Program Overview

Our innovative History degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge while developing practical and professional skills that you can apply to contemporary challenges, issues and debates.

Our History course is inspiring, innovative and compelling. We start with our amazing location – the Newton Park campus is beautiful, but it’s also a historic resource in its own right and a way into a wide range of historical subjects and approaches – from reading a landscape to analysing the symbols of wealth and power.

The cities of Bath and Bristol, right on our doorstep, offer an extraordinary wealth of material for historical study. Bristol, after all, is the city where the statue of Edward Colston was toppled into the river, and made us all reflect on the ways in which history continues to shape the present. The subject is vital: we need to understand where we’ve been, to have a sense of where we might go next.

We also offer a unique approach to learning in and outside your subject. We work collaboratively with a wide range of disciplines to offer you the best possible foundation for your studies, so that you can place history in context and make connections across time and place. In the first and second year, this means that you’ll deepen your knowledge of history, but also develop your understanding of it through work in literature, philosophy or politics – the ways in which we see the world, and the ways others do. In your final year, you’ll be able to produce a major piece of historical work of your own, building on and demonstrating the skills you’ve already acquired.

Develop practical and professional skills
We want you to become a confident communicator, able to sift through the raw materials of history and re-present your findings to any audience – on any platform. Yes, you’ll write essays. But we also want you to be able to podcast, tweet, blog, create scripts for film and radio, and adapt your style to suit a range of consumers, including young audiences. We also want you to be able to plan and initiate projects, work with your peers and with our external partners, and make a contribution to our wider community.

We combine the academic study of history with skill-based modules to create our ‘hands-on’ History degree. You could find yourself learning to write a funding application for one of your modules, and sifting through primary sources at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre or Bath City Archives on another.

You’ll gain broad historical skills and expertise – how to read historical texts; how to use a wide range of historical sources; how to discuss and debate historical subjects. You’ll also learn to analyse, process information, make decisions, manage projects, network, collaborate, and work with experts inside and outside of the University.