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Full Time: 3 Years
Take a journey through time with BA History - from crusading in the High Middle Ages to anarchy in the UK. Complement your learning with a study abroad option and improve your employability with our exciting work placements.
Discover a thousand years of history whilst experiencing all the specialist areas on offer at the University of Reading, including Britain, Europe, Africa, America, the Middle East and South Asia. Your first year acts as an introduction and helps you identify your particular areas of interest. You will explore people, politics and revolution, and culture and concepts. We will teach you the skills you need to study and research history, and you will start to shape your own degree through your choice of optional modules.
You can immerse yourself in modules covering subjects such as crusading, witchcraft and heresy; fascism and communism; gender and culture; and politics and colonialism.
You will be taught in small interactive seminar groups, encouraging discussion and debate with teaching staff and fellow students. We place a great deal of importance on employability skills, and our modules History Education, Discovering Archives and Collections, and Going Public all offer you short work placements and act as an introduction to career ideas. In 2020, we achieved a 91% satisfaction score for the teaching on our BA History course in the National Student Survey (for more details, ask us at www.reading.ac.uk/question).
Field trips in the UK and abroad give you the opportunity to see history in context, for example at Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire, Winchester, Westminster, and further afield in Paris and Berlin. Additionally, you can choose to spend a term in your second year at one of our partner universities in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia. We encourage all our students to take up this opportunity as it can open your eyes to new areas of history and build your confidence and skills.
Placement
Placements are a prominent feature of our degree courses and highly encouraged. Through our links with the Careers Centre, you can source potential employers and help with CVs and letters of application. Staff in the department also have close links with the university’s Institute of Education, Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) and Special Collections (archives), and with external organisations such as Cliveden House, English Heritage, Reading Museum, Reading Borough Library and the Berkshire Record Office.
Placements are a good way to show you how you can use the skills acquired through studying history in the real world. In History we ensure that placements are incorporated into your core learning. In the second year, we offer opportunities for short group placements in museums and heritage organisations, and encourage students to reflect on what they have learned from previous employment or voluntary work experience. For third years, two optional modules offer placements of 10 working days in local archives and secondary schools.
You also have the option to study abroad for a term in the second year. Some of the universities we have links with include University of Ottawa, Canada; University of Maastricht, Netherlands; University of Georgia, USA; and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
For more information, please visit the Department of History website.
Typical offer A Level BBB | IB 30 points overall
What will you study?
How much will it cost?
New UK/EU students: £9,250* per year
New international students: £17,320 per year
* UK and EU fee changes
UK undergraduate fees are regulated by the government. These fees are subject to parliamentary approval and any decision on raising the tuition fees cap for new UK and EU** students would require the formal approval of both Houses of Parliament before it becomes law.
From 2020, the UK government may link tuition fees to the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).
**EU students
For more information on fees, loans and grants for EU students, see fees and funding for home/EU students.
Additional costs
These course fees cover the cost of your tuition. Some courses will require additional payments for field trips and extra resources. You will also need to budget for your accommodation and living costs. See our information on living costs for more details.
Financial support for your studies
You may be eligible for a scholarship or bursary to help pay for your study. Students from the UK and other EU countries may also be eligible for a student loan to help cover these costs. See our fees and funding information for more information on what's available.
Flexible courses (price per 10 credit module)
Home/EU students: £750
International students: £1275
What career can you have?
Throughout your degree you will complete career and skills related modules, encouraging you to think about what career you would like and what skills you will need. Our second-year module Going Public: Presenting the Past, Planning the Future gives you the opportunity to consider your future career options.
If you would like a career in teaching, or in archives or records management, try our optional third-year modules: History Education and Discovering Archives and Collections. We have had a high success rate from students who have completed History Education, with many of our graduates gaining places for Initial Teacher Training. Additionally, both these modules help develop a wide range of interpersonal, organisational, presentational and research skills readily transferable to other areas of employment.
Our graduates have a broad range of transferable skills, including the ability to think clearly and critically, to communicate with confidence and work effectively both individually and as part of a team. Our graduates are valued by employers for their research, analytical, teamwork and communication skills. 93% of graduates from the Department of History are in work or further study 15 months after the end of their course [1].
Recent employers have included The British Museum, The Football Association, The House of Commons, Marks and Spencer, MI5, Morgan Stanley and Siemens Financial Services.
[1] Graduate Outcomes Survey 2017/18; First Degree responders from History.