Program Overview

Continue your studies with a top history department and develop under the guidance of world-leading academics. We are ranked first among all History departments in the country for the social and cultural impact of our research.

Our innovative MA programme connects the local to the global. The study of everyday life is central to the identity of the University’s History Group, and this is reflected in the range of modules we offer.

Covering the period from 1550 to the present, you will explore the impact of big historical forces on ordinary lives, examining how the past affects us today as individuals and as communities.

You’ll take two subject modules in the first semester. Money-makers, Murderers, Medics and Mothers uncovers the multifaceted nature of women’s lives in the 17th and 18th centuries. In History from the Street: People's Lives from the C19th to the Present Day, you’ll examine the impact of global change on everyday life in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the second semester, you’ll take Customs, Rights, Resistance and Community Culture, 1714-1914, which looks at the nature of the customary rights upheld by rural and urban communities in England, and the social tensions that arose from their erosion by social, economic and religious changes over the period.

Alongside these, you’ll take two research methods modules. The first will support you as you transition from undergraduate to postgraduate studies, while the second will train you to write for, and present to, different audiences and help you prepare for your 15,000-word dissertation. This is the culmination of the MA programme and an opportunity for you to develop a research project on a topic of your choice, under expert supervision.

Offered as a one-year full-time course or part-time over two years, throughout this MA you will be taught by our prize-winning academics, who publish widely and contribute regularly to national and international television and radio. Recent publications include Professor Owen Davies’s A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith During the First World War, Dr Katrina Navickas’s Protest and the Politics of Space and Place 1789 – 1848, Professor Jonathan Morris’s Coffee: A Global History and Dr Jennifer Evans’s Maladies and Medicine, 1540-1740.