Undergraduate

History

Hull History student, Dane Mellows, sits smiling with an open book and the sun resplendent behind him.
Hull History student, Andrew Ede, walking by the Hull Transport Museum in the Museums Quarter of the Old Town.
Hull History student, Hannah England, sits smiling with an open book in the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull.
The Wilberforce House Museum sign, red with gold lettering, above the entrance to the house: a Grade I listed building.

Look around

Open up a range of careers: historian, heritage manager, archaeologist, museum conservator, auctioneer, archivist, teacher, journalist, marketer…
Gain CV-boosting work experience through our strong links with local museums, archives, galleries, and the Hull History Network.
Criticise sources of historical information from newspapers to computer games. And develop your own ideas through podcasts and online exhibitions.
Study in a city that’s steeped in history. Explore the Hull History Centre, the Blaydes Maritime Centre, and the world renowned Wilberforce Institute.
Explore archives dating back to 1299, including papers owned by some of Hull's most notable figures: Amy Johnson and William Wilberforce.
Hull History student, Dane Mellows, sits smiling with an open book and the sun resplendent behind him.
Hull History student, Andrew Ede, walking by the Hull Transport Museum in the Museums Quarter of the Old Town.
Hull History student, Hannah England, sits smiling with an open book in the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull.
The Wilberforce House Museum sign, red with gold lettering, above the entrance to the house: a Grade I listed building.
Hull History Centre

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Code

Duration

Mode

  • Standard course
  • With a foundation year

Illuminate the past. Tackle the present. Shape the future. Join us on a journey to gain historical knowledge and take on today’s most pressing challenges.

Our understanding of History influences how we live our lives today. At Hull, we balance the thrill of fresh discoveries with familiar topics. Along the way you’ll develop key techniques for historians, and gain transferable skills all employers value.

You’ll also get the chance to work with local museums, archives and galleries. And take part in voluntary work placements with the Hull History Network.

  • 100% of students

    in work or further study 15 months after graduating 1

  • Access to our Rare Books Collection

    highlights include Machiavelli amongst others

  • Top grade

    for research impact 3

  • Boost your CV

    on a Hull History Network placement

  • Historical archives

    at Hull History Centre

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Course overview
Module options

About this course

You’ll engage with social and cultural history. With war and politics. With the powerful and the underdog. With sudden events. And with long-term change. You’ll uncover the historical roots of contemporary social, political and environmental challenges. From classical civilisations to modern communities, you’ll explore how all different periods of history continue to influence our world, and to help us understand it better.

Our assessments aim to reflect the real world. Instead of a series of exams, you'll be encouraged to express your ideas in a variety of ways. To criticise sources of historical information from newspapers to computer games. And to develop your own ideas through channels such as podcasts and online exhibitions. That way, you gain the range of skills you’ll need for the workplace.

You’ll benefit from the resources of a city that’s steeped in history. Explore the Hull History Centre, the Blaydes Maritime Centre, and the world renowned Wilberforce Institute. And, of course, there’s the Brynmor Jones Library. Here, we have more than a million books, journals and periodicals. As well as extensive digital resources drawn from libraries and archives across the world.

Scheduled study hours and how you’re assessed

Throughout your degree, you’re expected to study for 1,200 hours per year. That’s based on 200 hours per 20 credit module. And it includes scheduled hours, time spent on placement and independent study. How this time is divided across the year varies and depends on the module you are studying.

How you'll be assessed depends on the course you study, and the modules you choose. You may be assessed through a mix of examinations, coursework, presentations and group projects.

Choose your modules

Each year, you’ll study modules worth a certain number of credits, and you need 120 credits per year. Most modules are 20 credits – so you’ll study six modules each year. Some longer modules, such as a dissertation, are worth more. In these cases, you’ll study fewer modules - but the number of credits will always add up to 120. Some modules are compulsory, some are optional, so you can build a course that’s right for you.

Preparing for Learning in Higher Education

This module is designed to give you the best possible start to your university studies, making sure you have all the essential skills you need to succeed. Through lectures and workshops we will teach you how to write in an academic style, how to find quality sources, how to reference work, culminating in writing up a mini-research project.

Core•20 credits

Introduction to Study in the Humanities

This module equips you with a suite of analytical and theoretical tools to support you as you progress along your academic journey. You'll develop an interdisciplinary understanding of approaches to study in the humanities by working with a variety of resources, including novels, films and aspects of the visual arts.

Core•20 credits

Research in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Education

This module will equip you with the necessary skills to conduct and analyse research in a specific interest, supported by academics within your subject. You'll navigate through the research process, from identifying an area of interest to presenting their findings to your peers.

Core•20 credits

Group Challenge (Humanities)

Formulate and execute a group led enquiry into texts, cultural artifacts, film, music or dance. You'll explore their topics in groups at supervised workshops and develop questions on the cultural object relates to the living world of human experience, as well as developing your own methods to answer these questions.

Compulsory•20 credits

Foundation in Data Analysis

Develop a strong foundation in data collection and analysis. This module will introduce you to qualitative and quantitative data and how to analyse it; the collection of primary and secondary data; the production of high quality graphics; and report writing.

Compulsory•20 credits

Academic Writing Skills

Developing confidence in expression, oral as well as written, is a key feature of this module, which also aims to familiarise you with submission and assessment procedures in the context of Higher Education. This is a clear building block onto your degree programme and places you at a distinct advantage when you move into the following year.

Compulsory•20 credits

The foundation year has been designed to prepare you for learning at degree level. 
6 Modules

History of Freedom

What does it mean to be free and how has the answer to this question changed over time? In ancient and medieval times, there was no expectation of individual freedom as we understand it today, rather there were degrees of ‘unfreedom’ such as slavery, serfdom, or vassalage. Later, in the age of empire, race determined who could be enslaved, and the slave trade’s legacies of racism persist into the present day: the civil rights movements and the struggle against apartheid are known as some of the most prominent recent fights for freedom. Nonetheless, the idea of freedom has far broader connotations, and you will also have the flexibility to explore diverse issues such as religious, cultural or personal freedoms.

Compulsory•20 credits

Revolutions: Continuity and Change

Revolutions are processes and events of profound and enduring change, but they are not just about politics. Before the great revolutions in America, France, Haiti and Russia, global history experienced sweeping changes in society, ideas and technology. Revolutions are not modern phenomena, and they do not belong strictly to Europe: they are ancient and they have taken place all over the globe since the beginning of ‘recorded’ history. This module will widen your perspective on ‘revolutions’ by examining a number of revolutionary moments in world history, from ancient times to the present. These will range across technological, social, religious and political revolutions.

Compulsory•20 credits

All Roads Lead from Rome: the Classical Present

No matter how modern we think we are, we’re still shaped by the classical past. In every age, the classical world has been used as a benchmark for good taste and has been re-invented for present purposes. Using the artworks, archaeology and artefacts of material and visual culture, this module will explore topics such as how the classical world provided a blueprint for the projection of power through imagery and architecture. From the posturing of great leaders, such as the portraits of Napoleon, to the grand civic buildings of Washington DC or Albert Speer’s designs for Hitler’s Berlin, the classical world has been influential throughout history.

Compulsory•20 credits

Human Worlds

How have humans shaped their environment, and how has the environment shaped them in return? These questions have controlled how and where we live. The availability of resources has encouraged migration and movement from the trade routes of the Silk Road across Asia to the imperial web of coaling stations that developed for the projection of naval power. How do cities grow – like St Petersburg, Delhi or Paris, built and rebuilt that has affected how generations of inhabitants later would live their lives?

Compulsory•20 credits

World War Tudors: Rethinking British History

Why are TV programmes so obsessed with certain episodes in British history such as the Tudors and the world wars? What idea of Britain is conveyed when we focus on a narrow range of stories like Boudicca’s fight against Rome, victory at Agincourt, Henry VIII’s wives or the Battle of Britain? What gets left out of British history in these simplified versions of the past? This module will invite you to critique popular culture, such as television documentaries or computer games, and to create different fresh ideas for how you think the public could engage with an aspect of the past that inspires you.

Compulsory•20 credits

History in the News

What are the historical roots of what is happening now? You will help to shape the course by identifying some of the most pressing and interesting issues of the world today. We will then work together to research different perspectives on these themes by finding out historical background and historical parallels that help to explain them. The decision as to what we should explore together lies in your hands.

Compulsory•20 credits
6 Modules

Global Britain and its Past

Develop specialist skills such as using technology to map time and space, visual literacy, or oral history interviewing whilst learning about the expansion of the English across the British Isles and then across the world as an empire was built.

Compulsory•20 credits

History: Then and Now

This module explores how historians shape and debate the past. Should we study the past on its own terms as we act as neutral observers who are guided by what the sources tell us, or do historians mould the past into their own image, re-writing history for new purposes depending on each historian’s subjective preferences? In this module, we will consider these questions of objectivity, facts, bias, distortion, as well as the need for historians to return to the past and consider it from points of view that are relevant to the present.

Compulsory•20 credits

History Group Project

Using all of the skills you’ve developed through the programme to date to create a piece of public-facing history in cooperation with your peers. You’ll have the freedom and flexibility to choose the historical topic and the means by which you present it. Possible ideas include an exhibition, podcast, a website or something else that you find an effective tool for exploring the past.

Compulsory•20 credits

The First Superpowers

While Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union were the dominant nations of the 19th and 20th centuries, they were not the first superpowers. Some of the world’s most powerful entities of pre-modern times were found in Asia, pre-colonial North America, and in the heart of Europe. The ancient and modern world was formed by superpowers, from the Qin Dynasty of ancient China, to the equestrian empires of the Lakota and Comanche, to the Holy Roman and Ottoman empires that shaped history at the centre and edges of an expanding Europe.

Compulsory•20 credits

Trends and Treasures

Using the framework of ‘Treasures and Trends’ we seek to examine how and why different societies (at different points in time) value and classify visual and material remains of the past, often in order to negotiate and understand their contemporary relevance. Looking at trends and fashion as a barometer of taste, popularity, consumerism and acquisitiveness also allows us to explore ways in which these have been shaped by, and further gave shape to material and visual culture, often involving complex networks of trade and exchange that connect local and national histories with wider global forces.

Optional•20 credits

Interactions and Exchanges: The Roots of Globalisation

This module is about how people and societies have connected, communicated, clashed, exchanged and evolved over a long span of human history. Focussing on the period of the Columbian Exchange (1492), the emergence of global empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the present-day ‘global village’ the module will examine the connections between peoples, the movement and flow of people, things, and ideas, the disruptive effects of war and environmental change, and the connections between the local and the global.

Optional•20 credits

Shamans, Priests and Witches

People have often looked to the gods to explain the world around them and magic and the devil are often invoked at times of strife and trouble. This module will look at how religion and ritual have developed in key areas of the globe and how people have understood the world around them.

Optional•20 credits

Being Human

What are the limits and boundaries of humanity? How do we define and explain human experience? How do modern concerns such as ‘family,’ ‘gender,’ ‘sexuality,’ and ‘childhood’ refer back to the way earlier identities were explained and constructed? How different to us were people in the past? These questions go to the heart of what it is to be both human and an individual.

Optional•20 credits

Family, Sex and Death

What are the limits and boundaries of humanity? How do we define and explain human experience? How do modern concerns such as ‘family,’ ‘gender,’ ‘sexuality,’ and ‘childhood’ refer back to the way earlier identities were explained and constructed? How different to us were people in the past? These questions go to the heart of what it is to be both human and an individual.

Optional•20 credits
9 Modules

Capstone Project

This year-long project will be the pinnacle of your undergraduate studies with us. Follow your passion for a particular topic, develop and research your project and then present it as you choose. It might be a traditional dissertation (12,000 words of writing) or you might channel your scholarship into perhaps a documentary or an exhibition as a way of conveying your findings. Either way, it will be something you will look back at with pride and satisfaction for years to come.

Compulsory•40 credits

History co-produced module

Our programme is shaped by an ethos of students and staff working in partnership and enabling a flexible approach for students to pursue their interests. This module is the ultimate example of that approach, and it will be designed from scratch by students and staff together, and students will be deeply involved in the design and running of the seminars.

Compulsory•20 credits

The Past in the Present

We began the programme by looking at ‘History in the News’, and we will return to the question of how history shapes our understanding of the issues of the present day. We will consider how the study of history and heritage can contribute to social justice, the fairer distribution of rights, wealth, and resources, and environmental and political challenges.

Compulsory•20 credits

Insiders and Outsiders: Community and Belonging in History

For the ancient Greeks, citizens ruled. But their notion of a citizen was exclusive: men ruled over women, children, slaves, animals and things. In ancient societies, most people were excluded from power, participation, markets, resources and opportunity – they were ‘outsiders’. Over time, or so the story goes, societies have worked to ensure the inclusion of outsiders, whether through voting rights, civil rights, access to educational and career opportunities. This module explores the ways in which groups, communities, and nations determine and decide: who belongs.

Optional•20 credits

Fear and Terror

Are fear and terror the tools of the weak or of the strong? Totalitarian regimes from Stalin to Pinochet’s Chile have used extreme violence, secret police and state sponsored terrorism and assassination to assert their authority. Meanwhile, non-state actors, such as the IRA, Al-Qaeda and the ANC, relatively small in terms of number and weak in terms of infrastructure, have used campaigns of sporadic violence to effect change. Are they ever justified in doing so? Sometimes terror tactics have had important racial and ethnic dimensions as in the exercise of colonial power and in genocidal campaigns. In wartime, is the inducement of fear unavoidable or are atrocities deliberate? Are some acts beyond the pale, to be punished as war crimes? Can Truth and Reconciliation activities in the wake of such acts achieve their goals.

Optional•20 credits

The Vikings and their World

In the early Middle Ages, the Vikings founded new towns and kingdoms, developed new technologies, and crossed the Atlantic 500 years before Columbus. By studying historical, literary and archaeological sources this module will examine the Vikings’ world view and ask why they continue to be so popular today.

Optional•20 credits

Global First World War

The First World War affected every aspect of life and every corner of the map. This module looks at how the experience of empire and shared ideas about race and gender shaped the response to the war. Why were diverse peoples and resources required to serve, but only some were deemed suitable for bearing arms? How and why was the war fought far beyond the Western Front? Why were only some aspects of the violence and destruction of warfare deemed an ‘atrocity’?

Optional•20 credits
7 Modules

Playlist

Dr Jenny Macleod

Course Overview 1 min

History at Hull

Course highlight 1 min

The History of Team GB

Research Highlight 5 mins

Holly Cockerham

Student story 1 min

Entry requirements

What do I need?

We consider experience and qualifications from the UK and worldwide which may not exactly match the combinations above.

But it's not just about the grades - we'll look at your whole application. We want to know what makes you tick, and about your previous experience, so make sure that you complete your personal statement.

Have questions? Our admissions team will be happy to help.

What do I need?

If you require a student visa to study or if your first language is not English you will be required to provide acceptable evidence of your English language proficiency level.

See other English language proficiency qualifications accepted by the University of Hull.

If your English currently does not reach the University’s required standard for this programme, you may be interested in one of our English language courses.

Visit your country page to find out more about our entry requirements.

Fees & funding

How much is it?

Additional costs you may have to pay

Your tuition fees will cover most costs associated with your programme. There are some extra costs that you might have to pay, or choose to pay, depending on your programme of study and the decisions you make:

  • Books (you can borrow books on your reading lists from the library, but you may buy your own)
  • Optional field trips
  • Study abroad (incl. travel costs, accommodation, visas, immunisation)
  • Placement costs (incl. travel costs and accommodation)
  • Student visas (international students)
  • Laptop (you’ll have access to laptops and computers on campus, but you may want your own)
  • Printing and photocopying
  • Professional-body membership
  • Graduation (gown hire and photography)

Remember, you’ll still need to take into account your living costs. This could include accommodation, travel, food and more.

How do I pay for it?

How much is it?

Additional costs you may have to pay

Your tuition fees will cover most costs associated with your programme. There are some extra costs that you might have to pay, or choose to pay, depending on your programme of study and the decisions you make:

  • Books (you can borrow books on your reading lists from the library, but you may buy your own)
  • Optional field trips
  • Study abroad (incl. travel costs, accommodation, visas, immunisation)
  • Placement costs (incl. travel costs and accommodation)
  • Student visas (international students)
  • Laptop (you’ll have access to laptops and computers on campus, but you may want your own)
  • Printing and photocopying
  • Professional-body membership
  • Graduation (gown hire and photography)

Remember, you’ll still need to take into account your living costs. This could include accommodation, travel, food and more.

How do I pay for it?

Our academics

100% of History at Hull received the top grade of 4* for Research Impact.2 

Under the guidance of these experts, you’ll discover the drama of the past, understand the great challenges of the present, and gain the skills to help shape a brighter future for yourself and the world we live in.

See more academics for this subject
Colin Veach
Featured academic

Dr Colin Veach

Colin’s research investigates the articulation of power in medieval Britain and Ireland, placed in the context of Europe. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the peer review college for the Irish Research Council (IRC).
Dr Catherine Baker
Featured academic

Dr Catherine Baker

A specialist in post-Cold War history, international relations and cultural studies, Dr Baker’s initial research explored the politics of national identity and popular music during and after the Yugoslav Wars.

Take a look at our facilities

Hull History Centre

Explore archives dating back to 1299, including papers owned by some of Hull's most notable figures: Amy Johnson and William Wilberforce.

The Wilberforce Institute

The Wilberforce Institute produces world-class research on historic and contemporary slavery, and hosts a growing archive of books and electronic collections.

Brynmor Jones Library

Our 7-storey library is home to 1 million+ books, extensive digital resources drawn from libraries and archives across the world, and stunning panoramic views of the city from the 7th floor.

Rare Books

Our collection includes a variety of titles published between 1473 and 2002. Texts are in 18 languages. Places of publication range from Amsterdam to Zwickau, covering 26 countries on 5 continents.

See more in our virtual tour

Look around

Look around

Look around

Look around

Hull History Centre
Hull Wilberforce House
Brynmor Jones Library Observation Deck
Brynmor Jones Library Rare Books Room
Ethan Harding in Brynmor Jones Library

Future prospects

The way we teach history gives you skills that employers value. You’ll learn how to analyse complex data. How to present clear and coherent arguments to diverse audiences. And by explaining, supporting and defending your ideas, you’ll become a better communicator.

You'll also gain teamworking skills through presentations and seminar discussions. And you'll learn how to plan, research and manage your own time through essays.

With a History degree, you can pursue a range of careers, such as historian, heritage manager, archaeologist, museum conservator, researcher, auctioneer, archivist or teacher. Hull graduates also work in journalism, the Civil Service, marketing, law, and politics.

University of Hull Open Day

Your next steps

Not ready to apply?

Visit our next Open Day, and see all that Hull has to offer for yourself. Talk to our lecturers about your subject, find out what university is really like from our current students, and take a tour of our beautiful campus and amazing facilities.

Book your place now

You may also be interested in…

Course

BA (Hons) History and Politics
Course

BA (Hons) Secondary Teaching Studies (History)

1. 100% employability (History) UK domicile full-time first degree leavers; Higher Education Graduate Outcomes statistics, for the academic year 2021/22, published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency June 2024.

2. 100% of History at Hull received the top grade of 4* for Research Impact, and is also 18th for Historical Research in the UK, according to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021.


All modules presented on this course page are subject to availability and this list may change at any time.

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