Our Department of English Studies is joining Britain’s leading English academics and graduates from 3rd to 7th June as part of the #EnglishCreates campaign, which aims to highlight the value of English degrees.
Led by University English, in conjunction with the English Association and others, #EnglishCreates celebrates how an English degree enables students to create a difference in the world, and to futureproof their skills for life, work, and social change.
English degrees open up a variety of opportunities. Our graduates progress into professions such as media, law, and publishing, but also translate their specialism into sectors like video games design, management consultancy, or arts organisations. Significant Durham English Studies alumni include the broadcaster Jeremy Vine, the actor Ambika Mod, the novelist Alice Oseman, and the influencer and 'resident librarian' of the internet Jack Edwards.
English degrees teach students key transferrable skills, such as information management, attention to textual detail, analytic ability, as well as oral and written literacy. These emerge from our rich teaching across the full spectrum of English literature from Anglo-Saxon to the present day, and literatures in English in the global sense, with modules that cover authors and texts ranging from the United States to South Asia.
Here at Durham we also teach and research within the transformative humanities, applying the underlying qualities and knowledge of English to the social and technological issues of our time, from the advent of AI to climate crisis. For example, academics from English Studies teach on MA programmes in the Environmental Humanities and Medical Humanities, while conventional English students have the opportunity to learn about topics such as writing for websites, storytelling in video games, or programming to analyse textual data.
These approaches exemplify why English is so important to the creative industries, which are worth £126 billion to the UK economy, more than UK Life Sciences, Aerospace and Automotive sectors combined. Recent contributions to our regional creative economy include a collaboration with Elysium Theatre Company and Durham Fringe Festival to produce the summer Shakespeare Festival, and ongoing work with Durham Book Festival which supports tourism.
Dr Alistair Brown, who is on the organising committee for #EnglishCreates and who specialises in the creative industries and digital humanities, says that:
While advances in technology mean the direction of the future is uncertain, surveys of businesses and the public continually assure us that creativity and creative thinking, by humans, will remain as or even more important. Companies like Google increasingly hire students with Arts and Humanities backgrounds, while recently the Chief Operating Officer of Blackrock, one of the world's leading asset management firms, claimed that employees with degrees in History or English are more essential precisely because of the rise of AI.
The #EnglishCreates campaign is supported by successful English graduates including comedian David Baddiel, poet and novelist Patience Adbabi and writer Ali Smith.
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