Economics/English Literature

Economics and English literature is a combination that brings together two disciplines with fundamentally different but mutually enriching approaches to human life. Economics studies how individuals, firms, and societies allocate scarce resources, develop markets, and make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It is a discipline of models, evidence, and quantitative reasoning.

English literature asks how written works create meaning, how they reflect and shape culture, and what they reveal about the range of human experience across time and place. It is a discipline of interpretation, close reading, and critical argument. Studied together, they develop an unusually broad intellectual repertoire.

At the University of Glasgow, this part-time programme allows you to pursue both disciplines seriously alongside other commitments. Your economics studies will cover micro and macroeconomics, quantitative methods, economic history, and a range of applied and theoretical topics, developing your ability to reason analytically about complex social and economic phenomena. Your English literature studies will take you across early modern to contemporary writing, including American, Irish, and postcolonial literatures, engaging with critical theory, the relationship between literature and other arts, media, and science, and creative writing.

Glasgow's broad expertise across both departments means you will encounter teachers working at the frontier of their fields. A year abroad is part of the programme, giving you the opportunity to study both disciplines in a different academic and cultural context.

You will graduate with both quantitative analytical skills and the capacity for nuanced critical argument, a combination that is genuinely rare and highly valued.

Graduates go on to careers in finance, business, policy, journalism, publishing, education, consultancy, and public service. The combination of economic reasoning and literary sensibility is particularly distinctive. Postgraduate study in economics, English, or policy is a common continuation.