Geography and History

A joint honours degree allows you to study the same core topics as students on each single honours course, but you’ll take fewer optional and discovery modules so you can fit in both subjects.

Your first year will be spent studying core modules in each subject, introducing you to the key concepts and research methods you’ll need for the rest of your degree. You’ll study historiography, develop research skills, discover the key concepts in human geography and apply them to a study of Leeds.

Over the next two years, you’ll continue to build a firm knowledge base while pursuing your interests and specialising in specific areas of each subject. A core module will allow you to apply different approaches to human and economic geography, while you’ll also choose from optional modules in each subject.

You’ll keep some balance across historical periods, but you’ll have choices in history from the early medieval period to the present day alongside geographies of migration, globalisation, population studies and fieldwork modules. In your final year, you’ll focus on a period or topic in depth in your special subject. You’ll then be able to specialise even further when you apply the skills you’ve gained to a topic of your choice in your dissertation.

Course structure

These are typical modules/components studied and may change from time to time. Read more in our Terms and conditions.

Modules Year 1

Compulsory modules

• Local to Global: Geographies of a Changing World (Joint Honours) 20 credits
• People, Place and Politics (Joint Honours) 20 credits
• Historiography and Historical Skills 20 credits
• Primary Sources for the Historian: An Introduction to Documentary study 20 credits
• Studying in a Digital Age (Arts) 5 credits

Optional modules

• Nature, Society and Environment 20 credits

Year 2

Compulsory modules

• Research Methods: Ideas and Practice in Human Geography 30 credits

Optional modules

• Political and Development Geographies 20 credits
• Inside European Cities 20 credits
• Living within limits: natural resource management for sustainable development 20 credits
• Environment and Environmentalism in Britain, c. 1750-1972 20 credits
• Russia under the Romanovs, 1812-1917 20 credits
• Black Politics from Emancipation to Obama 20 credits
• Mao Zedong and Modern China, 1949-Present 20 credits

Year 3

Optional modules

• Urban and Regional Development: A Case Study of Athens 20 credits
• Advanced Population & Health Geographies 20 credits
• Management of Wilderness and Global Ecosystems 20 credits
• Spaces of Migration and Encounter 20 credits
• Tradition and Modernity in Colonial Africa: Uganda's Kingdoms 1862-1964 40 credits
• The Cultural History of Venice, 1509-1797 40 credits
• The Soviet Sixties: Politics and Society in the USSR, 1953-1968 40 credits
• Colonising Animals: More-than-Human Histories of Empire in Asia 40 credits