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.
Study our BA English Literature and Film & Theatre degree and explore the creative dynamics between writing and performance on the page, on the stage, and on the screen.
You will be studying in two departments (English Literature; and Film, Theatre & Television) who collaborate with each other extensively. Both have been leaders in their fields for a long time. 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.
You will learn about film from its beginnings in the late 19th century to the present day, and you will be able to learn more about everything from contemporary Hollywood to avant-garde cinema, together with new forms of digital entertainment and video art. Theatre modules present you with the opportunity to study the work of playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett. You will investigate a range of contemporary practices from popular forms of theatre to the latest performance art.
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 a huge advantage in our £11.4-million building (opened in 2011) that features three theatre spaces, a digital cinema, 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.
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 our students say that staff are good at explaining things (National Student Survey, 2021).
We place a strong emphasis on small-group learning within a friendly and supportive environment, because we believe that studying literature, cinema and theatre should be a discursive process in which 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.
Develop and hone your writing skills, and explore the complex interplay between live performance and audience, with our BA Creative Writing and Theatre course.
Taught jointly by the Department of English Literature and the Department of Film, Theatre and Television, on this course you will:
- explore your creative writing in small peer groups
- examine theatre in its various contexts: as popular entertainment, theoretical discipline and art form
- have the opportunity to develop your practical theatre skills.
Creative writing and theatre complement each other perfectly. Exploring a breadth of dramatic work and analysing creative choices will support the development of your own creative writing. Optional practical work will enhance your ability to create compelling characters and narratives.
Develop and hone your writing skills, and explore the important relationships between film and theatre, in our BA Creative Writing and Film & Theatre course.
Taught jointly by the Department of English Literature and the Department of Film, Theatre and Television, this multi-faceted course will:
- develop your creative writing in a small-group environment
- explore a variety of literary, dramatic and film texts
- provide practical and theoretical approaches to film and theatre.
Creative writing, film and theatre complement each other perfectly. Developing characters and narratives in your creative writing, and working to improve and refine them, will make you a better writer. This will enhance your ability to create compelling characters and narratives in your filmmaking and theatre work.
