Literature and Criminology

Literature and criminology is an interdisciplinary combination that approaches questions of crime, justice and deviance from two complementary perspectives. Literature has long been fascinated by criminality, exploring it through detective fiction, true crime narrative, prison writing and literary representations of violence, guilt and punishment. Criminology brings a social scientific rigour to these same questions, asking what causes crime, how societies define and respond to it, and how the criminal justice system operates in practice.

Studied together, the two disciplines produce graduates who can read texts carefully and think critically about the social world.

At the University of the Highlands and Islands this programme is studied over four years on a full-time basis. UHI's distributed campus model draws on digital and blended learning alongside face-to-face teaching, making the programme accessible across a wide geographic area. You will engage with literary traditions in crime writing alongside sociological and psychological theories of criminal behaviour, with the history of punishment and justice, with victimology, policing and the criminal justice system, and with contemporary debates about sentencing, rehabilitation and the relationship between fiction and reality in the representation of crime.

The combination develops your reading, writing and research skills alongside your sociological and analytical thinking.

Graduates of literature and criminology programmes are well placed for careers in criminal justice, probation, social work, education, community development, journalism, publishing and policy work. The ability to read complex texts and to think analytically about social structures and human behaviour is valued across many professional contexts. Postgraduate study in criminology, criminal justice, social policy, literature or creative writing is a natural next step for those who wish to specialise further.