Communications and English BA (Hons)

Core modules

Explorations in Identity and Selfhood

This module looks at a range of psychological and sociological theories of identity and selfhood.  Starting with our common sense understandings and a focus on 'personality', it moves out towards more radical theories and arguments, which see identities as more contingent and de-centred.

Rebel Literatures

Inspired by Nottingham’s status as a UNESCO City of Literature renowned for its ‘rebel writers’, this second-year core module explores how a spirit of rebellion has animated literary creativity over the past 150 years. From the fights for educational rights advanced by the New Woman authors of the late C19th to the voices of early C21st activist poets, this module invites you to consider the bold arguments advanced by authors at the forefront of cultural change. It includes the exciting opportunity to explore unique materials from the rich archives of radical literature held across Nottingham.

Transformation: Agency and World

What purpose do the humanities serve in today's society? How can the humanities help in the process of "healing and securing our planet" and "freeing the human race from poverty" as stated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development of the United Nations?

This module focuses on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and encourages you to develop your awareness of how your own field of study as well as cross- and inter-disciplinary actions can result in real, quantifiable change. Alongside a personal reflective portfolio, you will share your knowledge and understanding developed through the module to produce a news reel of how a contemporary sustainability goal relates to your discipline.

In this module you will either undertake an 80 hour placement, supported by the Arts and Humanities employability team, or will engage in an 80 hour project, responding to a supplied employer brief  and producing a solution to the brief given.

Optional pathways

Pathway 1: Extended work-like experience

Get the experience you need for after you graduate, and really understand how the things you study translate into the world of work with a work placement. Your highly experienced Employability Team will help you find a placement to suit your career goals from our huge network of companies, charities, institutions, and beyond.

Pathway 2: An international exchange

Travel the world, meet new friends, and have experiences you will remember for the rest of your life.

Our flexible curriculum has been designed to allow some amazing opportunities for you. Your second year of study is divided into two semesters, giving you the opportunity to take part in an international exchange. You could study with one of international exchange partners in Australia, Europe, USA, Canada, Thailand and many, many more.

Our dedicated team will support you in finding and arranging a suitable exchange. And don't worry about the cost, they will help you apply for any grants or loans you may need, as no one should miss out on the chance to broaden their horizons.

Pathway 3: Taught modules

Interdisciplinary optional modules typically include:

Intercultural Communication at Work

Gain the knowledge, skills and strategies to build your intercultural communication competence. Analyse and reflect on the impact of culture(s) on your values, assumptions, perceptions, expectations, and behaviours. Build successful verbal and non-verbal communication strategies in different intercultural settings.

People and Planet: pasts, presents, and futures

In this module you will develop an understanding of the human impact on the environment from the 15th Century to the present as a form of slow but sustained violence enacted against the planet. It will also explore how such long-term change can interact with social justice in the present day.

Rhetoric and Public Communication

You will develop the theoretical knowledge and practical skills required to become an effective communicator in both face-to-face and online contexts. It will provide you with a thorough grounding in the theory and techniques of classical rhetoric, as well as the latest social-psychological theories of rhetoric and their application. You will also be introduced to theories of political communication, propaganda and the psychology of leadership

English optional modules typically include:

Imagining the Sustainable World

We live in an era of significant challenges to the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants – from climate change, water pollution and energy shortages, to poverty, gender inequality and conflict. In this moment of crisis, this module will examine how writing from a range of eras and genres might offer insights, warnings, possibilities, sources of hope, and solutions to contemporary problems.

Women's Writing and the Literary Marketplace

On this module you will read short stories, novels, and poetry by British women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, a period of significant historical changes affecting the lives of women. You will develop an understanding of historical contexts relevant to this literature, including changes relating to education and professions for women; romance, marriage and motherhood; the home and domesticity; queer sexuality and the single woman; class inequality, and interwar anti-fascist and anti-racist movements. You will also gain valuable research skills using a digital database of interwar magazines which provide insight into the wider literary marketplace of this period.

Shakespeare and Co.

Shakespeare was born in 1564 and so his life was coincident with the rise of the brand new, state of the art, professional theatre. On this module we'll explore these cutting-edge plays in a context of rapid social change and religious and political uncertainty.  We’ll introduce you to playwrights of the period, their dramatic techniques, reception, critical and theatrical history and we'll also consider modern spin-offs of their plays – film versions and modern retellings.  Topics covered will include colonialism, religious difference, sex and gender, nation and ethnicity, selfhood.

Black Writing in Britain

Bernardine Evaristo was the first Black British writer to win the Booker Prize, in 2019, more than seventy years after Sam Selvon and George Lamming moved to Britain in what is known as the Windrush migration, in 1948. This module reads novels, poetry and short stories from 1948 to the present day, to consider how to define Black Writing in Britain, and assess its relationship with the publishing industry. Students undertake committed, contextualised close reading of experimental literary texts and prioritise what they detect as important trends, patterns, concerns, and events, as we ask ‘what is Black Writing in Britain?’.

Contemporary Working-Class Writing

What characterises ‘working-class writing’? How has the working class in Britain been represented in literature since 1950? Is there still a class structure in Britain? Texts on this module consider a variety of forms (novels, plays, short stories, poetry and non-fiction) to develop an understanding of the intersections between social class and gender, sexuality, ethnicity and place. We gain insights into modern and contemporary social and cultural history and heritage as we explore aspects of the following: concepts of ‘Britishness’, culture clash and class structures, social (im)mobility, poverty, family, immigration, economic depression, strikes, regional writing and radical print culture.

Communications optional modules typically include:

Journalism and PR: Critiques and Practice

This module explores the new ways of working and new modes of creativity in today's economy. Ranging across the fields of advertising, PR and journalism, you’ll interrogate the economic, psychological and sociological coordinates of the new forms of communication and media technology used in those industries, and you’ll examine the new types of creativity which have arisen as a result.

Media, Communication and Culture in East Asia

This module provides an insight into contemporary media development and cultural change in East Asia, placing this in the context of broader historical, economic and cultural debates. It will examine a wide range of media forms including print media, broadcasting, film and new media technologies, assessing their cultural impact in East Asian societies. It will explore contemporary issues of media development and policy and it will relate these to longer historical contexts.

Gender and Sexuality

Gender’ and ‘sexuality’ are familiar terms; however, they are also highly complex and contested. This module examines the ways these concepts have been theorised from a range of academic perspectives - including psychoanalysis, cultural history and feminist theory. It also orientates around three central questions: i) what is the substance of gender? ii) how do we become gendered? and iii) why do masculinity and femininity take the forms that they do and how do they change over time?

Core module

Major project

You have the choice of writing a Critical Dissertation, a practical Dissertation, or Staff-Student Research Project Pathway:

The Dissertation

The Critical Dissertation represents a unique opportunity in your degree to explore a subject over a sustained period of time and in depth. You will be able to choose a topic in which you have a special interest, whether or not it is covered by other modules on offer, to get to grips with it, to read around it and to produce an argument of your own. You will also have the chance to discuss your ideas with your dissertation supervisor, perhaps in a more systematic and specialised way than in the seminar and tutorial discussions you have already experienced.

The Practical Dissertation

As an alternative to the critical dissertation, you may wish to do a creative project supported by a extensive essay. For example you may produce a specialist podcast or blog series, host a showcase or networking event, write a screen play, or produce a series of video essays.

Staff-Student Research Project Pathway

Staff-Student Research Project Pathway: this alternative major project assigns the student to a member of staff's research project, providing them with research aims and questions. The student works with the staff member to produce original research on the topic, culminating in a written project detailing findings and analysis.

Transformation: Agency and Social Change

In this module, you will engage in a 'live partnership' with a cultural festival that is designed to deliver social change through the Arts and Humanities: the Counterpoints-run initiative, Refugee Week. Over the course of the module, you will gain insight into the sociocultural challenges faced by refugees in the C21st, and will explore the work of Counterpoints Arts as an organisation that seeks to address those challenges via cultural activity. Drawing on these insights, you will work in interdisciplinary teams in order to create a Refugee Week campaign that champions positive social change in attitudes or behaviours towards refugees. Ultimately, the module invites you to consider how your disciplinary knowledge of the Humanities enables you to become a responsible global citizen, and to assume responsibility for championing positive social change, whatever your chosen career.  The main assessment for this module is the creation of a ‘campaign tool’ (blogpost, podcast, social media post series, educational pack or other, that will be presented as part of a team ‘campaign’ at the end-of-module ‘festival’. You will also complete the Developing with NTU Award.

Interdisciplinary optional modules typically include:

Artificial Intelligence: Human Factors

This module will introduce you to problems and issues associated with technological change and digitization, with a specific emphasis on the likely future impact of artificial intelligence on the wider human dimension, both individual and collective. Providing you with the expertise required to become managers and policy-makers in the AI future, the module will take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the insights of philosophers, literary figures, historians, and social theorists.

Humanities in Action

What is the value of 'Humanities'? Answer this question from multiple perspectives - knowledge and intellectual value, economic value, humanities and "hard" and "soft" skills, social value, the value to the individual - and find it's place in society.

English optional modules typically include:

Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory

Focusing on fiction and poetry published in the twenty-first century, this module will help you to develop an advanced understanding of some of the topics that define our contemporary period.  We look at celebrated and less well-known writers, alongside wider cultural developments and key directions in contemporary criticism and theory. Reflecting on some of today’s most pressing social and cultural issues, as well your ideas about the world and your place in it, you will study approaches to national, transnational, and global identities, environmental change, technology and digital culture, and war.

Writing Justice: Changing Worlds

This module focuses on decolonial texts (fiction, poetry and film) and explores the relationship between acts of representation and the politics of anti-colonialism and decoloniality. It introduces students to the historical, political and cultural contexts of marginalised literary traditions that seek radical equality and justice and challenge the dominance of coloniality. A central objective is to familiarise students with decolonial and postcolonial theory and to develop the ability to work across theoretical and literary texts in innovative and decolonial ways.

Poetry and the Planet

Examining the role that poetry plays in understanding our changing environment, this module considers how contemporary writers think through the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world. Students will discuss topics including climate change, environmental justice, species extinction and indigenous knowledge in order to understand how the arts and humanities can help us to engage with the challenges we are now facing on earth. Incorporating writing workshops and a field trip, students will have the opportunity to respond creatively and critically using a range of print-based and digital media.

Gothic Rebels and Reactionaries

Gothic is known as the literature of the supernatural, the imaginary, and the darker aspects of being. However, it is also a literature that is deeply engaged with social and cultural issues, and frequently ahead of its time in terms of language, style and form. This module explores the gothic impulse in literature from the Romantic to the late Victorian era (1764-1897), considering how writers engage with cultural issues of the time, and the creative ways in which we, as readers, engage with their work in turn, through collaborative research including digital communities, and critical and creative responses in writing.

Early Modern Poetry and Prose: Nation, Self, Other

This period is one of great social change and literary invention - it saw Britain change its national religion and experience its only civil war. Against this background you shall find writers preoccupied with more enduring human concerns: gender and sexuality, religious conflict, humanity's relationship with nature, colonialism, and class. We consider how social change leads to writers attempting forms of writing not seen before in English literature and engage with contemporary thinking about literature’s importance in relation to national identity. Contemporary concepts of self and other are key to navigating writing from this fascinating time.

Nuclear Literature: Culture in the Atomic Age

In August 1945, atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the world entered the nuclear age, profoundly changing culture and society. On this module we explore what it means to live in a nuclear age by reading a wide range of nuclear literature, including novels, short stories and poetry, and works of feature journalism, post-apocalyptic fiction and science fiction. What, this literature asks, does it mean to be human in a technological age? How do we imagine potential ends of the world? How do we live sustainably on the planet?

Communications optional modules typically include:

Persuasion, Promotion, Propaganda

We live in an age of systemic propaganda where the manipulation of others is normalised and sometimes even praised. Indeed, we live in time when almost all of us are propagandists through our attempts to manufacture a public images online that may or may not conform to the reality of who we really are. Through case studies from politics, business and non-profits, this module examines efforts to persuade mass audiences to think, feel and act in ways deemed desirable to the source of the communication. We will critically explore fundraising communications by charities, electioneering by politicians and political parties, and efforts by private citizens and organisations to generate attention for themselves or for the causes and interests that they represent.

Natural Futures? Global Environmental Catastrophes and the Fate of Life on Earth

This module will help you understand our contemporary environmental emergency by grasping its roots in the past, comprehending the shape it takes today, and envisioning a range of possible future scenarios for a new flourishing of life on Planet Earth. As well as exploring theoretical, political and activist perspectives on environmental catastrophe, this module will support you in becoming an imaginative agent of change in the fight to shape better global futures.

DJ Cultures: History, Theory and Technique

From obscure roots, the art of DJing has in recent decades exploded into the limelight as a major form of popular culture. No prior experience of DJing is required to take this module, which combines a basic ‘taster’ introduction to DJ technology and the practical techniques of DJ performance with a theoretical consideration of various styles of DJing, their histories, their related musical experiences and their wider cultural significance and influence.

Self in Crisis: Power, Prejudice and Otherness

This module brings together debates which contend that, in various ways, contemporary selfhood is in a profound state of crisis. One part explores the idea that the very concept of the self – which, for so long, has sat at the very heart of the humanities - is itself problematic. Another considers the troubling of contemporary selfhood in more existential terms; that is, in terms of people’s actual lives and experiences. Here, special emphasis is placed on the status of mental illness and the roles of psychiatry and psychotherapy.

Advertising, Journalism and the PR Project

This module explores contemporary communication industries through the concept of ‘convergence’. This idea refers to the way in which individuals working in areas such as advertising, PR and journalism increasingly have to take on a variety of roles which cut across the traditional boundaries of each sector, and need to learn to use a variety of working practices and technologies as a result. The module culminates in you developing a PR project..

What's New: the Future of Media Communications

This module looks at innovations and challenges that face media communications professionals as they look to the future. Using practical assessments such as blog writing, producing a radio advertisement and making an audio slideshow, students will advance their media skills in preparation for future employment as digital, multi-media producers. You will examine the issues, ideas and debates which contemporary journalism and marketing have to engage with, such as the funding and accessibility of news on the internet, the nature and trends of popular content, new styles and forms of presentation and the blurring of fantasy and reality in digital communications.