Our undergraduate programmes in Comparative Literatures and Cultures offer a broad education in the discipline of Comparative Literature, while allowing you to focus on particular areas of interest from your first year of study. You will receive a comprehensive introduction to key concepts, methods, theories, and debates of Comparative Literature, working ‘hands-on’ with textual and visual sources as practical case studies. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which literary and cultural forms of expression interact with their political, historical, philosophical, and intermedial contexts.

The programme draws on the uniquely broad range of research-rich teaching in the School of Modern Languages for its core and optional courses. It also allows you to take selected units taught in other Schools in the Faculty of Arts, for example in the Department of English.

Our programme is distinctive in the breadth of artistic and communicative practices it encompasses. It covers a huge range of cultural endeavour, from individual forms of expression (novels, plays, poems and films – but also graffiti, comic books, social media, interviews, etc.) to forms of public discourse deployed by agents of power (manifestos, propaganda, advertising, etc.). It extends across periods from the classical and medieval to the urgently contemporary, with a global geographical spread. It will enable you to cross borders, establish transnational connections, and explore the transitions from a colonial to post-colonial world.

In this way, our programme is particularly well-placed to respond to changes in the global order, emerging routes of human migration, and the interconnectivity that marks the digital era. We thus prepare our students for future professional engagement with the cross-border realities of contemporary life.  

The Single Honours programme does not require any foreign-language proficiency, and all essential materials are available in English. Joint-Honours combinations with one of the languages taught to degree level in the School allow students to develop or deepen competency in a foreign language. All CLC programmes include a final-year research project that builds on the approaches and skills learned in years 1 and 2 to facilitate the production of a major piece of independent (but expertly supervised) study.

The Single-Honours Programme is a three-year BA programme. The Joint-Honours programmes are four-year BA programmes, with the third year spent in a country where the language of study is spoken.