Economics/English Literature

Economics and English literature is a pairing that might appear unexpected but that reflects a genuine intellectual complementarity. Economics provides rigorous analytical tools for understanding how markets, incentives and resource allocation shape the material conditions of human life. English literature offers a different but equally important lens: close engagement with how human experience is represented, interpreted and contested in language and narrative.

Together they develop the ability to move between formal analytical reasoning and interpretive, contextual understanding, a combination that is genuinely unusual and widely valued.

At the University of Glasgow, the English literature strand of this four-year degree explores all aspects of literature in English from early modern to postmodern periods, as the university describes, with expertise spanning American, Irish and postcolonial literatures, critical theory, creative writing and the relationship between literature and other arts, media and science. The economics strand develops your understanding of microeconomics, macroeconomics, econometrics and the applications of economic analysis to real-world questions. A year abroad is built into the programme, giving you the opportunity to study at a partner institution overseas and to develop an international dimension to both disciplines.

The skills the combination builds are genuinely transferable: analytical precision and quantitative literacy from economics, close reading and argumentative sophistication from literature, and the ability to work across different epistemological frameworks from studying both together.

Graduates go on to careers in financial services, consultancy, economic research, journalism, publishing, policy, education, the civil service, arts administration and a wide range of other fields where analytical and communicative capabilities are valued. Further study in economics, English, cultural economics or a related field is also a common route for those who want to specialise.