Italian
Italian language and culture are a celebration of beauty, passion, and love of life. If you love Venice and Rome, opera, Italian film, Dante, Pirandello and Calvino, come and study Italian with us. Our courses allow you to develop your interest at every level, from Italian language-learning short courses to programmes at BA degree level, Graduate Diploma, MA and PhD.
You will learn the Italian language, meet the sinners in Dante’s Hell, study the Italian novel, experience the censored kisses in Cinema Paradiso, and explore Fellini and contemporary Italian films with us.
Together we will study the Italian Renaissance, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century literature, history, film, Italy's history of art, as well as contemporary Italian culture.
Listen to students talk about what it's like to study languages at Birkbeck.
Italian COURSES
BA DEGREE
You can study Italian on a range of our undergraduate courses, together with another language within our flexible BA Modern Languages. If you are especially interested in how languages work and keen to orient your study towards linguistics, you can study Italian as part of BA Language Teaching and Language or BA Linguistics and Language. Or you can study Italian with another subject as part of a combined honours degree (e.g. English, Film and Media, History, Art History, Journalism, Politics, and Law).
If you focus on Italian in any of our degrees, this will be reflected in your degree title when you graduate.
View Italian BA degree courses.
BA DEGREE WITH YEAR ABROAD
Some undergraduate programmes give you the chance to spend a year abroad, enabling you to further develop your language skills and knowledge of the culture.
View courses with international experience.
BA DEGREE WITH FOUNDATION YEAR
If you haven’t studied for a while or don’t immediately meet our entry requirements, we also offer BA Modern Languages and BA Language Teaching and Language with a Foundation Year. This four-year degree with an in-built foundation year prepares you for study at university level, giving you the skills needed to succeed in the following three years of your course.
View Italian BA degree courses with foundation year.
POSTGRADUATE
If you've already studied for a degree, we offer postgraduate courses to enrich your understanding of Italian.
We offer a Graduate Diploma if you have a degree in another subject or have taken a break from studies but would like to refresh and deepen your knowledge of Italian with a view to further postgraduate study such as an MA, or simply to pursue a personal or intellectual ambition.
Our MA Modern Languages and Comparative Cultures allows you to specialise in Italian. It provides a thorough grounding in the theoretical basis of postgraduate studies in literary and cultural studies in the context of Modern Languages, and is structured flexibly, allowing you to choose a comparative pathway, or to engage in more depth with one or more specific language-speaking areas such as Italian. If you do so, this will be reflected in your degree award: MA Italian Studies.
View Italian postgraduate courses.
SHORT COURSES AND CERTIFICATE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Our year-long short courses improve your language skills and cultural knowledge of Italy. We offer different courses from Italian 1 (A1/Beginner level) to Italian 5 (C1/C2). View Italian short courses.
Birkbeck's Certificate of Higher Education in Linguistics and Languages offers you the chance of taking 120 credits the equivalent of a first year of our BA programme if you prefer not to commit to a full degree programme at this stage. The part-time Culture and Language introductory course enables you to study a language - French, German, Italian, Japanese or Spanish - to intermediate or advanced level, while also exploring the culture, history and society of the countries associated with it.
STUDENT TESTIMONIALS
"For me, studying in the evening was great, because it allowed me to work and support myself. It allowed me to have a bit more freedom with what I wanted to do during the day."
Cristina Bocci, BA Modern Languages student
RESEARCH
Birkbeck has a strong research culture with a variety of disciplinary orientations and interdisciplinary practices, covering from the nineteenth century to the present; we address critically the latest cultural, social, environmental and political developments across Italian communities.
CAMPUS
Birkbeck is located within the beautiful neighbourhood of Bloomsbury in central London, home to libraries, theatres, museums and galleries. At the heart of literary London, you might be studying in a building that was once home to Virginia Woolf and frequented by members of the Bloomsbury Group.