History

Fascinated by the past? Want to make a difference in the present? Develop practical and professional skills with our applied History degree.

• Develop practical and professional skills and apply them to contemporary challenges, issues and debates.

• Use your understanding of evidence and your ability to analyse information to solve problems and challenge convention.

• Explore the next stage in your career - our graduates have gone on to work with leading employers in a wide range of different roles.

Apply your knowledge of History to contemporary challenges, issues and debates. Our innovative History degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge alongisde practical and professional skills.

Our History course is inspiring, innovative and compelling. Our 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 and tracing their international connections.

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

Develop practical and professional skills

Working collaboratively with a wide range of disciplines, we offer a unique approach to learning in and outside your subject.

You’ll 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 you’ll also learn 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.

Our programmes are taught by people whose research embraces past and present, abstract concepts and physical structures. It crosses continents. You'll analyse big data and tiny fragments of text, and explore objects and images, the rhetoric of power, the gaps in the narrative.

What can you do with a History degree?

Our research has impact internationally, nationally and locally. Our teaching draws on this and on our work as policy advisors, trustees, fundraisers, advocates, curators, conservators, broadcasters, game designers, web editors, poets. Our graduates go on to do all of these things – and more.

Year One - Introductions and foundations: develop your historical skills and follow a broad curriculum which allows you to ask questions, challenge your own assumptions, interrogate evidence, data and opinions.

Year Two - Practical, applied, relevant: this year combines the academic study of your chosen topics with the acquisition of professional skills and the application of your knowledge and understanding to a defined problem or idea.

Year Three - Achievement, consolidation, creativity: your final project in the third year brings all this together. You’ll identify your own historical questions, develop your proposal and put it into practice. This might be an extended piece of academic writing, but it might also be an exhibition, community project, or the creation of digital resources.

We’ll assess your progress in a variety of ways including essays, research papers, group presentations, projects, portfolios, and reports. There are timed assessments and some modules may have end-of-year examinations.

Our assessment methods allow you to develop and demonstrate different skills. Many of these will help you in the workplace, for example: planning ahead, working to deadlines, and managing priorities.

Remember that you’ll be devising your own projects and research questions, giving you the freedom to develop your own expertise, supported by your tutors, our partners and your peers.