History MA

The MA in History offers you the opportunity to explore a variety of approaches – intellectual, political, cultural, social and economic – across a broad chronological and geographical range. The programme provides a high degree of choice across the department's key areas of expertise, with particular strengths in:

-Medieval and early modern history
-Contemporary British and European history
-Imperial, global and transnational history
-Public history

Given the range of research and teaching in the department, we are confident you will find units that reflect your own interests. Alternatively, you may prefer not to specialise, and instead obtain a broad sense of historical subjects, themes, debates and methodologies.

Programme structure

The MA comprises six taught units and a research dissertation. Teaching on the programme moves from lectures, through seminars, to one-on-one supervision. Likewise, the focus develops from broader units, through more specialised ones, to your chosen dissertation topic.

Teaching Block 1
You begin with a series of core and optional units. All students take Academic Research and Writing and Approaches to History - core MA units that enable you to develop critical research skills and approaches that underlie the later assessments.

You also choose a further unit from a wide range of Lecture Response Units (interactive units that combine seminar and lecture elements) on subjects that span the period from 1000 to the present. Alternatively, in place of the LRU you may choose the specialist skills unit Research Skills for Medievalists, which provides training in palaeography and manuscript studies.

Teaching Block 2
In the second teaching block, you will select three primary source-based seminar units. The following are examples of units that have run in recent years:

Dissertation
In the third semester, you will write a primary source-based dissertation of up to 15,000 words, supervised one-on-one by an academic in the department. You will identify the subject for your dissertation in the spring, but most of the research is conducted over the summer. The dissertation is submitted in mid-September.

Careers

Students who completed the MA programme in History have taken up careers as history teachers, researchers in a number of different fields and image and data capture assistants.

A number of MA graduates have gone on to take an MPhil/PhD in History and develop careers as research academics.