BA History

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, Russia, 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 Public History all offer you short work placements and act as an introduction to career ideas. In 2019, we achieved a 91% satisfaction score for the teaching on BA History 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.