Welcome to the department of English and Creative Writing at Exeter!
Ours is a large and varied department, and we’re very much looking forward to meeting you and working with you over the course of your degree. Our department include poets, novelists, screenwriters, critical theorists, and experts in many different fields of literary history. So, whether you’re passionate about translating Old English or writing for television, we have specialist modules and academic staff ready to help you develop your skills and knowledge to the fullest. You can find out more about us and our specialisms through our staff profiles.
As well as Single Honours English we offer multiple Combined Honours degree programmes, including English and Creative Writing, English and Communications, English and Film & Television Studies, English and Drama, Classical Studies and English, and English and Modern Languages. We are also home to the Liberal Arts programme below) and teach Flexible Combined Honours (FCH) degree programmes with an English and Creative Writing component. If you are a joint honours or FCH student, please do remember to check the departmental page of your other subject(s) as well! Find more information and guidance on the English and Creative Writing section on the HASS Student Gateway, which you can access when you activate your University IT account.
Key contacts
You will each be assigned a personal tutor whom you will meet as part of your academic induction in Welcome Week. This person will be your first port of call for any questions you might have. Other key contacts include:
- Director of Education for English and Creative Writing: Professor Sinead Moynihan
- Year One Tutor for English and Creative Writing: Dr Christopher Stokes
- Head of Department for English and Creative Writing: Professor Vike Plock
Preparing for your degree
You may be wondering what you can usefully spend your time reading ahead of September. You may find it useful to look at the reading lists for the current first year English modules, all of which are available online.
In particular, many students have found it helpful to read some of the longer texts on the “Beginnings” module before they arrive at Exeter.
These include Homer’s Odyssey which we study in the translation by Emily Wilson (Norton, 2018). Other key texts include:
- Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney, ed. Daniel Donoghue (Norton, 2000).
- Marie de France, Lais, ed. and tr. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, 2nd edn (Penguin, 1999)
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Bernard O'Donoghue (Penguin, 2006).
In the second term, all Single Honours English students will take a module called “The Poem” (Combined Honours students can also take this as one of their options, if they wish). The anthology we use for this module is the The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 6th edition, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Tim Kendall, Mary Jo Salter (Norton, 2018).
Please note that you are not expected to purchase any of the above books, though you may wish to. Access to online or hard copies of all reading materials will be provided once you arrive at Exeter. Therefore, there is no obligation to read any of these texts ahead of your arrival – and nothing terrible will happen if you don’t manage to!
We would advise though that you do continue to read over the coming months; we will be asking you to read quite a lot once you get here, and it’s good to be prepared for this. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Virginia Woolf or Jilly Cooper, so long as you are reading – and thinking critically and creatively about what you are reading too.
Our community
The Department of English and Creative Writing is strongly linked with the university’s student-led English Society, who run social events and activities throughout the year. For now, we have prepared an introductory exercise to help you introduce yourselves to one another. Here is the opening of The Marriage Plot (2011), by Jeffrey Eugenides:
‘To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Brontë sisters. There were a whole lot of black- and- white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of “Couples”, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.”’
Activity: What are you reading?
Let's start by looking at your books. What does your bookshelf say about you? Post your answers in the Forum below! To post, simply click 'REPLY.'
Please be aware that any comments and contributions in this forum are open to the general public and NOT just other students in the cohort.
Liberal Arts
Welcome to Liberal Arts within the English and Creative Writing Department at the University of Exeter!
A warm welcome to the Liberal Arts degree!
Students on the Liberal Arts programme take one of more than 20 different
majors, across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Business School. Alongside
your major, your language modules, and your other options, you’ll be taking our
core first-year module, Being Human in the Modern World, together with
all other first-year Liberal Arts students. This is an exciting,
multi-disciplinary module, featuring different guest lecturers each week, which
introduces a wide range of disciplines, approaches, and important topics from
across the humanities and social sciences. It provides a valuable grounding in
the breadth of study that is a crucial part of the Liberal Arts approach.
Key contacts
The Liberal Arts core team is:- Dr Henry Knight Lozano, Co-Director
- Dr Michael Flexer, Co-Director
- Dr Rob Sherman, Director of Student Experience
- Florence Gomez, Academic Adviser, Languages
The Liberal Arts administrator is Susan Margetts, who is based at the Queen’s Hub. Each student will be also assigned a Personal Tutor from within their major. This can take a week or two, so don’t worry if you don’t hear from your Personal Tutor right away during Welcome Week.
Also, please make sure to check the departmental page of your major in this course for subject-specific information and also find the Liberal Arts section on the HASS Student Gateway, which you can access when you activate your University IT account.
Preparing for your degree
We
don’t expect you to complete any preparatory work before you get here, but if
you’re keen to acclimatise yourself to your course and do a little reading
before term starts, we’d advise looking at your major subject page for any subject-specific
readings recommended.Our Community
The Liberal Arts student community is supported by the Liberal Arts Student Society, which run a series of events across the academic year. Academically the programme is also supported and represented by the Liberal Arts Student-Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC) and by Academic Reps and Department Officers, who you’ll get a chance to meet early in the new term.We look forward to meeting you in September!
Once you have finished reading about your department(s), you can skip to end of this section rather than clicking next and reading through all department pages.