Subject Areas

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Single, Joint or Combined Honours degrees

If you wish to specialise in more than one subject area, then a Joint or Combined Honours degree could be for you. This type of degree is designed to give you a breadth of choice over a wide range of subject areas.

More about Joint and Combined Honours degrees

Course details

Download detailed module guides for all of the Humanities subject areas below:

What are the Humanities?

The humanities disciplines study culture. Some subjects, such as history, literature and philosophy, date back to antiquity, while others, such as film, study more recent culture. What they all have in common is interpretation.

It can take considerable skill and effort to find, gather and use the background information needed to interpret a difficult work. These are among the characteristic skills of humanities graduates.

The chief benefit of studying a humanities degree is the pleasure of discovering varieties of culture that are new to you. Humans create new cultures all the time, and these are all legitimate objects of study for humanities students.You will also enjoy the sensation of becoming more skilled and sophisticated in your interpretations. Final year students are often surprised at how far they have come when they look back at what they wrote at level one.

A humanities degree will help you to support your conclusions with arguments, reasons and evidence. That is why a humanities education is valued by employers looking for 'well-rounded' graduates with leadership potential.

Above all, a humanities degree can ignite a life-long interest and pleasure in literature, theatre, history or any of the typical pastimes of educated people. A humanities education opens to you recreations that you might not have known about. All culture becomes richer and more intriguing the more you learn about it. An education is not just for a better job, it is for a better life.

Information on Part Time Student Study

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To read well-that is, to read true books in a true spirit-is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem... Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Henry David Thoreaufrom Walden (1854)