English and History BA (Hons) degree

This module will provide you with an outline of English literary history from the late medieval period to the modern day, introducing you to significant writers and genres and their place within a broad contextual framework. How are ideas of the literary canon formed and perpetuated, and what are the implications of such processes? You’ll have the opportunity to engage in these debates while studying key literary works in their original contexts.

Writers tell stories in many different forms and many different media. On this module you’ll examine a wide range of forms and media, from period fiction to film and the graphic novel. In doing so, you’ll discuss the features, functions and effects of different types of narrative. The assessment for this module offers you the choice to work creatively using what you’ve learned, or to focus on literary criticism. After this module, you’ll have the skills to continue studying different types of narrative across the rest of your degree.

This module introduces students to the concept of the 'Atlantic World', surveys the early modern history of Africa, the Americas and Western Europe, and explores the key historical themes of this period including race, religion and empire.

This module establishes a foundation about the nature of History - including public history - as a subject area.

A creative title for a creative module. Here you’ll be introduced to techniques for writing poetry and fiction, and be given lots of techniques to try out for yourself. The module is based on the assumption that everyone is starting out as a writer, so you don’t have to have had any experience. You’ll also learn how to give and receive feedback, meaning that you can develop your work and that of your fellow students. By the end of the module you’ll be confident in writing your own material, using skills in plot, imagery, character and a lot more. 

This module provides an opportunity to explore key concepts, approaches, and areas of interest in film studies through offering a critical introduction to the discipline. As well as considering key aspects of film form and style (setting, props, costume, lighting, actor performance, cinematography, editing, and sound and music), you will explore such topics as narrative, genre, the role of the director, star studies, and geographies of film consumption, through detailed study of a number of American films.

This module aims to give you the necessary analytical skills to read poetry more closely and critically, in order to understand how it achieves its effects. As well as gaining knowledge of core metrical principles and awareness of their various effects and implications, you will develop an understanding of the principal kinds and forms of poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present day. Working in small groups for the workshops and seminars, you’ll have a chance to study a range of poems in depth, analysing both their forms and their contexts.

This module gives you the opportunity to engage with a wide range of African American cultural production (written, cinematic and musical) from 1840 to the present day and to explore the complex social and political questions raised by these primary materials, studying a variety of texts from nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary hip-hop lyrics.

The aims of the module are to:

• Introduce central developments within art and visual culture during the 19th century and up to the present day, mapping these onto historical events, themes, and discourses.
• Provide a critical response to canons, concepts, and narratives within modern and contemporary art and visual culture.
• Develop key art historical skills such as comparative visual analysis.
• Equip students with the skills required to undertake research into historical works of art and visual culture, with a focus on modern and contemporary practice.

This module will introduce you to significant classic and contemporary theoretical approaches and key concepts used in the study of literature today, typically covering topics including gender and sexuality, race and postcoloniality, ideology and capitalism, eco-criticism, and power and protest. Through learning about these influential ideas and debates, you’ll be able to demonstrate how these theories can be used to interpret literary texts.

This module introduces students to the main currents of world history and to the shifting structure of the international order in the modern period. It aims to cover both the mainstream narratives and those critical of Eurocentrism, thereby stimulating an appreciation in cultural diversity.

One 10-credit module from a list supplied by the Language Centre, levels dependent on candidates’ previous qualifications.  Languages offered are: French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish.

This module serves two purposes. The first purpose is to place twentieth-century British history within a global context, surveying both its domestic social, cultural, economic and political development and its transformation from an imperial to a post-imperial nation. The second purpose is to introduce students to the different types of sources available to study the recent past and the techniques required to analyse them.

The aim of this module is to develop skills in research design, involving selecting of topic and viable research questions, appropriate research methodologies for the research questions selected, sourcing research data and learning how to complete a coherent research proposal.

On this module, you will be introduced to a range of Victorian texts, including poetry, novels, and short prose works, in order to assess the aesthetic, intellectual and social questions that informed Victorian writing. You will read Victorian literature in relation to the social and cultural history of the period, allowing you to explore ideas from the period in depth, considering such topics as the growth of industrialisation, scientific developments, the beginnings of the women’s movement, modernity, and evolving concepts of the city and the urban experience. In the weekly seminars, you will be encouraged to work with others as part of a learning community.

This module focuses on the theme of love in the lives of people from the Stuart era (1603-1714), and the importance of this period for the development of English literature. You’ll learn how ‘love’ of various kinds – marital, erotic, filial, and patriotic – holds as much social and cultural relevance as it does personal significance, which is illustrated through the diversity of representations in tragic, sceptical, pragmatic, comedic, and romantic narratives, including plays, poems, and pioneering early prose works.

This module is an introduction to the diversity of literary and artistic movements, ideas, and concepts grouped under the term ‘Modernism’. On the module, you will learn how twentieth-century writers developed new methods of responding to an increasingly mechanised and urban world, while also pioneering new ways of writing about the self. The module will show how modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce reacted against many Victorian conventions to produce challenging and radical art. The focus of the module will be on short fiction, the novel, and poetry, as well as on different modernist ‘voices’.

This module is very diverse, in that it covers a range of forms (including fiction, poetry and drama), in a range of genres (including verbatim, crime and weird) from a range of writers, including work in translation. Whatever your interests, you’ll discover writing that is new to you. What all these texts have in common is their concern with global concerns about identity, race, place, and belonging that undermine national literary and cultural identities as well as colonising cultural centres.

What do you know? What are skills? Where are they going to take you? This module will help you to answer those questions by building on transferrable skills and encouraging you to reflect on your learning. In addition, you’ll learn about the UK job market, and how to negotiate a range of recruitment tasks including decoding job specifications, writing an application, interviews, psychometric tests and the use of AI. Combine these with your degree and graduate with confidence.

The aim of this module is to examine the development of the political thought by looking at key concepts, thinkers and movements in the history of ideas.

This course provides an overview of modern Chinese history, focusing on China's entanglement with the world at large. It will be shown how modern China in cultural, social and economic terms was shaped by external influences and in return made its imprint on the wider world. The module thus provides insights into the development of a rising global power through studying its recent past, while at the same addressing issues of cultural difference.

This module introduces students to debates in the social, political and cultural history of Victorian Britain, with particular emphases on histories of childhood, democratisation, poverty, sex and sexuality, crime and deviance, religion, and race. The course also explores representations of the Victorians since 1901, addressing key historiographical questions about why and how the reputation of the period and its people has undergone constant revision.

This module introduces students to nineteenth and twentieth century African history, and explores the development of African states and nations in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. We will address why it has often been difficult for Africans to form successful nation-states and the impact of colonial legacies. The module will situate Africa in the wider global context, but will focus primarily on African experiences and how African peoples have shaped their continent's history.

If you are fascinated by the gothic, delighted by the strange and tempted by the unexplained, then this module will be up your – dark, shadowy – street. The Weird as a genre is over a century old, but is still the chosen form for many contemporary writers. This module will introduce you to a range of examples, dealing in different types of the Weird. You may wish to write a critical essay trying to make sense of it all, but you may also wish to try your hand as a Weird writer yourself. You may see a shadow in the corner of the room; hear the voice of an old gentleman in the Church Hall. Or maybe you imagined it.

The next step on your writing journey is this module, which introduces more skills and techniques (epistolary, ekphrasis, observation…) and challenges you to develop further as a writer. You’ll be asked to respond creatively to the work of another writer (some of whom are Loughborough graduates) and to create a portfolio of work that best represents your strengths and passions as a writer. As always, what you write about, and how you do it, is up to you.

From the animals in Franz Kafka’s short stories to BoJack Horseman, from nature documentaries to viral clips of cats and dogs online, contemporary culture is saturated with narratives and representations of non-human animals. On this module, you’ll be introduced to new ways of critically interrogating these narratives and representations, drawn from a variety of media, analysing them in relation to recent ethical, political, cultural, and philosophical debates concerning our lives with (and even as) animals.

The aims of this module are to:

• Introduce students to the main institutions of the US government and how they function within the US political system.
• Examine the politics and foreign policy of the United States through an analysis of its 20th century history.
• Explore how US cultural, social and intellectual history influenced US politics in the 20th century.

The aims of this module are to:

• Introduce students to the main institutions of the US government and how they function within the US political system.
• Examine the politics and foreign policy of the United States through an analysis of its 20th century history.
• Explore how US cultural, social and intellectual history influenced US politics in the 20th century.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the history of British India from mid-19th c. to the end of colonial period in 1947. The course begins with an introductory overview of colonial history through which to study the Indian sub-continent and goes on to examine major landmarks of this period. It looks at the colonial state's interactions with Indian polity, society and culture to show how imperial subjects came into being, before becoming independent citizens in 1947.

One 10-credit module from a list supplied by the Language Centre, levels dependent on candidates’ previous qualifications.  Languages offered are: French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish.

On this year-long module, you will build on your organisational skills in planning, researching, preparing and revising a substantial piece of written work, developing high-level research and writing skills. It is also possible to add a Creative or Practice-based element: if you choose to develop your work in these directions you will, in addition to the traditional academic component of the Dissertation, include original creative material as an element of your final assessed work.

Examples of a Creative element might include a series of linked poems or monologues, short fiction, the opening of a novel, a short script for stage, TV or radio, or a portfolio of work around a theme or topic. In such cases, the traditional academic component of the Dissertation will consist of the same kinds of critical and analytical work which characterise conventional academic Dissertations.

The aim of the module is to enable students to undertake an extensive piece of research on a topic of their choice in the field of their degree title, and to further develop their skills in research techniques and methods.

One 10-credit module from a list supplied by the Language Centre, levels dependent on candidates’ previous qualifications.  Languages offered are: French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish.

This module introduces you to a range of writings from the late nineteenth century, including poems, short stories, and novels, considering the relationship between writing of the period to broader cultural, social, and literary concerns. The module will invite you to consider issues such as the campaigns for female suffrage and the Social Purity movement, as well as contemporary debates on marriage, motherhood, female education, ‘free love’, class, race, and eugenics.

This module aims to introduce you to a range of texts that represent the practice of punishment in American history from the nineteenth century to the present day. You will have the opportunity to examine the representation of punishment in American fiction and film in relation to three critical questions: Who is punished? How are they punished? Why are they punished? Studying novels, films, and documentaries, you will have the opportunity to analyse these texts in relation to social and historical contexts as well as competing theories of punishment.

This module is designed to introduce you to a representative range of Neo-Victorian fiction, exploring how a re-imagining and re-writing of Victorian literature and culture has led to the emergence of an exciting and dynamic new field of study. You will be encouraged to consider novels as well as related developments such as film and TV adaptations, Mash-ups, and themes including race, identity, disability, and biography.

This module is designed to enable you, through working with other students as part of a learning community, to discover and explore the ways in which Shakespeare adapted his source materials to produce the scripts we know, and how those scripts are in turn adapted in modern performance. This will involve closely studying Shakespeare’s scripts, his sources, and a range of relevant critical views.

The final core creative writing module combines developing your writing with professional development about publishing and other career opportunities. Instead of workshops, you’ll take part in four day-long writing retreats, each with a specific theme, discussions, exercises and time to write. Alongside these, professional development sessions will help you to discover how writers - including you – get their work published, and how writers earn a living. Your assessments will be a long portfolio of writing, and a presentation about how you are going to make use of your knowledge of writing and the writing sector in future.  

This module introduces you to a variety of British and Anglo-American poets of the twentieth century, giving you an opportunity to explore how these poets reinvented the notion of what poetry could be in the modern era as they questioned or rejected older notions of the ‘poetic’. How did war transform the idea of war poetry, and even the love poem? How did poets promote revolutionary movements such as Futurism and Imagism through influential manifestos and small publications? Reading a combination of canonical poets alongside those who have typically been more marginalised in discussions of the period, you will be able to explore the innovative strategies utilised by modern poets in order to find a new voice in a fast-moving world of urbanisation, world war, and socio-political change.

This module aims to a) give students a sound grounding in leading strands of feminist philosophy; and b) to allow students to be able to position themselves within these debates. It will do this by focusing on texts and debates: students will read texts in preparation for the class sessions, and will be encouraged to critique, compare, contrast, engage and position themselves in relation to the writings under consideration.

This module offers students an opportunity to explore how American culture responded to questions raised by the modernisation of the United States between the end of the Civil War and the beginnings of World War 2.

This module examines the role played by the Soviet and post-Soviet security and intelligence agencies in the history of the Soviet regime and its satellites from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the present day. The history of Communism is a key part of the history of the twentieth century; the Soviet Union's security and intelligence agencies played a key role in the history of Communism. The twentieth century was the most calamitously bloody century in mankind's history; the Soviet Union's security services, and those set up in their image, bear of a large share of the responsibility for that.

This course examines the emergence, evolution and contemporary existence of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal) since 1945. It explores the moments of incorporation, trajectories of development and marginal spaces, apart from the mainstream of South Asia today.

This module examines the history and politics of Anglo-American relations, from c.1900 to the present.

The British Empire was by far the largest and most powerful, certainly of the modern period. There has been considerable debate, however, about the extent to which that Empire and imperial wars influenced Britons 'at home', especially in relation to how the Empire was represented in various types of popular culture and how it affected everyday life.

This module examines that debate through the study of news, print, visual, and performance culture, with especial attention to key organising themes of class, race, gender, childhood, and identity. In particular, we will investigate: war reporting, cartoons, photographs, early film; popular theatre; zoos, circuses, and exotic pets; juvenile literature and youth organisations such as the Scouts and the Guides; advertising and consumer culture; exhibitions and museums; the cult of the hero; and the impact of Empire on election campaigns. To do so, the module provides training in use and method of digital sources.