Our BA Liberal Arts has a flexible structure which allows you to choose the range of modules and combinations of disciplines from humanities, arts and social sciences to suit your own interests and curiosity. Our course has a required ‘spine’ running, comprising of The Enlightenment in the first year, The World in Question, in the second, and Dangerous Ideas in the Third. These are all interdisciplinary modules designed to provide you with the historical foundations of the humanities in the European enlightenment, extensions of, and challenges to that worldview apparent in the twentieth and twenty-first century, and innovative and subversive essays and manifestoes.

As a graduate in the liberal arts, you will have gained an all-round education that provides a more extensive range of knowledge, better communication skills and more flexible attitude to life than graduates who remain within the narrow confines of a single discipline. Interdisciplinary studies in the liberal arts help you develop your powers of self-expression (both in terms of writing skills and in terms of oral presentation skills), analysis and critical evaluation, and these are invaluable in later life. For example, some of our most recent graduates have found employment as a research assistant for Euromoney, a financial publication company, work within a housing association and teach English in Japan. Others have completed a PGCE and become teachers. In addition, a humanities course can lead to a wide variety of careers in, the media, journalism, publishing, local government, voluntary agencies or research. Many employers prefer to recruit students with a broad-based liberal arts education (and provide them with vocational training during their first year at work), rather than recruit students who have specialised in one discipline. The liberal arts also provides a good basis for pursuing further vocational training in administration, librarianship, finance, management and other fields. The skills, intellectual flexibility, and confidence that comes from stretching ones abilities across disciplines, enable many humanities graduates to do well in diverse employment settings. Many of our students, of course, develop a facility for education and pursue postgraduate qualifications in a range of subjects.