English and Art History BA (Hons)

Program Overview

This joint honors program combines English and Art History, delving into how literature and visual arts shape society. Students explore a wide range of literature and visual materials, developing critical analysis, communication, and problem-solving skills essential for careers in the arts, media, and academia. The program fosters a bold and progressive curriculum, encouraging students to transcend boundaries through unique archives, field trips, and study abroad opportunities.

Program Outline

Degree Overview:

This program is a joint-honors course, offering a combination of English and Art History, each taking up 50% of the student's time. It offers a bold, forward-thinking curriculum that allows students to study a thousand years of literature in new and progressive ways. The program also explores a wide range of visual material, from painting and architecture to sculpture and dress.

Outline:

The program is structured over three years of full-time study.

Year 1:

• Core Modules:
• Encountering Poetry
• Researching, Creating and Communicating in the Humanities 1
• Stories of Art I: Shaping Art
• Researching, Creating and Communicating in the Humanities 2
• Stories of Art II: What Can Art Do?
• Thinking Literature

Year 2:

• Core Modules:
• Art and the City I
• Reading Art History: Critical Texts
• Art and the City II
• Options:
• Inner Worlds: Literature, 800-1750
• Literature and Philosophy
• Outer Worlds: Literature, 800-1750
• Reading Post-Colonial Texts
• Science and Literature
• The Art of Short Fiction
• The Novel
• Word & Image
• Contemporary Literature and Culture
• Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain
• Modernisms
• Picasso to Kahlo: Transatlantic Dialogues
• Pop Life: After Modern Art
• Romance
• Romanticism
• Sense and Sexuality: Women and Writing in the Eighteenth Century
• Staging the Renaissance: Shakespeare
• The Politics of Children's Literature
• Victorian Visions: Art, Industry, Modernity
• Writing Poetry

Year 3:

• Options:
• Mediterranean Fantasies: Revivals and Utopias, 1919-1939
• Posthuman/Premodern
• Psychoanalysis and Literature
• Serial Fictions
• Sex and the City: The Origins of Modernism in Britain 1870-1910
• The Order of Things: The Museum and its Objects
• Topics in African American Literature
• Virginia Woolf
• Writing Race, Gender, and the Social: Experiments Beyond Representation
• Art and Place: Sites, Spaces and Identities
• Championing Literacy Placement
• Class, Culture and Contemporary Writing
• Commemorative Art: Images, Monuments, Memory
• Dissertation (English)
• Gender, Race and Society in Early Modern Drama
• Modern Nature
• Queer Fictions
• The program also has exceptional links with galleries and museums, including Tate Modern and the V&A.
• The program's teaching has involved working with unique archives, such as the private letters of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing, and field trips to literary landmarks, such as Woolf's house and the Globe Theatre.
• The program has previously offered students career-building experience through schemes, such as Sussex Writes, which brings the power of reading and creative writing to the public.

Careers:

The program provides students with transferable skills in critical analysis, research, communication, independent thinking, and problem-solving. It also helps students understand how visual culture works, an essential skill in an image-saturated society. Potential career paths include:

• The arts, libraries, and archives
• PR, media, and journalism
• Teaching and higher education

Other:

• The program is taught by a team of engaged and passionate tutors.
• The program is one of the UK's most respected and exciting English departments.
• The program offers a distinctive approach to a radical breadth of literary texts.
• The program encourages students to explore beyond boundaries.
• The program offers optional study abroad and placement opportunities.