These Russell Group unis are the best in the world for arts and humanities – see where yours ranks

Gals, the World University Rankings by Subject 2025 just dropped. The world’s leading unis have all been ranked by how good they are for each subject. Loads of the UK’s Russell Group unis made it into the top 200 universities in the world for arts and humanities in 2025. Slay. Here’s where all the Russell Group unis ranked on this list, so you can see how impressive (or unimpressive) your uni course is, and panic accordingly.

QS Top Universities works out this annual ranking by looking at several factors including how employable the grads are, how much research the department does, and how good actual professors think the uni is.

Unsurprisingly, the best two Russell Group unis for arts and humanities are the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. Only Harvard University beat Oxbridge in the world ranking. Loads of other UK unis actually aren’t far behind Oxbridge on the list. The University of Edinburgh is officially the 10th best uni in the world for arts and humanities. This makes total sense to me, since Edinburgh Uni appears to be stuffed with humanities students who exclusively wear trench coats from vintage charity shops and think they’re unique for listening to Lana Del Rey and reading Wuthering Heights.

The only non-Russell Group UK unis to make the top 100 are University of St Andrews (which ranked 58th), Lancaster University (which ranked 76th) and the University of Reading (which ranked 92nd).

Imperial College London is the only Russell Group uni not on this list, presumably because it’s so STEM-focused.

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So, here are where all the UK’s Russell Group unis rank in the world for arts and humanities in 2025. The first number is where they rank among Russell Group unis, then the ordinal number in brackets is the position they are in the world.

23. Queen’s University Belfast (194th)

22. University of Southampton (180th)

21. Cardiff University (151st)

Some real-life Cardiff humanities girlies

20. University of Liverpool (141st)

19. University of Nottingham (121st)

18. University of Exeter (90th)

17. University of Bristol (88th)

16. University of Sheffield (82nd)

15. Queen Mary University of London (81st)

14. University of York (75th)

13. University of Birmingham (72nd)

12. Newcastle University (71st)

11. University of Warwick (63rd)

10. University of Glasgow (61st)

Presumably these Glasgow students are celebrating how highly their uni ranks for arts and humanities

9. University of Leeds (54th)

8. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (54th)

7. Durham University (43rd)

6. University of Manchester (36th)

5. King’s College London (17th)

4. University College London (UCL) (11th)

3. University of Edinburgh (10th)

2. University of Cambridge (3rd)

1. University of Oxford (2nd)

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Featured image of the University of Edinburgh by Stinglehammer via Creative Commons.