BA Classics and English

Course Overview

You can choose to specialise in what you find most interesting from each side of the course, taking a range of options in English literature, and in ancient literature, history, philosophy, and linguistics. But the degree also integrates the two sides of its course, offering several papers designed specifically for the kind of comparative work that the course encourages. In the first year (second, for Course II), students take a paper in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the period during which writers were most consistently and intensely engaged with the languages and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome. Among the highlights of the latter two years are the four ‘link papers’: all students take Epic, and read and compare authors such as Homer, Virgil, Milton, Alice Oswald, and Derek Walcott; and then choose to take either Comedy, Tragedy, or Reception (in which you study the reception of ancient literature in 20th-century poetry). (Students who choose to take up a second classical language in their second (third for Course II) year only take Epic.) The final-year dissertation allows students to pursue an independently devised topic with an expert supervisor, which may combine the subjects or focus on an aspect of one of them. All of the courses allow students to pursue the twists and turns of literary genres across time.

General Eligibility

Part Time Work Details

Language Requirement

• The minimum IELTS score required is 7