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What makes Creative Writing and History at Worcester special?

Combining Creative Writing and History provides an opportunity to explore the past across multiple periods and develop critical thinking skills that will improve your critiquing of your own writing. You’ll learn through the academic investigation of the processes by which we understand historical events, and a practice-based enquiry into writing.

The joint honours course uses lectures, seminars, and workshops to help you deepen your understanding of the past and establish your own identity as a writer. Students graduate with transferrable skills and a portfolio of written work that supports employment across a range of industries.

Overview

Overview

Key features

  • Opportunities for students to publish their work from the very first week and throughout their undergraduate programme
  • Exciting programme of guest speakers and a student writing magazine: The Fuse
  • Experience in writing for a range of digital, print, audio, visual and performance platforms.
  • Work placement opportunities in archives, museums and community groups
  • Delivered by highly experienced, supportive and expert lecturers with international research profiles
  • Tailor your course to your individual needs with a joint honours degree
Entry requirements

Entry requirements

104
UCAS tariff points

Entry requirements

104 UCAS Tariff points.

The normal minimum entry requirement for undergraduate degree courses is the possession of 4 GCSEs (Grade C/4 or above) and a minimum of 2 A Levels (or equivalent Level 3 qualifications).

Other information

If you have any questions about entry requirements, please contact the Admissions Office on 01905 855111 or email admissions@worc.ac.uk for advice.

Further information about the UCAS Tariff can be obtained from the UCAS website.

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Course content

Course content

Our courses are informed by research and current developments in the discipline and feedback from students, external examiners and employers. Modules do therefore change periodically in the interests of keeping the course relevant and reflecting best practice. The most up-to-date information will be available to you once you have accepted a place and registered for the course. If there are insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, this might not be offered, but we will advise you as soon as possible and help you choose an alternative. 

Year 1

Mandatory

  • Introduction to Writing
  • Writing Poetry
  • Writing Fiction
  • Britain since the Reformation
  • Reconstructing the Past: Academic, Public and Popular History 

Year 2

Mandatory

  • Writer as Researcher

Optional

  • The Writing Professional
  • Collabowriting
  • Environmental Writing
  • Writing for Children
  • Slam, Spoken Word, and Performance Poetry
  • Genre Fiction
  • Work Project Module
  • Historical Research: Method and Practice
  • The American Century, 1917-2001
  • The German Empire, 1862-1918
  • History Work Experience Module
  • War and Peace: The Making of Modern Ireland
  • ‘A People’s War?’ Britain and the Second World War
  • Georgian Britain and the Atlantic World, 1760-1820
  • Heritage Tourism and Place Promotion

Year 3

Optional

  • Dissertation/Extended Writing Project
  • Hypermedia – Creative Writing in a Digital Culture
  • New Nature Writing
  • Contemporary Poetry
  • Creative Non-Fiction
  • Indie Publishing
  • Writing Witchcraft
  • International Exchanges
  • Writing for Performance
  • The Atlantic Slave Trade and Abolition
  • The Good War: The USA and World War Two
  • Nazi Germany
  • Research Experience Module
  • British Imperialism c. 1857-1972
  • Gender, Sexuality and Welfare. The Body in History.
  • Witchcraft and the Devil
  • Japan's World, 1854-1951
2 female students and 1 male student working at table

Joint Honours

Discover our full range of joint degrees and read about how your degree will be structured.

Find out more about studying a joint honours course

History and the City of Worcester

The city of Worcester resounds with history and provides an ideal environment for the study of the past. 

It is best known perhaps for its central role in the English Civil War. Worcester was the scene of its final battle when Oliver Cromwell defeated a Scottish army led by Charles II.  

The city also boasts one of the finest cathedrals in the country. King John, famous for agreeing to the Magna Carta, is buried there. During your time at the University you will be able to visit the cathedral library with its priceless collection of rare books and manuscripts, including letters signed by Charles I.

The city contains beautiful historic streets and many buildings dating from the seventeenth century.

Teaching and assessment

Teaching and assessment

For more information about teaching, learning and assessment on this course, please see the single honours course pages for Creative Writing BA (Hons) and History BA (Hons).

Programme specification

For comprehensive details on the aims and intended learning outcomes of the course, and the means by which these are achieved through learning, teaching and assessment, please download the latest Creative Writing programme specification and History programme specification documents.

Great lecturers who care and want to help as much as they can to help me achieve the best possible grades.

BA History student

Creative Writing aims to nurture your confidence as a writer and to support your development as a critical and skilful analyst of your own and others’ writing. Throughout, you will be immersed in intellectual issues informing the discipline and practices of writing and learn to place your own writing within contexts of published work.

You will develop expertise in commercial practice (writing for magazines, reviewing, scriptwriting, editing) and understanding of publishing and marketing processes alongside working towards your own, creative development. You will work with published writers, professional publishers and editors with a variety of specialisms including poetry, travel writing, writing for the screen, writing fiction, writing for performance, writing for children, feature writing, blogging and copy writing.

Your development and achievements will be assessed by means of a wide variety of writing ‘tasks.’ In your third year, you will undertake a major writing project of your choice, mentored by members of the course team, alongside participating in a range of activity designed to support you to prepare for progression once you have graduated.

History at Worcester is designed to enable you to study the types of history that appeal to you most. Informed by cutting-edge research on key questions of our time, it offers you the opportunity to study the political, cultural and social history of Britain, Europe and the wider world from the 16th to 20th centuries.

The course begins with a broad introduction to many of today’s debates surrounding history and approaches to historical study. It ends with the opportunity for you to produce a major piece of work on a topic of your choice, supported by one-to-one supervision.

History provides you with opportunities to benefit directly from your lecturers’ cutting-edge research and research interests – which include, amongst many others, the Devil in Tudor and Stuart England, US propaganda in the Second World War, appeasement, the transatlantic slave trade and the home front in World Wars 1 and 2.

Both subject areas are committed to supporting your understanding of the range of possibilities that could be available to you on graduation. You can undertake work placements as part of your formal study and explore opportunities for postgraduate study. There are sometimes ‘earn as you learn’ opportunities to work with staff, and courses regularly advertise volunteering opportunities to work with local organisations.

You can also investigate, with those who are already following them, career paths in:

  • teaching
  • the creative and cultural industries
  • heritage
  • the media
  • marketing and PR
  • research
  • and the many other employment sectors and fields in which history and writing graduates find work

Meet the team

You will be taught by a teaching team whose expertise and knowledge are closely matched to the content of the modules on the course.

Dr Jack McGowan

Dr Jack McGowan

Jack’s research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, and he specializes in the development of performance poetry in the UK since the mid-20th century, and the oral roots of poetry.

Jack is a performance poet with 10 years of experience on the UK spoken word scene and he writes for both performance and page publication.

Ruth Stacey Profile Image

Ruth Stacey

Ruth is based in Bredon 190. As Admissions Tutor for Creative Writing she is responsible for processing new applications for study and recruitment of new students. This includes attending open days, organising events, visiting schools and colleges, and collecting student testimonials for the Creative Writing blog.

A prize-winning writer, Ruth is interested in reclaiming maligned or forgotten voices in her work, combining historical research with imagined memoir to create a new document that allows a different perspective on the historical person. Ruth is currently writing symbolist poetry as part of her research for her PhD at the University of Northumbria.  The creative aspect of the project is an imagined memoir of the tarot artist Pamela Colman Smith.

Ruth is widely published and has taught literature and writing to all age groups, including in schools and with Writing West Midlands youth groups. An experienced freelance writer and copywriter, Ruth also helped to start the indie press V.Press and worked as the illustrator for the press for seven years.

darren-oldridge-cathedral-1-rdax-300x450

Professor Darren Oldridge

Darren Oldridge is a specialist in sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious history. His interests include witchcraft and the Devil, the supernatural, and the religious context of the English Civil Wars. A recurring theme of his work is the rationality underpinning apparently strange beliefs: this is reflected, most recently, in the new edition of Strange Histories (Routledge: 2017). More broadly, he is interested in the relationship between poetry and film and the past.

At Worcester Darren teaches modules that reflect these interests, including The Early Modern World and Witchcraft and the Devil. At present he is editing the third edition of The Witchcraft Reader, to be published by Routledge in 2018.

Candid headshot of Suzanne Schwarz

Professor Suzanne Schwarz

Suzanne Schwarz’s teaching at the University of Worcester focuses on the transatlantic slave trade and West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She also focuses on developing historical research skills for students through the study of regional and local history. She was the recipient of two student-led teaching awards in 2013 and 2014.

Professor Neil Fleming

Neil Fleming's research and teaching focusses on aspects of British, Irish and imperial history since the late nineteenth century.

Dr Wendy Toon

Wendy Toon is an historian of the United States of America, specialising in the twentieth century. She is currently writing Images of the Enemy: American Constructions of the Germans and Japanese in World War Two (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).

Wendy joined the University of Worcester in September 2002. She previously held positions at Staffordshire University and Keele University, and was a Royal Historical Society Fellow (Peter Marshall Fellowship) at the Institute of Historical Research.  

Dr Paddy McNally


Paddy McNally's teaching and research interests are focused on Irish history from 1690 until 1848, German history from 1870 to 1945, and the history of political thought. He is author of the book, Parties, Patriots and Undertakers. Parliamentary politics in early Hanoverian Ireland and numerous articles on eighteenth-century Irish history. He is currently writing From the Boyne to the Famine. A thematic history of Ireland, 1690-1848, to be published by Routledge. He teaches specialist modules on Irish history 1690-1848, German history 1870-1945, and Nationalism. He has successfully supervised PhD and MPhil students to completion and welcomes expressions of interest from prospective postgraduate researchers in most aspects of British and Irish history from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Anna Muggeridge

Dr Anna Muggeridge

Dr Anna Muggeridge is a historian of modern Britain with a particular specialism in women’s and gender history. She researches histories of women’s political activism, with a particular focus on the local. Currently, she is researching a history of women in local government in interwar England and Wales, as well as working collaboratively with colleagues at a number of other institutions on projects related to women’s activism in the twentieth century.

Dr Elspeth King

Dr Elspeth King

Elspeth King joined the university in August 2022 after 8 years of being an Associate Lecturer. Her research and teaching interests are in twentieth-century British history, especially the First and Second World Wars and Women’s History.

Elspeth is also interested in social class and the impact this has on the lived experience of people in everyday life.

Careers

Careers

The Creative writing aspect of this joint honours degree will provide a foundation for students who are interested in developing writing as a profession, for example in the creative industries and/or commercial markets and an understanding of how writers make a living.

Graduates from this course will be very successful candidates for careers in teaching because of the emphasis on writing in the new English curricula. Graduates may equally go on to work in sectors such as publishing, the media, marketing and communications. The course also provides an excellent basis for further study or for self-employment as a freelance writer.

History joint honours graduates from Worcester have progressed in recent years to take up work in a variety of career sectors, including teaching, accountancy, law, the media industries, local government, the police, retailing, administration, marketing, management and university lecturing and research.

A growing number of our graduates progress to postgraduate research in history, both at the University of Worcester and at other universities. Thus, History remains an attractive and personally satisfying degree to study, with a strong track record of supporting graduate employability in a range of professional, managerial, administrative and media-related careers.

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Careers and Employability

Our Graduates pursue exciting and diverse careers in a wide variety of employment sectors.

Find out how we can support you to achieve your potential
Costs

Fees and funding

Full-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard fee for full-time home and EU undergraduate students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £9,250 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

International students

The standard tuition fee for full-time international students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £16,200 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Part-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard tuition fees for part-time UK and EU students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the academic year 2024/25 are £1,156 per 15-credit module, £1,542 per 20-credit module, £2,312 per 30-credit module, £3,083 per 40-credit module, £3,469 per 45-credit module and £4,625 per 60 credit module.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Additional costs

Every course has day-to-day costs for basic books, stationery, printing and photocopying. The amounts vary between courses.

If your course offers a placement opportunity, you may need to pay for an Enhanced Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) check.

Accommodation

Finding the right accommodation is paramount to your university experience. Our halls of residence are home to friendly student communities, making them great places to live and study.

We have over 1,000 rooms across our range of student halls. With rooms to suit every budget and need, from our 'Traditional Hall' at £131 per week to 'En-suite Premium' at £221 per week (2024/25 prices).

For full details visit our accommodation page.

How to apply