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BA English (with Integrated Foundation Year)

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Here's what you need in order to apply:

  1. Royal Holloway's institution code: R72
  2. Make a note of the UCAS code for the course you want to apply for:

    • BA English (with Integrated Foundation Year) - Q30F
    • English - Q300
  3. Click on the link below to apply via the UCAS website:
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BA English (with Integrated Foundation Year)

Course options

Key information

Duration: 4 years full time

UCAS code: Q30F

Institution code: R72

Campus: Egham

Key information

Duration: 3 years full time

UCAS code: Q300

Institution code: R72

Campus: Egham

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The course

BA English (with Integrated Foundation Year)

This course is available to Home (UK) students and students from the EU who meet the English Language requirements.

Our Integrated Foundation Year for Arts and Humanities is a thorough, skills-building course that will give you everything you need to start your study of BA English with confidence. 

Arts and Humanities subjects, like English, provide key ways of understanding our complex world, its histories, and current debates facing contemporary society. Identity, political and social conflict, our interaction with new digital and genetic technologies, our stewardship of the environment are all issues where the voice of creative and critical thinking are key. Literary texts, films, plays and digital games offer important ways in which societies have debated - and continue to represent - their values and their futures. 

Our Foundation Year sets you up so you’re ready to explore those debates and issues, providing you with opportunities to gain knowledge and understanding of how to approach studying the humanities, including your chosen degree subject. Learning from friendly, expert tutors, you’ll explore modules designed to give you a solid start to your study of arts and humanities subjects, helping you to grow critical skills to explore a range of literary, visual, and cultural forms, including plays, films, and digital media.  

Once you have completed your Foundation year, you will normally progress onto the full degree course, BA English. There may also be flexibility to move onto a degree in another department (see end of section, below). 

BA English allows you to choose from a diverse and extensive range of modules, covering works across time, cultures, genres and geographies. Offering more than 40 modules from across a thousand years of English, American and global literature, English at Royal Holloway is a particularly wide-ranging subject which allows you to develop your passions, debate cutting-edge ideas, and to pursue, if you wish, your own creative writing.

The flexibility of this course encourages discovery. We have expertise in all the major literary periods and you will encounter many new literary worlds and new ways of understanding familiar ones, from the Knights of the Round Table to contemporary literature on global questions like migration or the environment. Most importantly, you will discover your own voice as a writer in an environment which places particular value on independence of mind and intellectual creativity. We are also proud of our educational expertise, offering small group teaching, a special programme of study that introduces you to university level study when you join us, and individual attention at all stages of your degree. We want to ensure that you are confident, happy and academically successful.

Studying at one of the UK's most dynamic English departments allows you to develop a strong understanding of key periods, genres, authors, and critical concepts. After a first year which gives you firm foundations, you can choose from a huge range of options both innovative and traditional: for example, Drama and Witchcraft, Sensation Fiction, World War I Poetry, Science Fiction, Children's Literature, African-American Literature, the Girl in the Book, Queer History as well as courses on the Medieval period, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, Eighteenth-century and Victorian literatures, Modernism and Postmodernism. In your third year, you can write a dissertation on a specialist subject of your own choice.

You will be taught by nationally and internationally known scholars who write prize-winning books, talk or write in the national media, or advise cultural bodies like Liberty or the Charles Dickens Museum. Outside the vibrant community of the English department, you can take courses in other departments, and even opt to study abroad for a year.

On successful completion of your Foundation Year, you may be able to choose an alternative pathway which could include Single Honours English, joint or minor degree with English (except pathways with Creative Writing), or degrees within the Humanities (History, Drama, Media Arts, Classics, Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Culture, Liberal Arts).  If you'd like to do this, you may take your Foundation Year Department Based Project in one of the other departments in Humanities.

From time to time, we make changes to our courses to improve the student and learning experience. If we make a significant change to your chosen course, we’ll let you know as soon as possible.

4th

in the UK for creative writing

Source: Complete University Guide, 2024

Top 20

in the UK for research quality

Source: Complete University Guide, 2024

96%

say staff make the subject engaging

Source: National Student Survey, 2023 (Creative Writing)

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