This unique degree unites UEA’s strengths in creative writing and in drama to give you an exhilarating immersion in writing and performance.
You will have the opportunity to study all kinds of creative writing, with a particular focus on writing for theatre, cinema, television, and radio. Alongside this, you'll be exploring the contemporary practice, criticism, and history of dramatic writing and performance. Your writing will be enriched by an awareness of theatrical and literary traditions from around the globe.
You’ll take practical drama modules, and you’ll have full access to our professionally equipped 200-seat Drama Studio. This comprehensive grounding in acting, directing, and all other aspects of stagecraft will enable you to graduate from this drama and creative writing degree as a writer with an instinctive feel for the world of theatre and performing arts.
Offering an exhilarating immersion in all aspects of theatre, this drama course combines a comprehensive grounding in acting, directing, theatre-making, and practical stagecraft with the thoughtful and inventive study of plays and performances.
You’ll explore a range of theatre and performance practices from around the world, combining theoretical and historical knowledge with practical exploration and skills in all elements of theatre-making. Throughout your drama degree, you’ll learn from practising directors, scriptwriters, and theatre-makers, alongside academic experts in theatre and performance.
Once you graduate, your BA Drama degree will open the doors of the theatre world to you – or you might choose to take all the skills you've learnt to any number of careers across the creative industries and beyond.
This distinctive, flexible and varied degree combines the study of English literature with workshop-based practical theatre work, allowing you to explore performance from both creative and critical perspectives.
You’ll study literatures in English from the medieval to the contemporary period, exploring richly diverse literary texts across different genres, including fiction, poetry and drama. You’ll be equipped with the knowledge and skills to understand literature in the context of a variety of historical periods, places and cultures. Reading and understanding literature can help us to find out about ourselves and see the world from other perspectives. Through engaging with different kinds of texts from across the globe and from different periods of history, you can learn how language reflects and shapes human experience. Literature modules explore themes relevant to how we live today, including race and ethnicity, gender, climate change and nature, social class, disability, and wellbeing.
You will also develop your skills as an artist-researcher through practical workshops led by our own theatre specialists. With compulsory and specialist optional modules spanning theatre, performance, applied theatre, design, digital performance, directing, musical theatre, event management, acting and collaborative practice, you’ll be able to follow a broad range of interests suited to your own academic and professional development.
Throughout your degree, you’ll learn through a combination of seminars, lectures, workshops, practical experimentation and working with both specialist and readily available digital technologies. This degree encourages you to integrate your literary and theatrical interests through a wide range of literature, theatre, and performance options. It provides you with a challenging and rewarding opportunity to combine ambitious, collaborative practical projects with rigorous critical thinking. You’ll develop your skills as a critical reader and a persuasive writer, while reflecting upon the impact that performance has on cultures and societies across the world. You'll become an advocate of the creative arts, developing collaborative, creative, critical thinking and project management skills that will benefit you in a wide range of careers.
Graduates in English and Theatre & Performance have progressed to a wide variety of career destinations, including professional theatre and media, publishing, writing, events management, marketing and business, as well as further academic study.
Explore drama, literature, performance and theatre history
Our English and Drama MA offers an exciting opportunity to specialise in the study of drama, theatre and literary studies.
In this course, you will primarily study dramatic texts and the history of theatre, working with leading experts in Shakespeare and early modern drama, theatre history, and modern performance theory and practice. You can also choose from a wide range of optional modules across the field of literary studies, combining your interest in drama with topics including postcolonial and world literature, and critical and cultural theory.
You have the choice of completing a research dissertation on a topic of your choice, or alternatively, taking up a professional placement or an extended practical project. These can help you develop your professional network and practical skills for the future career you have in mind.
You will enjoy easy access to the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, and major theatres in Coventry, Leicester and Birmingham. On campus, Warwick Arts CentreLink opens in a new window, the largest of its kind outside London, is visited by companies of international standing specialising in both the established repertoire and new work.
Our warm and vibrant research community is one of the largest in the UK, with around 110 postgraduates every year. We also offer funding for postgraduate study, and career development support during your time here.
By the end of the course, you'll be well-positioned for further study or employment with the transferable skills you will develop.
This BA English Literature and Theatre degree enables you to explore a broad range of topics across English literature and theatre, as well as areas where the two subjects overlap.
You will be studying in two departments (English Literature; and Film, Theatre & Television) who collaborate with each other extensively. English Literature was one of the first university departments in the UK to study American and Canadian authors like Margaret Atwood, and we continue this tradition with a curriculum that includes the best of contemporary writing in English from around the globe. The Department of Film, Theatre & Television pioneered the study of film in UK higher education, and we continue to lead in the range and breadth of the modules we offer.
The theatre component of your degree focuses on performance, and so we investigate plays in a variety of settings. You will make regular trips to performances in Reading and London, and will investigate a range of contemporary practices including site specific work and examples of digital technologies in live performance. We study twentieth and twenty-first century dramatists, such as Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett. Our teaching is a dynamic mix of theory and practice, and optional modules that include group-based practical projects are available for those who enjoy practice-based study.
We have state-of-the-art facilities, including three theatre spaces, a dedicated recording studio and a mixing suite. You will have access to a studio with a flexible lighting system, multi-camera facilities, a talk-back system and Chroma key and a studio gallery linked to the theatres for live filming and mixing work. We provide industry standard software and support from dedicated technicians, and all spaces are equipped with state-of-the-art multimedia equipment and lighting. Over 100 performances, films, and television programmes are created in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television each year, meaning that there are plenty of opportunities for you to develop your technical or performance skills on an extra-curricular basis.
In your English Literature modules, you will encounter authors and genres that you may already know (from tragedy to Gothic, from Shakespeare and Dickens to Plath and Beckett). You will also explore aspects of literary studies that may be less familiar to you, from children’s literature to publishing studies and the history of the book. Our lecturers and professors have published research on everything from medieval poetry to contemporary Caribbean and American fiction so you will be learning from experts in the field. Everyone in our departments, from new lecturers to professors, teaches at every level of the degree, so you are learning from experts as soon as you begin your first year. 96% of students agreed that our staff are good at explaining things in the Department of English Literature (The National Student Survey, 2021).
We place a strong emphasis on small-group learning within a friendly and supportive environment, because we believe that the study of literature and theatre is a discursive process where we learn by sharing ideas. We provide detailed and thorough feedback on your written work within 15 working days: this is crucial to your development as a writer, whether you intend a career in creative or professional writing.
