History With Foundation Year (Ba): 4-Year, Full-Time

Our BA History with Foundation Year offers you a huge range of modules, stretching around the world and across thousands of years. The degree combines this wide choice with a carefully structured framework which will help you to build your skills as a historian year on year.

Our expertise underpins our teaching. We are one of the very few history departments in the UK to include archaeologists, classicists and historians working on every period from prehistoric humans to Ancient Greece to medieval, early modern and modern societies. Our expertise encompasses much of the globe, with over 40 specialists in, for example, Ancient Rome, medieval Byzantium, colonial India and modern China, as well as Tudor London, Nazi Germany, and much more. You will be able to pursue interests in British, European and global history, and explore themes within histories of ‘race’, migration, gender and sexuality.

The BA History with Foundation Year gives you the opportunity to acquire analytical skills and critical approaches that will enable you to assess historical evidence for yourself and question accepted wisdom about the past. You will enhance your career prospects by developing the ability to formulate and communicate your own ideas effectively. We help you to develop these skills systematically through three 'How to' modules which form the backbone of the degree. For these modules you will join other students and experienced historians to explore the study of the past together.

‘The historian's task is not simply to discover the past but to explain it, and in doing so to provide a link with the present.’ (Professor Eric Hobsbawm, former Birkbeck historian)