Criminology and English Literature BA (Hons)

Oxford Brookes University

Overview

Our joint honours course allows students to pursue their own areas of interest within Criminology and English Literature whilst also providing them with a solid foundation in the discipline and a range of personal and professional skills which will serve as a springboard for their future career development. The programme is carefully designed to enable students to gradually develop their knowledge and skills and to become autonomous, effective and independent learners.

Criminology is a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary subject concerned with analysing the nature, occurrence and explanations of crime, criminal behaviour and societal responses to these phenomena. English Literature offers students the opportunity to study British and world literatures through a model of progressive specialisation that teaches advanced literary critical skills in the context of periodised, thematised, formal and theoretical modules.

Learning and assessment

In your first year, you’ll develop key academic skills that will help you succeed in the course. We’ll also ask some big questions like, What is crime? Why do some people commit crime, but not others? You’ll build the core skills and understanding you need for undergraduate literary studies with modules in critical theory and global literatures.

In your second year, core modules help you learn to challenge the status quo - how might capitalism encourage crime? Where and why are there inequalities in the criminal justice system? You’ll broaden and deepen your knowledge of literature in relation to movements and cultures past and present. You’ll begin to specialise, following your own interests.

In your final year, you’ll have the freedom to focus on what you care about most, including your dissertation subject. Optional modules can include topics like the pleasures of crime, visual criminology, queer criminology, drugs, or policing. You can explore literary topics like urbanisation, utopian societies, artificial intelligence, sustainability or even witchcraft.