Comparative Literature/Music

Comparative literature and music are disciplines united by a shared concern with how human beings make and interpret works of art across cultures, time periods and formal conventions. Comparative literature studies texts across national and linguistic frontiers, asking what works from different traditions share and how they differ, how forms and ideas travel across boundaries, and what new meanings emerge when texts are read alongside each other rather than in isolation. Music history and musicology ask equivalent questions about sound, examining how composers and performers have worked within and against the expectations of their time and place, and how musical meaning is produced and received across different cultural contexts.

At the University of Glasgow you will study this four-year programme with a year abroad embedded in the curriculum, giving you access to different literary and musical traditions in an international setting. You will develop your ability to read literature from multiple traditions in critical and analytical depth, engage with musical texts and performances across a wide historical and cultural range, and move fluently between the critical languages of literary and musical scholarship. The programme builds the skills of close reading, archival research, written argument and comparative analysis that are central to both disciplines.

Graduates of comparative literature and music have a genuinely distinctive intellectual profile. Careers include literary and music journalism and criticism, arts administration, broadcasting, publishing, translation, education, cultural policy, gallery and heritage work, and a range of roles in the international creative industries where the ability to engage intelligently with multiple cultural traditions is an asset. Postgraduate study in comparative literature, musicology, translation studies, cultural theory, or a related field is a natural extension for those who wish to pursue specialist research or academic careers.

The analytical and communication skills both disciplines develop are also valued in law, the civil service, and a wide range of commercial and not-for-profit organisations.