Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Philosophy and English Language (with Sandwich Year)

at University of Hertfordshire - De Havilland Campus United Kingdom

Study English Literature with us and we’ll help you grow from passionate reader into critical thinker and literary scholar.

You’ll be taught by research-active academics who bring fresh thinking to our accessible, engaging courses. This means you’ll study literature written in English by writers from all parts of the globe, whose voices are relevant and important in our modern world.

We’ll introduce you to writers who will open doors to contemporary worlds and cultures remote from your own, and also help you explore more familiar literature in ways that challenge your preconceptions.

Whatever your taste in literature, our courses will interest and provoke you. From The Tiger Who Came to Tea to Jane Eyre, from Paradise Lost to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, we’ll broaden your literary horizons and hone your critical thinking.

A core module in your first year will equip you to read and interpret both traditional and contemporary literary texts critically as a scholar of English literature. Alongside this you can choose to study international and American literature or revisit Shakespeare and consider his cultural relevance today through fictional, cinematic and TV adaptations.

In your second year you’ll focus on period-based literature from the Renaissance onwards and gain an understanding of literary history, from Elizabethan verse and drama, via Augustan poetry and the emergence of the novel in the 18th century, to the radical transformations of the Victorian age, and the emergence of modernity in the 20th century. You’ll also have the opportunity to consider ways of reading that go beyond textual analysis or historical context, such as understanding literature through the political or ideological lens of Marxism, feminism and post-colonial theory.

You’ll have the chance to specialise in your final year, tailoring your degree to reflect your own interests. Themed options include children’s literature, young adult fiction, Renaissance tragedy, 21st century American literature, European crime fiction, literary adaptations and the culture of print in the 18th century.

If you have a particular interest or independent research idea you can choose to work with a supervisor to write an extended dissertation. Previous dissertations have focused on subjects as diverse as anthropomorphism in Beatrix Potter’s animal tales; Black British identity in young adult fiction and grime music; women in Shakespearean tragedy; and slavery and the frontier in early American gothic short stories.

The MSc Management is designed to provide you with a multidisciplinary approach to management. Upon graduation, you’ll be equipped with the personal and professional skills needed to be competent and successful managers in modern businesses.

You’ll develop a strong foundation of understanding of the role of management and its implementation across different industries. From developing an understanding of the role of management in the wider international economy, to the responsibilities of management to society, sustainability, and the planet, you’ll explore management from a range of perspectives.

Sustainability is becoming increasingly important to businesses as consumers become more conscious of their impact on the environment. Businesses are required to balance the need for transparency in the choices they make, while considering the needs of the business. Throughout the course, you’ll explore the key challenges of sustainable decision-making and the importance of managing relationships with communities, society and the environment. You’ll learn to bring together a range of business practices, knowledge and skills, and apply them to develop sustainable business activities.

So, whether you’re a graduate looking for a broad management qualification, or a professional who is looking to progress into management through a formal qualification, the MSc Management will provide you with an exciting learning journey.

Data is the currency of all but the most theoretically-based scientific research, and it also underpins our modern world, from the flow of data across international banking networks and the spread of memes across social networks, to the complex models of weather forecasting. The constant generation of data from our digital society feeds into our everyday lives, affecting how we receive healthcare to influencing our shopping habits. In order to handle, make sense of, and exploit large volumes of available data requires highly skilled human insight, analysis and visualisation. The professionals working in this field are called ‘data scientists’, who blend advanced mathematical and statistical skills with programming, database design, machine learning, modelling, simulation and innovative data visualisation. These professionals are in high demand in both public and private sectors in the UK and worldwide. This programme aims and learning outcomes are built around two guiding principles:

• To provide comprehensive understanding of the fundamental mathematical and statistical concepts underlying data science, and how they are implemented in algorithms and machine learning techniques to solve a variety of data processing and analysis problems.
• To provide training in the practical skills relevant to data science, central of which is the ability to write clean and efficient code in industry-recognised languages (in particular, Python and R), but also includes data handling, manipulation, mining and visualisation techniques.

Why choose this course?

• This programme is distinctive in its philosophy of widening participation and provides a route to gain skills and training in data science to those from a background not traditionally associated with the STEM-themes of mathematics, statistics and programming. The programme is designed to be appealing to a broad range of students who are seeking training or up-skilling in data science.
• You will benefit from the expertise of astrophysicists, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists with international research profiles. Their day-to-day research involves application of, and in some cases the development of new, data science skills, from fundamental statistical analyses, the use of distributed high-performance computing, and research into novel artificial intelligence algorithms.
• We aim to make the programme distinctive in terms of the mixture of hard and soft skills, and the close personal relationship that we are developing with employers, which will feed into the programme through continuous assessment of the latest industry-relevant tools, which are continually evolving as new technology and software becomes available.
• You will experience a multidisciplinary approach to data science by experiencing challenges in computer science, creative arts, medical and business environments.
• You will have the opportunity to attend a wide range of research-focused seminars to excite and spark your intellectual curiosity.

The MSc Sustainable Planning is delivered in the Ebenezer Howard School of Planning, reflecting our unique location in the county which houses the world’s first garden cities and our focus on exploring the contemporary planning implications of this placemaking patrimony.

Planning plays a key role to play in improving the condition of life in our towns, cities and rural areas. Towns and cities themselves impact on global sustainability and can play a very influential role in tackling global environmental, social and economic problems.

The breadth of material covered will give you the skills you need in order to meet contemporary sustainability challenges in planning cities and rural areas. The planning system provides one of the most sophisticated mechanisms for regulating environmental change, global environmental, social and economic problems and implementing sustainability principles.

You’ll benefit from a wide range of modules, from Planning Law, Policy and Practice to Sustainable Energy and Urban Design and Conservation. You'll choose between three pathways: MSc Sustainable Planning, MSc Sustainable Planning and Environmental Management and MSc Sustainable Planning and Transport.

This program offers you opportunities to gain valuable skills in a much needed and fast changing professional area and makes you highly employable in a diverse range of disciplines which will allow you to contribute to the creation of more sustainable urban environments.

A degree in English Literature and Journalism will help you grow from passionate reader into a critical thinker and literary scholar; it will also develop your practical, professional writing skills, shed new light on how the media works, and get you some hands-on experience that employers are really looking for.

On a degree in English Literature and Journalism, we’ll introduce you to writers who will open doors to contemporary worlds and cultures remote from your own, and also help you explore more familiar literature in ways that challenge your preconceptions. This means you’ll study literature written in English by writers from all parts of the globe, whose voices are relevant and important in our modern world. You’ll also develop your journalistic skills in exciting ways: you’ll learn the different requirements of writing ‘news’ and ‘features’, while learning how to carry out research, conduct interviews, and structure your writing in order to get published.

You’ll be taught by academic staff who bring fresh thinking to our accessible, engaging courses. Some are active researchers of international standing who bring their own passion for their discipline into the classroom; others are dynamic teachers with extensive industry experience.

Whatever your taste in literature, there will be something to interest and provoke you. From The Tiger Who Came to Tea to Jane Eyre, from Paradise Lost to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, we’ll broaden your literary horizons and hone your critical thinking.

A core Literature module in your first year will equip you to read and interpret both traditional and contemporary literary texts critically as a scholar of English literature. Alongside this you can choose to revisit Shakespeare and consider his cultural relevance today through fictional, cinematic and TV adaptations; or to deepen your understanding of Gothic writing by tracing its origins back to the Romantic era.

In your second year you’ll focus on period-based literature from the Renaissance onwards and gain an understanding of literary history, from Elizabethan verse and drama, via Augustan poetry and the emergence of the novel in the 18th century, to the radical transformations of the Victorian age, and the emergence of modernity in the twentieth century. You’ll also have the opportunity to consider ways of reading that go beyond textual analysis or historical context, such as understanding literature through the political or ideological lens of Marxism, feminism and post-colonial theory.

You’ll have the chance to specialise in your final year, tailoring your literary study to reflect your own interests. Themed options include children’s literature, young adult fiction, Renaissance tragedy, European crime fiction, literary adaptations and the culture of print in the 18th century.

Your study of English Literature will enhance your ability to analyse and synthesise complex ideas, and to express yourself clearly in both written and spoken English. These skills will be hugely beneficial to your study of Journalism, but this part of your course will extend your range far beyond just print media. As the course progresses, you’ll discover how journalism varies across video, radio and the internet, hear from inspiring industry guest speakers, and take placements in real newsrooms.

Our BA English Language and Literature enables you to combine your study of the structure, development and use of English as a world language with your reading of literature written in English from all parts of the globe.

You’ll be taught by research-active academics who bring fresh thinking to our accessible, engaging courses. We’ll introduce you to writers who will open doors to contemporary worlds and cultures remote from your own, and also help you explore more familiar literature in ways that challenge your preconceptions.

You’ll enrich your study of English literature in its cultural and historical contexts through modules on the history of the English language. You’ll balance your reading of poetry and drama with analyses of how language is used in the media, to inform or persuade. The common link between the two disciplines will be your analysis of language and how it operates in literature and in real life.

A core module in your first year will equip you to read and interpret both traditional and contemporary literary texts critically as a scholar of English literature. You’ll also be introduced to English Linguistics, the scientific study of our language, from how language develops in children, to the ways it reflects society and how it changes over time.

Your second-year core modules will focus on English grammar and the sounds of English, and you’ll also study period-based literature from the Renaissance onwards, gaining an understanding of literary history, from Elizabethan verse and drama to the emergence of modernity in the 20 th century. A core module in English Literature will introduce you to a range of theoretical lenses which you can apply to your further study of texts.

You’ll have the chance to specialise in your final year, tailoring your degree to reflect your own interests. English Literature options include children’s literature, young adult fiction, 21 st century American literature and literary adaptations, amongst others.

Alongside these, a module on Corpus Studies in English Language will allow you to bring your literature and language interests together. Using Sketch Engine, a text analysis tool that enables you to search vast databases of language, you’ll be able to search literary texts to identify how particular words have been used in novels or literature. With more than 15 billion words available to you, you’ll be able to ask questions no one has asked before and pursue uniquely creative research projects.

Do you have a story to tell, or have you always wanted to be a writer? Perhaps you want to learn how to be a critical reader or gain a greater understanding of the craft of writing.
Studying English Literature and Creative Writing with us will help you find your voice, whether as a poet, playwright, novelist or scholar of literature.
This joint course combines the study of literature with the practice of creative writing. Studying literature will give you a greater understanding of how literary texts work, while this improved critical insight will help you put principles into practice in your own creative writing.

We offer a stimulating and supportive place in which to explore your ideas, hone your craft and understand literary texts. Our creative writing modules are taught by lecturers who are themselves award-winning practitioners and who bridge the gap between creative and academic approaches to literature. They include our poetry lecturer Wayne Holloway-Smith, winner of the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and Seamus Heaney Prize nominee.

Over the three years you can choose specialist creative writing modules in poetry, creative non-fiction, drama, short story writing and prose fiction. Those specialisms are reflected in our English Literature modules, which range from children’s and young adult literature to film adaptations and work written in English from all over the world.

By the time you graduate, you will have a polished piece of work which has the potential for publication. Recent successes for our students include short stories published in Bandit and AnotherLenz magazines and poetry published in Rising and international magazine Poetry London.
In your first year, an underpinning core module, Becoming a Writer, will introduce you to genres and forms and examine the universalities of dialogue, plot and language. A second core module, Identity and Contemporary Writing, introduces you to some of the most exciting new writing as a model for your own work, while an optional module enables you to specialise in writing for the screen.
The practicalities of getting published or working in literary publishing are explored in a creative writing module in your second year taught by a former editor of Granta, the renowned magazine of new writing. For your final year your particular creative interest can be channelled into a long piece of writing, which can be poetry, prose or drama.

The recently revalidated and updated BA(Hons) Music Industry Management degree introduces students to a wide range of subjects relevant to today’s music industry. This degree covers business topics such as accounting, law, marketing, strategy, small business and entrepreneurship alongside key industry topics such as the live industry, the changing digital environment, international markets and will look at the different genres that make up what we know as popular music. An exciting aspect of the newly revamped programme offers students the opportunity to focus on areas of particular interest in their second year of study such as song writing, production, live music promotion and A&R. Delivered by a hugely experienced team of lecturers, all of whom have wide-ranging industry experience, the Music Industry Management (MIM) degree course is renowned throughout the UK music industry for helping develop the artist managers, live music professionals , entrepreneurs and record & music publishing executives of the future.

• The University of Hertfordshire’s BA(Hons) Music Industry Management programme pride ourselves on our Music Industry links through the lecturers, guest speakers and alumni. We engage with Industry through guest speakers in lectures, alumni / current student networking events, Masterclasses and placements (including Universal Music Group and Domino Records).
• Students rated satisfaction with academic support at 86% and satisfactory with resources at 86% in the 2017/18 NSS.
• Our graduates go on to work for a wide range of organisations across the Industry from major labels such as Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment to independent labels such as Hospital Records and Domino Records as well as organisations such as Kobalt, Global Media, Live Nation, AEG, The Orchard, PPL and Creative Artists Agency (CAA) as well as setting up their own businesses.

The aim of the Fine Art programme is to equip you with the skills, knowledge and understanding required to practice at an advanced level, to foster your creativity and enhance your employment opportunities. You will work alongside artists and designers and benefit from contributions from visiting artists, designers, makers, as well as from involvement with our international exhibitions programme and gallery environment. This is the perfect opportunity to develop your individual creative practice and place it within the wider professional context of fine art.

You will work with other students to explore and challenge the boundaries of your practice and, through discussion, explore some of the key ideas that inform contemporary fine art practice. We strongly encourage conceptual experimentation and development of originality in use of materials to explore possibilities and realise the potential of your ideas. Seminars, research methods and debates will help you to advance, as well as technical skills.

Our staff are experienced in research and professional practice, and you will also benefit from contributions from visiting artists, designers, makers and other arts and design professionals, as well as from involvement with our international exhibitions programme and gallery environment. 

 Induction, seminars and social events for students and staff mean that you will be part of a friendly and supportive postgraduate community, which also includes film makers, musicians and professionals working in new media. Senior research staff and internationally renowned artists work with postgraduate students, helping you to develop original and challenging work.

Social workers help people to live more successfully within their local communities by helping them find solutions to their problems. To succeed, social workers must work not only with clients but their families and friends as well as working closely with other organisations including the police, National Health Service, and schools.

During our two-year MSc programme you will learn the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in the social worker role. In your first year of study you will undertake modules which provide core knowledge about social work purpose, practice, and impact, human growth and development, and the policy and legislation which underpins practice. Additionally, you will learn the key methods, interventions, and skills for working with diverse communities and service users.

The second year of teaching builds on this to explore the research evidence and practice relating to a range of social work settings and collaborative and interprofessional working to assess and manage risks and vulnerability. The programme culminates in the writing of a dissertation on a topic area in which you are especially interested.

This academic learning is complemented by two placement blocks totalling 170 days in contrasting settings and 30 days of classroom-based skill development.

Why choose this course?

• Social work is a regulated profession. The MSc Social Work programme leads to eligibility to apply to the Social Work England Register and practice as a social worker in England;
• An emphasis on small group practice prepares you for practice in a modern multi-professional workforce;
• Interactive learning in and out of the classroom will help you to understand concepts fully;
• Academic teaching is supported by social work practitioners from the newly constituted Teaching Partnership with Hertfordshire County Council and the Tavistock and Portman Foundation Trust, service users, and carers enabling you to link theory to practice throughout the programme.
• A distinct feature of the programme is an emphasis on the development of knowledge and skills through reflective practice.