English Literature and History with Foundation Year

English literature and history together offer one of the richest routes into the human past and the cultural traditions that have shaped who we are. Literature provides access to how people imagined, narrated, and made sense of their experience across time, while history reconstructs the social, political, and material conditions in which those literary works were produced and received. The two disciplines are in constant dialogue: to understand Shakespeare you need to understand the political world of the Elizabethan court, and to understand the Victorian novel you need to know something about industrialisation, empire, and the emergence of the mass reading public.

Studying them together allows each to illuminate the other.

At York St John University, this programme includes a foundation year, a sandwich year with placement, and a year abroad, combining a generous set of practical and international learning experiences with the academic depth of the joint degree. The foundation year provides a supported transition into degree-level humanities study. You will explore the connections between literary texts and historical contexts across different periods, developing skills in close reading, historical research, and critical argumentation.

Both disciplines cultivate the capacity to engage carefully with complex material and to construct well-evidenced arguments in clear prose, skills that are genuinely valuable across a wide range of careers.

Graduates work in education, publishing, journalism, heritage, museums and archives, public policy, the civil service, and the creative industries, among many other fields. The combination of literary sensitivity and historical understanding is particularly valued in roles that require engaging with diverse audiences or interpreting cultural and historical material for public benefit. Many graduates go on to postgraduate study in English literature, history, or a related humanities field, while others move directly into professional life with a strong analytical and communicative foundation.