Comparative Literature/Theatre Studies

Comparative literature and theatre studies share a fundamental concern with how human beings use narrative, language, and performance to make sense of their experience and communicate it to others. Comparative literature examines writing across cultural and national frontiers, time periods, languages, and genres, even crossing the boundaries between literature and the other arts. It asks you to move between traditions, to notice what is distinctive about particular literary cultures, and to develop the critical vocabulary to describe and evaluate how literary meaning is made.

Theatre studies approaches similar questions through the lens of performance, exploring how texts become events, how conventions of staging and acting develop, and how performance functions within social and cultural life.

At the University of Glasgow you will study this joint degree part-time, with a year abroad embedded in the programme to give you direct experience of literary and theatrical cultures beyond the UK. You will read widely across European and world literature, work with texts in translation and sometimes in their original languages, and develop skills in literary analysis, cultural history, and theoretical reasoning. In theatre studies you will engage with dramatic texts, performance histories, and the theoretical frameworks that allow you to understand what performance does and how it works.

Both disciplines cultivate close attention to language and form, sustained critical argument, and the ability to situate creative work within its broader context.

These are disciplines that develop transferable intellectual skills of the highest order. Graduates pursue careers in publishing, arts administration, journalism, criticism, broadcasting, teaching, dramaturgy, cultural policy, and the heritage sector. The ability to read carefully, argue clearly, and understand cultural contexts is valued across the creative industries and the professions.

Theatre studies opens specific routes into professional theatre as a dramaturg, literary manager, or arts administrator. Postgraduate study in comparative literature, translation studies, performance studies, or related fields is a natural step for those who wish to specialise further or pursue academic research.