Why Study Liberal Arts? 

Liberal Arts programmes provide a flexible, multidisciplinary alternative to Single Honours and Joint Honours programmes, giving you the opportunity to pursue your interests in a variety of areas.

Durham’s Liberal Arts programme, in common with other Liberal Arts and Combined Honours programmes, provides a framework within which you can study a wide range of subjects in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. These programmes offer you both breadth, through the study of several subjects, and depth, through increasing specialisation in the later stages of your studies. This encourages you to make connections between your subjects and foster the development of interdisciplinary perspectives. Some of the programmes require or strongly recommend the study of a modern language, and many offer you a chance to study or work abroad for a year. 

Graduates of Liberal Arts and related programmes are highly employable, not only on account of the knowledge, understanding, and skills which they have acquired in each of their subjects but also, and more fundamentally, because of the broad range of their skills, their adaptability, their capacity to make connections, and their independence of mind. 

Why Study it at Durham? 

Our Liberal Arts programme is one of the three multidisciplinary programmes which have enabled generations of students to specialise in two or more subjects at Durham University. Through Combined Honours in Arts, Combined Honours in Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences, the University has played a leading role in the provision of multidisciplinary programmes for many years. Drawing on this experience, the Liberal Arts programme provides a highly flexible framework for multidisciplinary studies in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. 

The Liberal Arts programme enables you to put together a programme of study reflecting your specific interests and aspirations. Every student is unique, and while some combinations of subjects are more popular than others, it is rare for any two students to be studying exactly the same combination of modules. The Liberal Arts programme is the framework within which all of these individual and distinctive programmes of study develop.