Excited to learn more? For a taster of what you can expect to study on our English with Business Studies degree, take a sneak preview of some of the modules you may have the opportunity to study below.

Compulsory modules

Management and International Business Fundamentals

The aims of this module are to:

  • Prepare students with a foundation of various management perspectives and concepts; Examine some of the local, national and international factors and actors which impact businesses and organisations.
  • Gain an understanding of the complexity of doing business in the international business environment.
  • Develop an understanding of how managers and workers work individually, in groups and in teams within organisations.
  • Encourage an openness to new ideas and an awareness that in many situations there are a range of alternative perspectives that might be taken and courses of action that should be evaluated.

Writing in History

This module will provide you with an outline of English literary history from the late medieval period to the modern day, introducing you to significant writers and genres and their place within a broad contextual framework. How are ideas of the literary canon formed and perpetuated, and what are the implications of such processes? You’ll have the opportunity to engage in these debates while studying key literary works in their original contexts.

Narrative Forms

Writers tell stories in many different forms and many different media. On this module you’ll examine a wide range of forms and media, from period fiction to film and the graphic novel. In doing so, you’ll discuss the features, functions and effects of different types of narrative. The assessment for this module offers you the choice to work creatively using what you’ve learned, or to focus on literary criticism. After this module, you’ll have the skills to continue studying different types of narrative across the rest of your degree.

Principles of Law

The aims of this module are:

  • To introduce basic legal concepts relevant to commercial activity, and to explain their relevance as a parameter of business decision-making.
  • To explain how legal principles are created by both case law and statute.
  • To illustrate their relevance to all aspects of business activity.

Management of Human Resources

The aims of this module are:

  • To build on the pre-requisite module.
  • To examine critically the role of the Human Resource Management (HRM) function within the contemporary organisation.
  • To develop a clear understanding of the role of the HRM function in maintaining an equitable relationship between employer and employee.

Theory Matters: Critiquing Inequalities

This module will introduce you to significant classic and contemporary theoretical approaches and key concepts used in the study of literature today, typically covering topics including gender and sexuality, race and postcoloniality, ideology and capitalism, eco-criticism, and power and protest. Through learning about these influential ideas and debates, you’ll be able to demonstrate how these theories can be used to interpret literary texts.

Optional modules

Slavery to Black Lives Matter: African American Culture 1840 - present

This module gives you the opportunity to engage with a wide range of African American cultural production (written, cinematic and musical) from 1840 to the present day and to explore the complex social and political questions raised by these primary materials, studying a variety of texts from nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary hip-hop lyrics.

Elephants and Engines: An Introduction to Creative Writing

A creative title for a creative module. Here you’ll be introduced to techniques for writing poetry and fiction, and be given lots of techniques to try out for yourself. The module is based on the assumption that everyone is starting out as a writer, so you don’t have to have had any experience. You’ll also learn how to give and receive feedback, meaning that you can develop your work and that of your fellow students. By the end of the module you’ll be confident in writing your own material, using skills in plot, imagery, character and a lot more. 

Introduction to Film

This module provides an opportunity to explore key concepts, approaches, and areas of interest in film studies through offering a critical introduction to the discipline. As well as considering key aspects of film form and style (setting, props, costume, lighting, actor performance, cinematography, editing, and sound and music), you will explore such topics as narrative, genre, the role of the director, star studies, and geographies of film consumption, through detailed study of a number of American films.

Analysing Poetry: Metre, Form and Meaning

This module aims to give you the necessary analytical skills to read poetry more closely and critically, in order to understand how it achieves its effects. As well as gaining knowledge of core metrical principles and awareness of their various effects and implications, you will develop an understanding of the principal kinds and forms of poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present day. Working in small groups for the workshops and seminars, you’ll have a chance to study a range of poems in depth, analysing both their forms and their contexts.

University-wide Language Programme

One 10-credit module from a list supplied by the Language Centre, levels dependent on candidates’ previous qualifications.  Languages offered are: French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish.

Compulsory modules

Organisation Studies

The aims of this module are:

  • To develop a social scientific understanding of organisational theories, themes, concepts and practices.
  • To encourage a challenging, questioning perspective on organisational behaviour, research and ideas.

Principles of Marketing

The aim of this module is to introduce students to the principles of marketing and the role of marketing management, in and the impact of internet marketing in a variety of organisational settings (Retail, industrial, service and non-profit orientated).

The Marketing Mix

The aims of this module are:

  • To build on the prerequisite marketing module
  • To examine the nature of the marketing mix and the contribution of each of the marketing mix elements to an effective marketing strategy.

Optional modules

Victorian Literature

On this module, you will be introduced to a range of Victorian texts, including poetry, novels, and short prose works, in order to assess the aesthetic, intellectual and social questions that informed Victorian writing. You will read Victorian literature in relation to the social and cultural history of the period, allowing you to explore ideas from the period in depth, considering such topics as the growth of industrialisation, scientific developments, the beginnings of the women’s movement, modernity, and evolving concepts of the city and the urban experience. In the weekly seminars, you will be encouraged to work with others as part of a learning community.

Love and Life in Stuart-Era Literature (1603-1714)

This module focuses on the theme of love in the lives of people from the Stuart era (1603-1714), and the importance of this period for the development of English literature. You’ll learn how ‘love’ of various kinds – marital, erotic, filial, and patriotic – holds as much social and cultural relevance as it does personal significance, which is illustrated through the diversity of representations in tragic, sceptical, pragmatic, comedic, and romantic narratives, including plays, poems, and pioneering early prose works.

Strange Fascination: Queer Desires and Identities in Literature, 1886-1952

This module aims to introduce students to the range and diversity of queer literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The module will consider how authors engaged with, and helped to shape, contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality, considering how these concepts shifted over time and across different contexts.

Maps and Motors: The Writing Portfolio

The next step on your writing journey is this module, which introduces more skills and techniques (epistolary, ekphrasis, observation…) and challenges you to develop further as a writer. You’ll be asked to respond creatively to the work of another writer (some of whom are Loughborough graduates) and to create a portfolio of work that best represents your strengths and passions as a writer. As always, what you write about, and how you do it, is up to you.

Your Future Career: Preparing for the World of Work

What do you know? What are skills? Where are they going to take you? This module will help you to answer those questions by building on transferrable skills and encouraging you to reflect on your learning. In addition, you’ll learn about the UK job market, and how to negotiate a range of recruitment tasks including decoding job specifications, writing an application, interviews, psychometric tests and the use of AI. Combine these with your degree and graduate with confidence.

Modernisms

This module is an introduction to the diversity of literary and artistic movements, ideas, and concepts grouped under the term ‘Modernism’. On the module, you will learn how twentieth-century writers developed new methods of responding to an increasingly mechanised and urban world, while also pioneering new ways of writing about the self. The module will show how modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce reacted against many Victorian conventions to produce challenging and radical art. The focus of the module will be on short fiction, the novel, and poetry, as well as on different modernist ‘voices’.

Literature from 1990

This module is very diverse, in that it covers a range of forms (including fiction, poetry and drama), in a range of genres (including verbatim, crime and weird) from a range of writers, including work in translation. Whatever your interests, you’ll discover writing that is new to you. What all these texts have in common is their concern with global concerns about identity, race, place, and belonging that undermine national literary and cultural identities as well as colonising cultural centres.

Screen Cultures

This module introduces influential and acclaimed films from the 20th and 21st-century and explores how they earned their reputation by analysing their interface with, and impact on, wider social, political and historical developments in histories of media.

Weird Fiction

If you are fascinated by the gothic, delighted by the strange and tempted by the unexplained, then this module will be up your – dark, shadowy – street. The Weird as a genre is over a century old, but is still the chosen form for many contemporary writers. This module will introduce you to a range of examples, dealing in different types of the Weird. You may wish to write a critical essay trying to make sense of it all, but you may also wish to try your hand as a Weird writer yourself. You may see a shadow in the corner of the room; hear the voice of an old gentleman in the Church Hall. Or maybe you imagined it.

Animal Tales: Non-human Animals in Fiction, Film and Philosophy

From the animals in Franz Kafka’s short stories to BoJack Horseman, from nature documentaries to viral clips of cats and dogs online, contemporary culture is saturated with narratives and representations of non-human animals. On this module, you’ll be introduced to new ways of critically interrogating these narratives and representations, drawn from a variety of media, analysing them in relation to recent ethical, political, cultural, and philosophical debates concerning our lives with (and even as) animals.

Accounting for Managers

The aims of this module are to:

  • To introduce students to a range of technical and analytical skills.
  • To illustrate the application of analysis in a business context.
  • To evaluate the use of accounting and financial management in planning, decision making and control.

Company Finance

The aim of this module is to examine the background to the financing of companies; the methods used to raise finance; and the implications of using different sources in an international context.

University-wide Language Programme

One 10-credit module from a list supplied by the Language Centre, levels dependent on candidates’ previous qualifications.  Languages offered are: French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish.

Compulsory modules

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

The aims of this module are:

  • To present a range of issues on managing entrepreneurship and innovation.
  • To present and discuss these issues for both large multinational corporations (MNCs) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
  • To present a range of frameworks and tools in support of managing entrepreneurship and innovation.
  • To develop relevant transferable skills.

Fundamentals of Strategic Management

The aims of this module are:

  • Explore strategic management concepts.
  • Acquire knowledge on strategic positioning, strategic capabilities and resources and strategic options.
  • Develop understanding of strategic thinking, development of alternate strategies and strategy implementation.

Entrepreneurship and Small Business Planning

The aims of this module are:

  • To build on and apply concepts presented in semester one in the prerequisite module, through the creation of a business plan for a real or imaginary business.
  • To develop relevant transferable skills.

Leadership & Interpersonal Skills

The aim of this module is to examine the roles of leadership and interpersonal skills in achieving effective teamwork, motivation and successful organisational performance by organisations and individuals.

Optional modules

Dissertation

On this year-long module, you will build on your organisational skills in planning, researching, preparing and revising a substantial piece of written work, developing high-level research and writing skills. It is also possible to add a Creative or Practice-based element: if you choose to develop your work in these directions you will, in addition to the traditional academic component of the Dissertation, include original creative material as an element of your final assessed work.

Examples of a Creative element might include a series of linked poems or monologues, short fiction, the opening of a novel, a short script for stage, TV or radio, or a portfolio of work around a theme or topic. In such cases, the traditional academic component of the Dissertation will consist of the same kinds of critical and analytical work which characterise conventional academic Dissertations.

Cruel and Unusual: Punishment on trial in American Culture

This module aims to introduce you to a range of texts that represent the practice of punishment in American history from the nineteenth century to the present day. You will have the opportunity to examine the representation of punishment in American fiction and film in relation to three critical questions: Who is punished? How are they punished? Why are they punished? Studying novels, films, and documentaries, you will have the opportunity to analyse these texts in relation to social and historical contexts as well as competing theories of punishment.

Textual Editing in the Digital Age

On this module, you will have the opportunity to produce a scholarly edition of a literary work or historical text of your own choosing and to publish it in digital form. To prepare you for this task, you will develop an understanding of the theoretical and methodological concepts of scholarly editing. Through a series of weekly workshops, where you will learn some of the requisite coding, you will be supervised through the process of producing your own digital scholarly edition.

Love, Poetry and War: The Modern Poet from Eliot to Plath

This module introduces you to a variety of British and Anglo-American poets of the twentieth century, giving you an opportunity to explore how these poets reinvented the notion of what poetry could be in the modern era as they questioned or rejected older notions of the ‘poetic’. How did war transform the idea of war poetry, and even the love poem? How did poets promote revolutionary movements such as Futurism and Imagism through influential manifestos and small publications? Reading a combination of canonical poets alongside those who have typically been more marginalised in discussions of the period, you will be able to explore the innovative strategies utilised by modern poets in order to find a new voice in a fast-moving world of urbanisation, world war, and socio-political change.

Maladies and Medicines

Writers have long been concerned with all sorts of aspects of health, mental or physical; they have written about cures, about characters – or entire societies – who are ill, and about how illness affects their own perceptions of the world, and their writing. On this team-taught module, you’ll discover a range of this writing, from an early modern account of depression or advice on diet, to poetry addressing male mental health in the twenty-first century. It’s a deep dive into issues that have been discussed for a long time, and which are still with us, and still affecting us.

Radicals and Reactionaries: Writing Women in 1890s

This module introduces you to a range of writings from the late nineteenth century, including poems, short stories, and novels, considering the relationship between writing of the period to broader cultural, social, and literary concerns. The module will invite you to consider issues such as the campaigns for female suffrage and the Social Purity movement, as well as contemporary debates on marriage, motherhood, female education, ‘free love’, class, race, and eugenics.

Neo-Victorianism

This module is designed to introduce you to a representative range of Neo-Victorian fiction, exploring how a re-imagining and re-writing of Victorian literature and culture has led to the emergence of an exciting and dynamic new field of study. You will be encouraged to consider novels as well as related developments such as film and TV adaptations, Mash-ups, and themes including race, identity, disability, and biography.

Adapting Shakespeare

This module is designed to enable you, through working with other students as part of a learning community, to discover and explore the ways in which Shakespeare adapted his source materials to produce the scripts we know, and how those scripts are in turn adapted in modern performance. This will involve closely studying Shakespeare’s scripts, his sources, and a range of relevant critical views.

Driving On: Writing Towards Publication

The final core creative writing module combines developing your writing with professional development about publishing and other career opportunities. Instead of workshops, you’ll take part in four day-long writing retreats, each with a specific theme, discussions, exercises and time to write. Alongside these, professional development sessions will help you to discover how writers - including you – get their work published, and how writers earn a living. You assessments will be a long portfolio of writing, and a presentation about how you are going to make use of your knowledge of writing and the writing sector in future.  

University-wide Language Programme

One 10-credit module from a list supplied by the Language Centre, levels dependent on candidates’ previous qualifications.  Languages offered are: French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish.

The information above is intended as an example only, featuring module details for the current year of study. Modules are reviewed on an annual basis and may be subject to future changes – revised details will be published through Programme Specifications ahead of each academic year. Please also see Terms and Conditions of Study for more information.