptionally well prepared for careers in which critical reading and clear writing are central. Teaching at secondary level, publishing, journalism, the civil service, the heritage sector, law, and the voluntary and cultural sector are all common paths. The combination of literary sensitivity and historical rigour is valued by employers across a very wide range of professional contexts.

Many graduates also continue to postgraduate study in history, literature, cultural studies, or related fields, building specialist expertise for research or professional careers.