Undergraduates

The Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies is one of the largest at Warwick. There are around 40 members of staff and an undergraduate intake for the main degrees of 130 students in each year. In addition there are about 100 students per year taking joint degrees with other departments and 100 Graduate students.

The Department was founded in 1965 and is highly successful in research and teaching. Much of its work is interdisciplinary, with substantial strengths in the literary and cultural history of the Early Modern, Eighteenth-century, Romantic, Victorian and Modern periods; in work on gender and sexuality; and in various forms of cultural production, where interests both reflect the interdisciplinary character of the Faculty and respond to the general widening of literary studies so as to include contiguous fields such as film, journalism, popular culture and performance. This is the form in which the founding principle of comparativism continues to flourish, as does a tradition of close collaboration with a number of research centres and active interdisciplinary research groups within the university.

The Department was recently ranked 4th in the Guardian League Tables and we are in the Top 50 English Departments in the 2013 QS World University Rankings by Subject.

English can be studied on the following degree progammes at Warwick:

    PLEASE NOTE THAT FOR THE ABOVE DEGREES, WE PREFER TO INTERVIEW SELECTED CANDIDATES BEFORE MAKING AN OFFER. THE INTERVIEW IS TAILOR-MADE TO EACH CANDIDATE AND IS DESIGNED TO EXPLORE THE CANDIDATE'S INDIVIDUAL SUITABILITY FOR STUDY AT WARWICK. INTERVIEWS DO NOT, THEREFORE, FOLLOW A SET PATTERN. Click on the yellow box on the right hand side here to find out more about the interview.

    Use of Contextual Information in Selecting Candidates for Interview:

    As of 2012-13, we will be piloting a scheme on Q300 in which we will analyse the range of data indicators provided by UCAS in order to help identify students who have come from especially challenging and/or non-traditional backgrounds. Such students will be offered the opportunity of an interview when, in the past, they might otherwise have been filtered out in our highly selective process. (We will still expect all students to be capable of achieving AAA at A level.) This pilot is part of ongoing research into the use of contextual data, and the outcomes – which will not be fully apparent until the end of this forthcoming admissions cycle – will feed into further developments both in English and across the University. We very much hope that this will encourage more applications from talented students who have excelled in challenging circumstances and who show every sign that they would thrive in the department.

    Interview dates are normally in Janaury and February in the year of entry.

    English can also be studied on the following joint degree progammes at Warwick: