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About the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics

The School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics is a highly successful school with a long and prestigious history.

We warmly welcome you to the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.

We are a long-established School, holding one of the oldest professorships of English Studies in this country, set up in 1898. The Chair is named after the Newcastle MP Joseph Cowen

Cowen was a champion of the right to vote and firmly believed that access to education and cultural activities was essential to an expanded democracy.  He helped found the first public library in Newcastle and was its first borrower, taking out John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. The School's main prize for Literature, given for an outstanding piece of undergraduate work every year, is named after his friend, Robert Spence-Watson, the Gateshead reformer and advocate of women's education.  

We appointed the very first Professor of English Language and General Linguistics in Britain when, in 1964, Barbara Strang was appointed to the professorship, becoming one of the first women to hold such a post anywhere in the world.

We are proud to carry on Cowen's and Spence-Watson's goal of an open and outstanding education for all and to continue the academic excellence that Professor Strang exemplified. We are a Russell Group, research-intensive School with over thirty per cent of our undergraduates coming from Widening Participation backgrounds.  A national benchmarking exercise has established us as leaders in our fields of research and that excellence is the bedrock of all our teaching. We embrace creativity in the classroom and a commitment to giving all our students the best university experience possible. Everyone eager to learn is welcome in our community.

In 2009, Professor Linda Anderson founded the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts from the School. 

The Centre was created as a place where contemporary writing might be performed and presented to public audiences. It was opened by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who composed his poem 'Slack' in honour of the Centre. The NCLA enables the School to contribute to the cultural  life of the North East, by showcasing established and up-and-coming writers, dramatists, film-makers and poets. Through its regular programming and its annual Poetry Festival, as well as its spring school and short courses, the Centre is a flagship organisation for the creative arts.  It continues our long tradition of supporting, investing in and upholding the humanities and creative arts in our region. This includes preserving the papers of our region's writers including the archive of the Northeast's internationally lauded poetry publisher, Bloodaxe Books

Would you like to join us? We offer undergraduate degrees in:

  • English Literature,
  • English Literature with Creative Writing,
  • English Language,
  • English Language and Literature,
  • English Literature and History, 
  • Linguistics (including Linguistics with French, German, Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese).
At postgraduate level our students can undertake a Master's degree or a Ph.D in  in Literature, Linguistics, or in Creative Writing. We are very proud of and inspired by the many successes of our alumni.   
We strongly value our connections with our local communities and we offer outreach sessions for teachers and students of our subjects at GCSE and A-level.

Our School is based in the Percy Building on Newcastle University's city centre campus, in the heart of a city famous for its open friendliness.  Get in touch and come and visit!