BA (Hons) English

at Goldsmiths University of London

Our BA English degree gives you the opportunity to develop the critical and verbal skills needed for confident, effective reading of literary texts and criticism.

Bold, flexible, and richly diverse, the BA in English offers you a world of literature and language. You will be taken on a thrilling intellectual and imaginative journey from the Caribbean, New York, and Victorian London, to the American South via 1980s Northern Ireland, South Korea, Zimbabwe, Belarus, India, and Algeria. Along the way, we encourage you to ask big, complex, and often challenging questions about how to read literature in all its cultural, artistic, and political contexts ranging from the analysis of bear-baiting in Early Modern drama, the role of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th century novel to the impact of the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements on 21st-century literature, film, and culture.

You will travel across histories, cultures, and languages and be encouraged to engage in a huge variety of debates around, for example, gender and sexual identity, the Transatlantic slave trade, climate change, feminism, Caribbean writing, indigenous literature and philosophical ideas about what it means to be human across time.  

With a focus on both creative and analytical thinking as well as on rigorous communication and research skills, your degree in English is full of choice, offering you the opportunity to design your own curriculum. You could specialise in the study of language and communication, or in ‘world literature’, or in American literature and culture. You’ll also have a chance to take up one of our Work Placements, two of which are with Poetry London, and take a Creative Writing module specifically designed for BA English students.

In your final year, you’ll research and write a dissertation on a subject of your own choosing. You will benefit from our portfolio system of assessment that gives you individual feedback to help you become a highly proficient researcher, writer, and communicator with a suite of transferable skills attractive to graduate-level employers looking for high-level analytical abilities. A dedicated Careers Service will help you make the most of these skills and to think about life beyond Goldsmiths.

With its unparalleled literary history, London is one of the best places in the world to study English literature and access the city’s literary, cultural, and creative events. You'll gain free attendance to events run by our research centres in Comparative Literature, Decadence, and Caribbean and Diaspora Studies, the Centre for Political and Critical Theory as well as the chance to hear the most exciting contemporary writers and poets talk about their work in the Writers’ Centre and at Goldsmiths Prize readings.