English and Film Studies

English and film studies is a pairing that takes seriously the common intellectual ground between literary and cinematic forms of storytelling and meaning-making. English literature has developed a sophisticated tradition of close reading, historical contextualisation, and critical theory over centuries of scholarship. Film studies applies and extends these methods to the moving image, examining how cinema constructs meaning through visual language, editing, performance, and sound, and how it engages with the same questions of representation, ideology, identity, and form that literary criticism addresses.

Studying both together develops a richly comparative critical intelligence.

At Queen's University Belfast this three-year full-time degree explores literature, language, and cinema in the widest possible sense. You will study English writing from the earliest Anglo-Saxon texts through medieval, early modern, and Romantic literature to contemporary Irish, British, and global literatures. Film studies spans the origins of European cinema through the French New Wave to contemporary Hollywood and world cinema, situating films in their historical, cultural, and ideological circumstances.

Modules on adaptation, visual culture, and scriptwriting in both English and film studies demonstrate the productive cross-pollination between these important cultural forms, and the programme as a whole develops your critical, analytical, and communicative skills across literary and cinematic contexts.

Graduates go on to careers in publishing, broadcasting, journalism, education, the arts and cultural sector, screenwriting, media production, and a wide range of roles where the ability to analyse, interpret, and communicate with precision is valued. Many graduates also continue to postgraduate study in English, film studies, or related humanities disciplines.