English Studies and Climate Change BA (Hons)

Aberystwyth University

Our combined course provides a thorough and critical understanding of the ideological debates that shape the ways we read and write, challenge our perceptions of the places we read and write about, and interrogate who we are. You will encounter texts that explore and represent climate change, that evaluate the climate challenge and its political, economic, social, and ecological impacts. By raising provocative questions about human responses to climate change, this course will equip you with the skills and knowledge to analyse diverse perspectives on a global challenge. This scheme establishes core knowledge of climate science and issues of governance pertaining to climate change alongside subject-specialist engagement with the representation of climate change in literature from the 1800s onwards. Throughout the course, you will engage in a problem-based learning approach that presents students with real-world scenarios and simulations enabling you to develop negotiation and team-building skills essential to a plethora of employment settings.

Year one: Your core modules will provide you with the necessary foundation for successful engagement with literature and creative writing at the university level. Critical Practice builds upon your existing skills and helps you become an independent thinker and critic; Creative Practice gives you a foundation of knowledge and techniques for creative writing. You will also study writing from the pre-1800 period, introducing you to the long tradition of English literatures from Chaucer to Defoe. You will investigate the science of climate change through two innovative modules, Climate Change: Impacts, Perceptions, Adaptation and The Science of Climate. In these modules, you will work with staff and students from other disciplines and together bring your subject-perspectives into contact in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of climate change. In addition, you will choose from an exciting range of option modules, including Literature and the Sea and Introduction to Poetry, that allows responding to what you are learning either creatively, through your own writing, or critically, through essays. You will be able to study writing from an exceptionally broad range of places and periods, such as Greek and Roman Epic and Drama, American Literature and Contemporary Writing. Years two and three: The module Governance of Climate Change engages students in simulation, presenting you with real-world problems and developing the skills essential to addressing current and future global challenges. You will also take core modules that will give you detailed knowledge of fictional and non-fictional responses to the climate, Literature, and Climate in the Nineteenth Century, Contemporary Writing and Environmental Justice, Speculative Fiction and the Climate Crisis and you will develop your own creative writing in whatever genre or form you choose in Crisis Writing. You will also choose from a wide range of option modules through which you can tailor your program to suit your specific interests. Our writing modules cover graphic novels, crime fiction, specific skills (plot, characterisation), and much more; our English modules introduce you to the best, most exciting literature from the last 1000 years. You will engage in ideological debates that shape the ways we read and write; Literatures of Surveillance, challenge our perceptions of the places we read and write about; Literary Geographies, and interrogate who we are; Contemporary Queer Fiction. In the final year the Creative Writing Project or English Dissertation. With the opportunity to attend our annual Writing Retreat held at a historic site in the beautiful mid-Wales countryside, the final year project is a fitting culmination to a degree that challenges students to become informed, skilled, and impassioned advocates for change.