Year 1

In Year 1, your modules will equip you with the fundamental skills for investigating English and History.

Core modules

• The Novel Around the World (double module)
• The Shock of the Modern
• Barbarism and Civilisation: Medieval and Early Modern Europe
• Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (double module)

Option modules

Choose two option modules from:

• Global History: Connections and Cultures in a Changing World, 1750 to the present
• Great Britain: The State We're In
• US History since 1877
• Europe 1861-1991: Emancipation and Subjugation

Modules shown represent choices available to current students. The range of modules available and the content of any individual module may change in future years.

Year 2

Year 2 allows you to explore an even greater range of literary and cultural movements alongside the historical currents and events that shaped them.

Core module

• Perceiving the Past

Option modules

Choose one option module from:

• Religious History
• All Bourgeois Now? Class in History
• Global Cities
• Madness, Monarchy and Politics in Georgian Britain
• Race and Ethnicity
• Enter the Dragon: Modern Chinese History, 1839-1989
• Americas Plural: Latin America and the United States
• Blood, Position and Power: The Nobility of Later Medieval England, 1066-1485
• Jack-the-Ripper: Crime, Popular Culture and Policing in Victorian Times

Plus either Chaucer and Medieval Culture (double module)

Or Renaissance Literature B (double module)

Plus one of the following three options:

• Love Wars: Gender, Writing and Society, 1660-1789 B (double module)
• Or Concepts in Criticism B (double module)
• Or two of these three modules:
  
  • Sin and Redemption in Medieval Literature
  • Love Wars: Gender, Writing and Society, 1660-1789 A
  • Concepts in Criticism A

If you are planning to write a History Dissertation in Year 3, you will also study Becoming the Historical Researcher.

If you are planning to write an English Dissertation in Year 3, you will choose two further option modules:

Choose one option module from:

• Race and Ethnicity
• Histories of Violence
• Histories of Medicine

And then choose one final option module from:

• The Latin World: Ancient, Medieval and Modern
• Domestic Revolutions: Women, Men, and the Family in American History
• A World Connected: Welfare, Economy and Government since 1945
• From Beer to Fraternity: Alcohol, Society, and Culture in North America
• History in the Classroom
• Heritage Field Project

Modules shown represent choices available to current students. The range of modules available and the content of any individual module may change in future years.

Year Abroad (optional)

If you wish, you can spend your third year studying abroad at one of our partner institutions (eligibility is dependent on your academic performance in Years 1 and 2). Alternatively, you can opt to continue studying at the University and complete your degree in three years.

Studying abroad is not just for people who are interested in travelling and meeting new people. It is about acquiring life skills that are becoming increasingly significant for a wide range of jobs in our modern globalised society. Whether you go on to work in the private sector, the state sector, a non-governmental organisation or become self-employed you will find the experience invaluable. Find out more from our Study Abroad Unit.

Please note that a year spent abroad still incurs a tuition fee, but this is much lower than for a normal year at Leicester. See our Fees and Funding section for details.

English and History at Leicester have links with several European universities, administered through the Erasmus+ scheme. If you are eligible for a loan from Student Finance you can apply for a travel grant from them. Languages courses, at both beginners and advanced level, are available through the University’s Languages at Leicester scheme.

• For the latest information on the future of the Erasmus+ scheme at UK universities please see our Brexit microsite.  

We have links with the following universities:

• University of Helsinki, Finland
• Paris Diderot University - Paris 7, France
• Universität Salzburg, Austria
• Universität Heidelberg, Germany
• Universität Leipzig, Germany
• Università di Bologna, Italy
• Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
• Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands
• Universiteit Utrecht, Netherlands
• Université de Genève, Switzerland

History at Leicester also has links with Queen's University, Ontario, Canada. If you are receiving financial assistance from Student Finance your support will continue and you may also be eligible to apply for additional travel grants or scholarships.

Modules shown represent choices available to current students. The range of modules available and the content of any individual module may change in future years.

Final Year (English dissertation)

Core module

• Dissertation

Option modules

Choose one option module from:

• Crime and Punishment in African American History
• The USA and the Vietnam War
• Fourteenth Century Crisis in England? Politics and Society 1297-1413
• Disasporas and Migrations in the Modern World
• Gender, Crime and Deviance in Eighteenth Century Britain
• On Europe’s Edge: Empires and Nations in Central and Eastern Europe, 1848-1918
• From Empire to Nation: Modern South Asia, c. 1857-1947

Then choose two option modules from:

• The Imperial Economy: Britain and the Wider World, 1815-1914
• What Difference Did the War Make? British Society and the Great War, 1900-1939
• Women in American Society from the Civil War to First World War
• Clothing and Fashion in Historical Perspective. Case Studies of Modern European History in Transnational Context
• When Two Dragons Fight: China and Japan at War in the Twentieth Century
• Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, c1350-1650
• The Medieval Natural World
• Abolitionists: Antislavery Activism in Britain and America, 1787-1865

Then choose one option module from:

• What Difference Did the War Make? British Society and the Great War, 1900-1939
• Clothing and Fashion in Historical Perspective. Case Studies of Modern European History in Transnational Context
• Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, c1350-1650
• The Imperial Economy: Britain and the Wider World, 1815-1914
• Slavery in the Americas 
• Cities and the Making of Modern South Asia, c. 1750-1950  
• Food, Diet and Health in Early Modern Europe 
• When Two Dragons Fight: China and Japan at War in the Twentieth Century 
• The Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968 
• Brave New World: City, Culture and Identity in Post-War England 

Finally, choose:

• either Modern Literature and Postcolonial Britain
• or Rewriting Britain 

Modules shown represent choices available to current students. The range of modules available and the content of any individual module may change in future years.

Final Year (History dissertation)

Core module

• Dissertation

Option modules

Choose one option module from:

• Coming of Age in America: Representing Adolescence in Fiction and Film
• Forms of Modern Poetry
• The Child Writer
• Love and Death: The Novel in 19th Century Russia and France
• Feminist Fiction
• Church and State in Medieval Literature
• Writing Voices
• Criminal Women in Early Modern Literature
• Classical Worlds: Translation and Reception
• Detective Fiction from Sherlock Holmes to the Second World War
• Libertine Literature, 1660-1690
• Writing Prose Fiction
• On the Road Again: The Canterbury Tales After Chaucer
• The Living and the Dead in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture

Plus either Romanticism: Revolutionary Writing from Blake to Shelley or Victorians: from Oliver Twist to The Picture of Dorian Gray A

Plus either Rewriting Britain (double module) or Postcolonial Britain

Finally choose two option modules (if you chose module A) or one option module (if you chose double module B) from:

• Modern Monsters: Contemporary American Texts
• War, Trauma and the Novel
• American Autobiography and American Literature
• Fantasy Literature and the Middle Ages
• Woman and the Feminine in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
• Late Victorian Gothic: Texts and Contexts
• Representing the Holocaust
• The Thatcher Factor: The 1980s in Literature
• Medicine and Literature in the 19th Century
• Modern European Fiction
• Historical Fiction
• Understanding Screenplays
• Kingdoms of Ice and Snow: Exploration in Writing and Film
• Tragedy
• Clinical Encounters? Narratives of Doctors and Patients from the Victorians to the Present Day
• Green Unpleasant Land: Britain’s Colonial Countryside
• Writing for Laughs
• Language, Power and Persuasion
• Sex and Sensibility: Women, Writing, Revolution
• The Imperial Economy: Britain and the Wider World, 1815-1914
• What Difference Did the War Make? British Society and the Great War, 1900-1939
• Women in American Society from the Civil War to First World War
• Clothing and Fashion in Historical Perspective. Case Studies of Modern European History in Transnational Context
• Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, c1350-1650
• When Two Dragons Fight: China and Japan at War in the Twentieth Century
• The Medieval Natural World
• Abolitionists: Antislavery Activism in Britain and America, 1787-1865

Modules shown represent choices available to current students. The range of modules available and the content of any individual module may change in future years.