History of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick
Foundations of a Radical English Department (1964–1970s)
The Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies has been at the heart of Warwick since the university opened in 1964. It was founded during a moment of social transformation: a new university for a changing nation, designed to defy traditional hierarchies in higher education.
Lord Butterworth, Warwick’s first Vice-Chancellor, appointed Professor G. K. Hunter to craft a degree that would break from convention. Hunter did not want an English programme defined by a quick march from Beowulf to Beckett. Instead, he imagined something daring, groundbreaking and global.
G.K Hunter was described as a renaissance man, a visionary, a pioneer of academia that strived to tackle elitism, gender discrimination, and class-and-culture prejudice in higher education. He saw English, history and politics as a continuum that must be read and understood together. He was well known as a Shakespearean and Shakespeare took a central role in teaching the English course at Warwick. It ultimately led to the close relationship The Shakespeare Company still has with Warwick today. He would headhunt some of the best academics in the country to spearhead the new English and Comparative Studies degree that would call into question the literary canon and set itself apart from any other English degree the country had to offer.
The most significant way in which the degree differed was that students would encounter English literature alongside other languages and cultures from the very beginning. They were expected to study a second language, to read texts in translation, and to situate British writing within European, classical and transatlantic contexts. The aim was not only intellectual breadth, but a commitment to internationalism, critical acuity, and cross-cultural curiosity.
In the early curriculum, canonical works were always placed in dialogue:
• The Epic Tradition taught Milton through Homer, Virgil and Dante
• The European Novel brought Austen and Fielding into direct exchange with Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert and Mann
• European Theatre explored tragedy from Aeschylus to Brecht before Shakespeare ever took centre stage
English at Warwick never accepted national borders as walls. This was a humanities education designed to produce outward-looking thinkers equipped to understand the world they lived in, not simply the nation they came from.
Personalities Who Shaped the Early Years
The department recruited scholars who embodied breadth and restless inquiry. George Hunter himself was a Shakespearean of distinction, yet always eager to bring popular and experimental culture into conversation with the classics.
Colleagues ranged from Classicists-turned-Ruskin specialists to Americanists fascinated by film. The corridors buzzed with spirited debates, offices overflowed with books, improvisation and experimentation were part of the everyday. In the days when two academics shared a single phone line, misdirected messages were transformed into jokes (sometimes even in Latin) and pinned to office doors. Scholarship did not preclude mischief.
Germaine Greer and the Politics of Voice
Few figures embody Warwick English’s early cultural impact as vividly as Germaine Greer. She taught at Warwick from 1968 to 1972 while writing The Female Eunuch in a Leamington bedsit she shared with 2 cats and 300 tadpoles. Its publication in 1970 stunned the literary world and made Greer one of the most recognisable feminist voices of the twentieth century. She became internationally known for her books, TV appearances and academic work on feminism and remains a highly influential character today. She was known on campus for her incongruous style, distinct charisma and brazen nature, often disagreeing, sometimes causing havoc but always demanding the attention of everyone in a room, whether it be of students or staff. Several books and TV appearances later, she returned briefly to The University of Warwick in 1998 assuming her position of Professor of English and Comparative Studies before deciding, finally, to leave Warwick at the end of the last term and retire as an academic. She currently resides in Melbourne and continues her activism, interviews and writing today. You can listen to her talk at Warwick on her work The Whole Woman in 1998 in our archives here. Her presence reinforced a principle that has never left the department: writing changes the world when it refuses to stay polite.
“Red Warwick”: Literature Meets Activism (1970s–1980s)
Warwick’s campus, and the English department within it, became a centre for political intensity and student organising. The 1970s are remembered as the era of “Red Warwick,” a nickname earned through decades of outspoken activism. Students protested the Vietnam War, the rise of the National Front, and social injustice both locally and globally. Sit-ins were staged against government surveillance of politically active students. Campaigns were waged against accommodation costs, women’s liberation, inequality, and for the right to student self-governance. The Students’ Union building, built in 1975, is a physical monument to that persistence.
Towards the end of the 1970s many students became involved in the anti-racism protests against the rise of the National Front at the time. One student named Kevin Gately, was tragically killed in London whilst protesting against the National Front in a protest that over 200 Warwick students attended. Students at Warwick were clearly a force to be reckoned with and many academics were on board too, creating a space for critical thinking, political and intellectual activism, while being a celebration of scholarship that allowed for boundary pushing and breakthroughs. With forward-looking courses, innovative and edgy teaching, creativity and innovation flowed through student life. Today many students and staff continue to organise and protest for causes such as Palestine liberation, workers rights and climate protection, amongst many others. The student newspaper The Boar also played a part in narrating and communicating the student movement and continues to be run and read by students since 1973. Warwick staff and students continue to sit at the forefront of history both in shaping it, narrating it and calling it into question.
A Stage for Experiment
Cultural life also flourished. Writers, poets and theorists visited in waves, filling lecture theatres and Arts Centre rooms with exploratory performance. Basil Bunting, Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, and later Alan Hollinghurst read to students who would become their critics and successors. Allen Ginsberg famously delivered a reading from a throne-like chair, transforming the room into a bohemian happening.
Then there was Julia Kristeva, the famed theorist whose visit during the height of structuralism nearly ended in calamity. As one professor recalled “Our colleague, John Hunter, acted as her host and, having only recently learnt to drive, he was driving her back somewhere at night after the event when, deeply engaged in high-level discussion, he failed to see a deep hole in the road left by workmen working on drains or cables and drove straight into it. Fortunately, both driver and passenger escaped unhurt but John was haunted for some time thereafter by the thought that he nearly achieved fame as the man who killed Kristeva.” The anecdote remains a cherished reminder that theory can literally change one’s direction of travel.
Growth, Collaboration and Creativity (1980s–2000s)
As the university expanded, so too did the department’s ambitions. New degrees emerged including Philosophy and Literature, English and Theatre Studies, English combined with Modern Languages. These interdisciplinary pathways cemented Warwick’s reputation as one of Britain’s most innovative humanities centres that intertwined departments and stood as a cutting-edge collective.
Scholarship grew in international authority. Staff produced influential studies of modernism, satire, global literature, the literature of war, and new directions in historicism and theory. The department embraced American literature and film more fully, ensuring contemporary culture was never marginal to the curriculum. Bernard Bergonzi’s The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature (1986) reshaped understandings of modernist tradition, while Michael Bell’s Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (2000) investigated the ethical and philosophical stakes of modern European fiction. Building on this legacy, Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011) re-mapped the terrain of postcolonial studies for a new generation. Together, these works reflect Warwick’s enduring commitment to scholarship that challenges assumptions and places literature in dynamic conversation with the world. Such publications exemplify the department’s long-standing commitment to pushing disciplinary boundaries and asking how literature reflects and reshapes the world.
The Warwick Arts Centre, with theatres and cinemas on the doorstep, enabled creative and performance-based pedagogy long before such approaches were common. The close partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company deepened and many students have gone on to become actors, directors and performers that continue to take events like the Edinburgh Fringe by storm.
Creative Writing Comes into Its Own
The creative writing strand that had threaded through the department since the 1970s gained increasing prominence. Its growth culminated in the Warwick Prize for Writing in 2008, a landmark literary prize celebrating innovation across genres and nations. Warwick became a place not only for analysing literature, but for making it. Creative Writing now has its own department at Warwick but still remains deeply connected to the ethos of the English department and has since branched out to a significantly interdisciplinary and expansive subject, much like its previous parent.
World-Leading Research and the Future of English (2010s–Present)
Today, the department is known internationally as one of the top centres for English and comparative literary studies. Recent decades have expanded its ambitions even further, across fields such as:
• Environmental and medical humanities
• Performance, film and digital media
• Black studies and postcolonial theory
• Gender, sexuality and queer studies
• Poetry and poetics
• World-Literature and world-systems approaches
It offers ground-breaking Master courses such as Environmental Humanities and Critical and Cultural Theory that continue to break the mould of English study in the UK. Warwick English Alumni from recent years include the award-winning novelist, Jonathon Coe, Comedian, writer and presenter, Frank Skinner, as well as poet and journalist, Cathy Galvin.
Warwick Research Collective (WReC) brought renewed attention to globalisation and literary production, influencing scholarship far beyond the university. New partnerships have been forged around the world, continuing Hunter’s original international trajectory.
Teaching and Research Excellence
In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework, the department was ranked among the best in the UK, with world-leading research and an outstanding environment for both students and scholars. Undergraduate and postgraduate programmes attract applicants from across the globe, drawn by a curriculum that feels both rigorous and radically contemporary. The department has consistently ranked in the top 10 across the board in the UK. As of 2025 the department ranks number 5 in UK in The Guardian University Guide for English, and we ranked 34th in the world in the QS.
A Living Identity
Across sixty years, the department has remained committed to a belief that defined its origins: Literature is not a national possession, it is a global conversation.
The English and Comparative Studies Department continues to nurture generations of readers, writers and thinkers who challenge assumptions, cross intellectual borders, and address the urgent questions of their time. In a world facing fragmentation, the department still insists that stories can connect, critique and transform. G. K. Hunter’s foundational vision lives on through a department unafraid of innovation, unafraid of politics, unafraid of change.
Warwick’s English Department was founded to break the mould, and it remains a place where literature refuses to stay still.
Researched by Louisa Toxvaerd Munch
27th October 2025