BA Anthropology and History

This mutually enriching joint programme equips students in identifying historical and contemporary patterns of social organisation, ethnic and cultural divisions, varieties of inequality, and patterns of change over time across diverse societies.

Anthropology is the study of human diversity around the world. In studying anthropology, you will learn how different societies live together and think about such topics as family, sex, religion, art, and economics and gain skills increasingly in demand in a globalized and automated world.
Issues addressed in anthropology modules include:

• Does globalisation mean the end of cultural difference?
• Can a post-conflict society heal?
• How do ritual traditions, musical performances, and art shape cultural identities?
• How do some people become willing to die for a group?

Through classroom modules, optional placements, and your own anthropological fieldwork, you will also gain valuable skills in critical thinking, cross-cultural understanding, researching, interviewing, writing, and presenting.

History explains the modern world by tracking phenomena like gender, race, class, religion, the state, empire, or capitalism back through time. Our historians are able to reach back to the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the great modern revolutions across all of Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, in order to account for our lives today. From their first year, we trust our students to make choices and range widely across all these histories to understand where we have come from. And from the beginning of your degree you will be taught in small groups by expert historians. Our range in time and space, our trust in you to explore and make good choices, and our small group teaching from the first year of the degree, mark us out among our peer universities.