BA Italian Studies
About this course
Italian studies goes beyond language learning to offer a comprehensive engagement with Italy as a culture, society, and civilisation. It encompasses literature, history, cinema, politics, art, and contemporary social questions, approached through the Italian language itself. Italy has been one of the most important contributors to Western culture from the medieval period to the present, and studying it in depth, in its own language, is a way of understanding not just Italy but many of the traditions and debates that run through European culture more broadly. This four-year full-time programme at the University of Manchester develops your Italian language skills to a high level while also giving you a rigorous grounding in Italian cultural and intellectual history. You will read literary texts, engage with film, analyse political and social developments, and work with a range of cultural materials that illuminate different aspects of Italian life from Dante and Machiavelli to the post-war economic miracle and contemporary Italy. The programme includes a sandwich year and a work placement, both of which give you direct experience of using your Italian skills in a professional or international context, and which make a significant difference to how employers perceive your degree. With a typical tariff of 152 points, the programme attracts students who are already serious about the subject and prepared to invest the sustained effort that reaching high-level proficiency requires. Manchester's strong languages department and its international research connections provide an excellent environment for this kind of intensive, culturally rich language study. The skills you develop, close reading, writing precisely in a second language, cross-cultural understanding, and sustained independent research, are highly valued across many professional fields. Graduates work in translation and interpreting, education, the diplomatic and civil service, publishing, arts management, international business, journalism, and a wide range of roles where Italian-language capability and European cultural knowledge are genuinely useful. Many continue to postgraduate study in Italian, comparative literature, or European studies.
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