History and Philosophy and Ethics BA (Hons)/BSc (Hons)

History

Our innovative History degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge while developing practical and professional skills that you can apply to contemporary challenges, issues and debates.

Our History course is inspiring, innovative and compelling. We start with our amazing location – the Newton Park campus is beautiful, but it’s also a historic resource in its own right and a way into a wide range of historical subjects and approaches – from reading a landscape to analysing the symbols of wealth and power.

The cities of Bath and Bristol, right on our doorstep, offer an extraordinary wealth of material for historical study. Bristol, after all, is the city where the statue of Edward Colston was toppled into the river, and made us all reflect on the ways in which history continues to shape the present. The subject is vital: we need to understand where we’ve been, to have a sense of where we might go next.

We also offer a unique approach to learning in and outside your subject. We work collaboratively with a wide range of disciplines to offer you the best possible foundation for your studies, so that you can place history in context and make connections across time and place. In the first and second year, this means that you’ll deepen your knowledge of history, but also develop your understanding of it through work in literature, philosophy or politics – the ways in which we see the world, and the ways others do. In your final year, you’ll be able to produce a major piece of historical work of your own, building on and demonstrating the skills you’ve already acquired.

Philosophy and Ethics

Our innovative Philosophy and Ethics degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge while developing practical and professional skills that you can apply to contemporary challenges, issues and debates.

The course explores the assumptions, beliefs and values which shape human behaviour and our responses to it, and addresses the key questions which underpin all academic disciplines and concepts. This means that it is important in its own right, and fundamental to our study of history, literature, the arts and sciences.