BA History
Cardiff, United Kingdom
DURATION
3 Years
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
Request application deadline
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2025
TUITION FEES
EUR 22,700 / per year *
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* for overseas | for home year two and three: £9,250 / year one: £9,000
Introduction
Our exciting BA History degree lets you shape your passion for history according to your interests, using the latest approaches to study the past with a critical eye and make connections to debates in the public sphere.
Our expertise reaches an extraordinary breadth of societies, periods and places, spanning the British Isles, Europe (east and west), Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Our modules allow you to study well-established areas, such as political, social, cultural and gender history, or explore areas that might be new to you, such as environmental history or digital history.
Crossing this wide range of periods and perspectives, our highly respected programme will train you to analyse topics from across the globe, allowing you to put into practice your skills as a historian. Moreover, prestigious collections in the University’s Special Collections and Archives give you access to a wide range of original texts and sources, including some of the world’s oldest printed books.
While sharing our cutting-edge research in all our modules, we encourage you to re-evaluate existing understandings of the past and to create new and original interpretations of your own. You will become adept at exploring debates, creatively drawing on our robust grounding to examine history of all kinds. In the process, you will develop the skills so advantageous in our digital age: creativity, empathy, critical thinking, persuasive communication skills and the ability to challenge and question.
Your degree culminates with you writing original history, and researching a topic of personal academic interest in your dissertation. Studying at Cardiff means engaging in historical and public debate - and becoming a historian in your own right.
By graduating with a range of academic and practical skills – including teamwork, leadership and communication – the confidence to use them and the ability to see the big picture, you’ll be valued by employers and ideally placed to progress into a range of careers. Taught by leading experts in the field, our BA History gives you the skills, training, and knowledge to succeed.
Why Study this Course
Study with Passion
Explore interests with subjects ranging from slavery in America to Soviet and Japanese history.
Dissertation with a Difference
Explore a topic that sparks your curiosity; enhance multiple skills with a presentation and written element.
Learn from Experts
Benefit from the teaching and support of research-active staff.
Interactive Careers Workshops
Hone your career skills and gain valuable insights into roles and sectors fit for you.
Admissions
Scholarships and Funding
Loans and Grants
Financial support information for students.
Bursaries
We wish to ensure that financial circumstances are not a barrier to your undergraduate study opportunities.
Scholarships
We wish to recruit the very best students and to help us achieve this, we offer several scholarships.
Part-time Undergraduate Funding
Information about funding for part-time students.
Financial Support for Asylum Seekers
Information for asylum seekers about the financial support we offer undergraduates and options for funding from outside the University.
Curriculum
The BA History is structured in such a way that you will acquire over successive years high-level skills to become an independent and critical thinker, equipped for professional employment.
Through a blend of core and optional modules, you will study 120 credits of modules each year.
The modules shown exemplify the typical curriculum and will be reviewed before the 2024/2025 academic year. The final modules will be published by September 2024.
Year One
Your first year lays the foundations for the degree and is made up of modules which are designed to equip you with the skills for advanced study and allow you to explore historical themes and ideas that you may not have encountered before university.
Our core modules introduce you to the different frameworks which underpin historical research and to the big debates over how we understand ‘global’ connections and historical change. Through these modules, you develop your understanding of why historians disagree and gain skills that enable you to participate in these debates.
Optional modules on medieval, early modern and Welsh history give you opportunities to study a variety of periods and regions. You can also take modules which explore themes, such as religion or film, across multiple periods or take modules in ancient history or archaeology, which examine the past from different perspectives and introduce you to different forms of evidence for understanding the past.
Core Modules for Year One
- The Making of The Modern World, 1750-1970
- History in Practice Part 1: Questions, Frameworks and Audiences
- History in Practice Part 2: Sources, Evidence and Argument
- Global Histories
Optional Modules for Year One
- A World Full of Gods
- Projecting the Past: Film, Media and Heritage
- Inventing a Nation: Politics, Culture and Heritage
- Medieval Worlds, AD 500-1500
- Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution
- The Archaeology of Mediterranean Societies: Egypt, Greece and Rome
- The Archaeology of Britain: Prehistory to Present
- The Near East, Greece and Rome, 1000-323 BCE
- Empires East and West, 323 BCE to 680 CE
- The Origins and Legacies of Religion in the Modern World
Year Two
In your second year, optional modules allow you to explore themes across a narrower time range while encouraging a more comparative approach.
Our core modules develop your skills in understanding the past through exploring different approaches to history and the nature of different kinds of historical evidence and ways of using that evidence. You apply these skills as you research a historical debate which interests you with the support of a supervisor and also work collaboratively to explore the historian’s role in sharing research beyond the boundaries of academia and the voices they privilege or silence.
Core Modules for Year Two
- Reading History
- Making History: Historians, Evidence, Audiences
- Debating History
Optional Modules for Year Two
Optional modules for year two
- Dafydd ap Gwilym a'i Gyfnod
- Past, Present and Future
- Everyday Life in Medieval Britain c1200–1600
- A History of the Supernatural
- Accessible Pasts
- The British Civil Wars
- European Enlightenment(s): The View from the Margins
- America: From Revolution to Reconstruction
- Modern France
- Europe's Dark Century
- Stalinism: State, Society, and Environment
- Close Neighbours, Dangerous Foes: China, Japan and Modern East Asia
- Politics and the People in Modern Britain: Protest, Citizenship and the State
- Environmental Histories
- Anti-Colonial Resistance
- Language Skills for Historians
- Chwyldro, Diwylliant a Radicaliaeth, 1789–1914
Year Three
In the final year, you are challenged to think more deeply about the nature of historical developments. You develop your skills at analysing sources and writing history through studying a range of specialist modules on offer.
Supported by one of our expert staff, you will plan and undertake a research dissertation on a topic that is linked to an area you study as part of your degree. The dissertation provides an opportunity for you to develop advanced independent research skills and an in-depth knowledge of a research topic, fully supported by an academic supervisor and a programme of workshops. Our students generally find the dissertation to be the most enjoyable and exciting part of their studies.
Core Modules for Year Three
- Researching History: Dissertation
Optional Modules for Year Three
- Age of Arthur: Myths, History and Identity in Medieval Britain
- Crusading Worlds
- Divided Memory in post-1945 Germany
- East Asia in a Global Second World War
- Digital Games and the Practice of History
- Witchcraft and Witch-Hunting in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1750
- An Information Revolution: Politics and Communication in Early Modern Britain
- Health and Illness in Early Modern Britain
- Mobile Lives: Travel, Exile, and Migration in the Early Modern World
- Slavery and Enslaved Life in the United States, 1775-1865
- Native American History
- Utopias of Extremism: Revolutions in Comparative Context
- Czechoslovakia: The Twentieth Century in Miniature
- Inside the Third Reich
- Violence and Ideology in the Inter-War Soviet Union
- Gender and Imperialism, India c.1800-c.1900
- Change, Conflict, and Mass Mobilisation in Republican China, 1911-1945
- Peripheral Reverberations of the French Revolution
- Mayhem and Murder: Investigating the Victorian Underworld
- The Making of British Socialism
- Britain at War: Culture and Politics on the Home Front, 1939-1945
- Public and Private: Gender, Identities and Power in Twentieth-Century Britain
- Jews, Europe and the World
The University is committed to providing a wide range of module options where possible, but please be aware that whilst every effort is made to offer choice this may be limited in certain circumstances. This is because some modules have limited numbers of places available, which are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, while others have minimum student numbers required before they will run, to ensure that an appropriate quality of education can be delivered; some modules require students to have already taken particular subjects, and others are core or required on the programme you are taking. Modules may also be limited due to timetable clashes, and although the University works to minimise disruption to choice, we advise you to seek advice from the relevant School on the module choices available.
How Will I be Assessed?
Assessments include source criticisms, research projects, reviews, presentations, creative-critical portfolios and blog posts, alongside more traditional forms of assessment such as essays and tests/exams. Some of our assessments allow you to work collaboratively on a project, while others include writing and creating for different audiences; for example, you might be asked to design a museum exhibition or create a guide for using sources; and you may have the opportunity to create podcasts and digital texts for social media. Long essays allow you to address fundamental historical questions or explore a historical issue or debate in more depth.
In all cases, our assessments are designed to support you in developing your ideas, skills and competencies. They help equip you with skills to link your knowledge to local, national and global issues, and encourage you to be innovative and creative; to find new ways to address problems or ask questions; to collaborate in solving problems and presenting findings; and to present evidence-based arguments. The skills developed and assessed throughout the programme prepare you for entry into a range of graduate careers. Individual and group feedback on assessments and other learning provides you with the opportunity to reflect on your current or recent level of attainment.
Program Outcome
What skills will I Practise and Develop?
The Learning Outcomes for this Programme describe what you will be able to do as a result of your study at Cardiff University. They will help you to understand what is expected of you.
The Learning Outcomes for this Programme can be found below:
Knowledge & Understanding
On successful completion of the Programme you will be able to:
- KU1: engage critically and conceptually with the changing assumptions and methods that historians use to explain the past
- KU2: identify and critically analyse the diversity of human history, continuity, and change, across a wide geographical and chronological range
- KU3: demonstrate systematic knowledge and understanding of the complexity and diversity of the past in a single country or relation to a particular theme
- KU4: demonstrate a critical awareness of the limits of historical knowledge and the evolving nature of that knowledge and understanding
Intellectual Skills
On successful completion of the Programme you will be able to:
- IS1: critically evaluate the nature of historiographical agreement and disagreement
- IS2: utilise knowledge and appropriate skills and methods to identify and critically evaluate historical change
- IS3: formulate and justify arguments about a range of historical issues, problems, and debates using historiographical ideas and methods
- IS4: identify and locate appropriate primary sources, reflect upon their nature, and analyse them critically to address questions and solve problems
Professional Practical Skills
On successful completion of the Programme you will be able to:
- PS1: demonstrate critical thinking, reasoning, and the ability to assimilate and summarise complex information and ideas through the independent selection and critical analysis of an appropriate range of evidence
- PS2: ask cogent and focused questions and pursue answers to these questions through structured enquiry, selecting and interrogating an appropriate range of evidence
- PS3: summarise and critically appraise the relative merits and demerits of alternative views and interpretations and evaluate their significance
- PS4: design, undertake, and present an historical, historiographical, or conceptual research project
Transferable/Key Skills
On successful completion of the Programme you will be able to:
- TS1: present complex findings and arguments, concisely, and persuasively in a variety of formats
- TS2: show enterprise skills to solve problems and analyse diverse, partial or ambiguous evidence using critical thinking, initiative, and creativity
- TS3: prepare and give a presentation and provide clear and accurate supporting materials in an appropriate format
- TS4: effectively manage your learning
- TS5: effectively communicate complex information and arguments to diverse audiences, either individually or collaboratively as part of a team
Program Tuition Fee
Career Opportunities
We encourage our students to think about life beyond university from day one, offering modules and support to give them a competitive advantage on graduating no matter what path they follow.
Our degree equips you with a lively and critical understanding of the past, its enduring legacies, and how it connects to the present, and important skills which employers value from collaborative working and communicating with a wide range of audiences to critical thinking and finding new ways to address problems. We provide you with opportunities to attain and develop enterprise skills as you progress from pitching your ideas on global history on first-year modules and working collaboratively on a project in year 2 to credit-bearing placements in year 2 and your final year. A range of option modules extend these opportunities and support you to develop these skills further.
Training and career events are delivered in and out of the curriculum with a focus on developing skills while in university and articulating those skills successfully in future applications. We work closely with Student Futures who not only deliver training and workshops on our core modules but also offer a wealth of opportunities. Beyond your formal studies, we run programmes that provide you with opportunities to engage with local schools and communities or work with local heritage organisations to develop your skills and profile whilst allowing you to make a difference.
The Cardiff Award provides you with a framework through which to develop your employability, while you can take advantage of a wide range of university programmes from Languages for All (to try out or improve your language skills) to support from the Enterprise and Start-Up team to bring your ideas to life.
Graduate Careers
- Broadcast journalist
- Lawyer
- Advertising executive
- Teacher
- Historian