Spanish/English Literature

Spanish and English literature is a degree that places two of the world's great literary traditions in dialogue. Spanish literature spans centuries of poetry, drama, and fiction across Spain and Latin America, encompassing canonical works from the Golden Age to the boom of twentieth-century Latin American fiction and contemporary voices writing in an enormous diversity of contexts. English literature draws on an equally rich tradition, from medieval verse and Renaissance drama through the novel's rise to the complexity of modernism and postcolonial writing.

Studying them together develops a genuinely comparative perspective on how language, form, culture, and history shape literary expression.

At the University of Glasgow, you will work with staff who cover a wide range of topics across the Spanish-speaking world, giving you the opportunity to engage with native speakers from different parts of Spain and Latin America and to develop a nuanced understanding of how Spanish functions across its many cultural contexts. The English literature strand provides equal depth, developing your close reading, critical analysis, and historical contextualisation skills through engagement with a broad range of texts and periods. The combination sharpens your understanding of how literary traditions borrow from, respond to, and diverge from one another.

The degree runs over five years and includes a placement year and a work placement, giving you the opportunity to develop your professional skills in a relevant context while building the linguistic fluency and cultural confidence that sustained engagement with the Spanish-speaking world requires.

Graduates from Spanish and English literature programmes move into careers in translation, publishing, education, journalism, cultural organisations, diplomacy, and the civil service. The combination of a major world language and strong literary and analytical skills is genuinely versatile. Postgraduate study in Hispanic studies, comparative literature, translation, or related fields is a natural route for those who wish to pursue scholarly work or develop a deeper specialism.