MA in History

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. It is designed to develop and test your ability to carry out investigations into primary sources, to refine your analytical and theoretical skills, and to deepen and broaden your knowledge of the past.

The MA offers a high degree of choice. You may choose to specialise in one of the following areas, representing a number of key strengths of the Department:

• Medieval and Early Modern History
• Cultural and Intellectual History
• Contemporary History
• Empires and Colonial History
• Public History

Alternatively, you may prefer not to specialise, but to obtain a broad sense of historical subjects, themes, debates and methodologies. The MA comprises a six-unit taught element delivered through seminars, and a research element (the dissertation). For the dissertation, you will undertake a substantial piece of individual research, which engages with primary sources, under the supervision of a dedicated academic supervisor.

Core Units

• Approaches to History
• Research Methods
Plus one of the following 'pathway' units:
• Research Skills for Medievalists
• Themes in Contemporary History
• Themes in the Study of Colonialism
• Themes in Cultural and Intellectual History
• Themes in Cultural and Intellectual History

Optional Units

You will also take three optional units. These vary from year to year; the following are examples of units that have run in recent years:

• The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture and Society
• The English Reformation
• Persecution and Toleration: Dealing with Difference in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
• Poetics, Politics and Places of Memory: Remembering the Holocaust, 1945 to the present
• Public History in Theory and Practice
• Ideology, Poverty, Famines
• Academic and Mystical Approaches to God
• Medieval and Early Modern Colonialism: the English in Ireland
• Modern Sexualities
• Bristol, c1000-1542
• Madness and Empire
• Building New Britains
• Making History Public

You may also take optional units from other departments, including units on Latin American History, Russian History and the History of Art.

Dissertation

You will be required to research and write a dissertation of up to 15,000 words on a project of your choice, advised by a member of the academic staff. The dissertation accounts for 60 credit points. You will identify the subject for your dissertation in the spring, and begin work on it then, but most of the research is conducted over the summer. The dissertation is submitted in mid-September.