English

Subject overview at Downing

Average places per year 7
Course duration  3 years - BA (Hons)
Standard offer Our standard conditional offer for this subject is usually A*AA at A-level, or 41-43 points overall and 776 at Higher Level in IB.  All Colleges may modify offers to take account of individual circumstances. 
Course requirements While History, Classics, Religious Studies and languages all give particular strengths to undergraduates taking the English Tripos, only English Literature or Language and Literature are compulsory for entry. All additional subjects, including Science and Mathematics, are acceptable, though we have a preference for academic rather than vocational subjects. 
Admission overview Applicants must submit two pieces of written work. Those invited to interview will sit an online written test (CELAT). If you are called to interview at Downing, you will receive two 30-minute interviews on the same day, each conducted by our teaching fellows. 
UCAS code Q300
Campus code D

Why study English at Cambridge?

English at Cambridge is an exciting subject to study. It is flexible, expansive, and interdisciplinary. It offers students the opportunity to explore a wide range of texts, helps them to reflect upon the world, and builds our ability to express ourselves through the games that language plays with us.

English is the study of language and communication: not just words but images, cultural artefacts, cultural practice. As a subject English invites us to engage with history, philosophy, language theory, theology, politics, the history of science, human identity, the environment, but it always has at its heart the reading of texts: novels, poetry, drama. English is for those who love reading and those who are curious about the ways in which literature can help us to understand ourselves and our society.

English provides us with sharp analytical skills, the ability to read, interpret and understand the written and spoken word. It helps us to live in the world with other people, to interpret and be part of communal and institutional life, and it prepares us for work in some of the most exciting areas of modern society: literature and the arts, education, politics and law.

All teaching for English follows the same course outline set by the Faculty. See the structure of the course here.

English graduates from Downing have entered many professions including: education in universities and schools, journalism, law, publishing, speech writing, literary agenting, film and television, theatre, arts administration, fine art, charitable organisations, advertising, public relations, consultancy, the civil service, law, politics and accountancy.

Why Study English at Downing?

We are a warm and welcoming community with a strong focus on the creative arts. For more on how you can participate in writing, theatre, music and visual art at Downing see our Cultural Life page.

What we offer

At Downing you will have access to excellent facilities. The College Library contains an extensive range of books and journals, which supplement the comprehensive materials available at the Faculty Library and the University Library. English undergraduates at Downing are assisted with the cost of buying books through annual grants from the Denham Fund. We provide regular sessions with industry experts to help you understand life after University: these talks have included literary agents, publishers, broadcasters, arts managers, TV producers. Downing is supportive of creative writing, and awards prizes worth up to £500 for original poems, short stories, and chapters from novels, thanks to the generosity of the late P. D. James, Honorary Fellow of the College. Downing also has a flourishing drama scene, with the Downing College Dramatic Society and the Howard Theatre at the very heart of college life.

The English Society is a community of current and past Downing English students. Our main activity is the production of Downing’s literary magazine, The Leaves. This publication features Downing talent in visual art, poetry, drama, prose fiction and non-fiction. Each volume is edited by students and contains new work by Downing students alongside winning work from the College’s Twining Egginton Prize for visual art, The Festival of New Writing for drama, and the John Treherne Prize for creative writing. 

Teaching Staff 

Downing prides itself on its undergraduate provision; we currently have three teaching fellows, supported by a number of other teaching staff that includes practitioners able to help students with their creative work. We cover a wide variety of historical periods, literary genres and critical approaches. Our areas of expertise include the Eighteenth Century period, modernism, contemporary poetry and fiction, literature and visual art, ecocriticism, philosophies of language, and lyric poetry. Where you wish to work on a topic that falls outside of our collective expertise, your Director of Studies will organise supervisions with a specialist from another college. We do not aim to impose a particular way of thinking, but to allow you to develop your own particular interests, in a genuinely mutual dialogue with leading experts in the field. Our pedagogical environment is flexible, supportive, and challenging.

Downing has three Fellows who teach for the English Tripos:

  • Dr Ewan Jones, who focuses on the relationship between poetry and philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
  • Dr Sarah Kennedy, whose research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone poetry, modernism, metaphor, nature-writing, literary self-conception, originality, and allusion.
  • Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson whose work focuses on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, drama and culture, the novel, and the ways in which literature has engaged with the histories of sciences and religion.

Downing also has four Bye-Fellows for English.

  • Lisa Mullen, whose teaching and research interests range across the long twentieth-century, with particular focus on ecocriticism, literatures of health and sickness, and the affordances of the interdisciplinary approaches to critique.
  • Claudia Tobin is a writer, curator and academic specialising in the intersections between literature and the visual arts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
  • Stephen Bennett, who is Director of Drama at Downing. He has taught and directed at the universities of Yale and Carnegie Mellon in the US, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Shakespeare's Globe and The Royal National Theatre in the UK.
  • Jenn Ashworth is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. Her research interests are broad and include space and place in the novel with a particular interest in representations of the North, memoir, narratives of sickness, care and recovery, formal experiment in the essay, representations of religious experience, the contemporary ghost story and creative writing pedagogy.

Alumni

Downing has long been strongly associated with English at Cambridge. The influential critic F. R. Leavis was Fellow in English from 1936-1962 and Downing has among its English alumni Trevor Nunn, Howard Jacobson and Quentin Blake.

Who are Downing looking for?

What skills do you need?

English students need an intellectual curiosity which drives them to analyse new texts and ideas and to ask probing questions. We look for reading beyond the syllabus, and for independent, well-informed critical thinking.

Detail about submitted work/portfolio

For more information on submitted written work, see the University website.

Detail about Admissions Test

CELAT is an essay-writing exercise in response to textual extracts. It is taken online before you come to interview. For more information about entry requirements, CELAT and to see a sample CELAT paper, see the English Faculty website.

Detail about Interview

The interviews are designed to ascertain your aptitude and enthusiasm for English at Cambridge. There are no ‘trick questions’ or preconceived right answers; above all else, we are looking for candidates whose passion for literature leads naturally to independent and original thinking. As part of the interview, you may be asked to respond to a small literary text or extract.

How can you find out more about English?

At school ‘English’ as a subject meant reading texts closely. At University you still read texts but you also read a lot of literary criticism and other kinds of scholarship that will help you to build your own interpretations of literature. To get a sense of what literary criticism can be like, you might have a look at some scholarship written by those who teach at Cambridge. Much of this work is now available openly online, such as on Taylor & Francis Online and Open Journals

Reading List

Look at the Resources page of the English Faculty website.