Literature offers us an opportunity of understanding life and each other and gives us access to a wealth of human insight and imaginative terrains. Stories are told through poetry, drama and prose. These stories allow us to express ourselves to each other as individuals and as communities and enable us to come to an understanding of the moment in which we live, the past and diverse cultures, ideas and experience. In looking at the way in which a work of literature is written, we can learn to appreciate style and the connection between what the story says and the way in which it is told. Central to the aims of the School of English is the promotion and development in our students of independent critical and creative thinking and an appreciation of the aesthetic. It is through their engagement with literature that students acquire the critical tools with which to read text and develop their fluency and skills in language and expression.

English is also a ‘hinge’ subject in the expanded Bachelor of Arts (Joint Honours) programme, and enhances the capacity of the faculty to provide a unique combination of new and established disciplines, different from that offered by any other institution in the state at undergraduate level.

At postgraduate level, the school is building on its current MA provision, its centres of excellence (the Centre for Research in Children’s and Young Adult Literature, and the Centre for Poetry Studies), and developing its doctoral programme and establishing research conduits between existing schools in the faculty.