Explore the links between humans and their environments around the world from the medieval period to the modern era. Examine how people have understood nature and their place within it over time and across cultures, investigating climate change, environmental disasters and massive landscape transformations.

You’ll situate the natural world as both an agent of change and a system that humans can alter on many scales, developing skills in navigating complex human-environment interactions. You will encounter a range of sources, from texts to images and environmental data, and learn how to analyse them, including through digital methods.

With these skills, you’ll explore regional case studies of environmental impacts on humans and human alterations of the environment, from the impact of warming periods and the Little Ice Age to the transformation of colonial landscapes, the exploitation of forests, minerals, and water and the effects of urbanization.

Discover how wars are among the most important drivers of historical change. They have transformed states, societies, borders and landscapes, as well as ideas, identities, and worldviews.

The decision to go to war is rarely taken lightly, but the mechanisms and norms for doing so have varied greatly over time. How peoples mobilize themselves for conflict has likewise been shaped by ideas about rights, responsibilities, and roles, ideas sometimes rooted in shifting concepts of gender and racial ideologies.

War is also a crucible of scientific and technological change. From the longbow to the machine gun, and from photography and reconstructive surgery to the atomic bomb, war has stimulated scientific and technological innovation while unleashing its most destructive forces.

By exploring war and its legacies in all its complexities, you’ll see it not as a unique form of human endeavour, but as a realisation of broader social, cultural, and intellectual forces.

Who makes History? What drives them to investigate the past? You’ll meet the women and men who have helped shape the discipline of History, delving into their life and works. How did their experiences and opportunities shape their careers and what questions spurred their curiosity? How did they find the sources they would need, and what methods did they use to analyse them?

In exploring their stories, you’ll ask how the place, time and society in which they lived opened opportunities or created obstacles to their careers, how they collaborated with other scholars or carved roles in learned societies or public debate. And you’ll ask why some historians have been heralded as ‘great’ – their names famous, their books widely read – and why others are consigned to the footnotes of the historical profession, their endeavours in the archives unrecognised. What makes a pioneering historian?

Explore the two things that make us human – body and mind. Historians once regarded mind and body as the same across time and place. But more recently, historians have challenged this assumption, showing that changing societies have led people to experience mind and body in radically different ways.

You will explore patterns of continuity and change from the medieval to modern periods by investigating key themes such as:

• How ideas about mind and body have impacted gender, race and social class
• Violence and injury
• Sexuality and gender identity
• Changing experiences of disability and transformations in attitudes to healthcare

You’ll build the skills to historicise mind and body through innovative methodologies such as:

• Disability studies
• Histories of health and medical humanities
• Gender and sexuality studies
• Histories of clothing and bodily adornment
• Interdisciplinary approaches including osteo-archaeology
• Recent developments in material culture
• The study of lived experience

Not all professional contexts are the same – and within any organisation there are diverse people with varied backgrounds. This module focuses on enhancing your intercultural competency and cultural awareness, with a particular emphasis on ‘place-based’ learning. Considering the cultural dynamics of the North West of England and the broader UK helps us reflect upon intercultural dynamics in very different locations.

Through analysis, discussion and self-reflection you will strengthen your ability to navigate diverse workplace settings and enhance your employability in today’s interconnected world.

What does it mean to die? Is it frightening? Will I see those I love again? What does it mean to kill, whether an enemy, a friend, or myself? Death is a universal human experience but, as you’ll discover, how we confront it has varied across history.You’ll explore varied experiences of death, from end-of-life care to execution, and from battlefields to pandemics.

Religion can shape beliefs and customs, from the theology of the afterlife to funerary rituals and the treatment of the corpse. Yet at the margins have always lain a shadowy world, where the restless dead return, the living seek to summon the departed, and the despairing take their lives.

You’ll discover the different means of investigating death, from the chronicles that describe the walking dead, to the archaeology of burial practice, and from murder trials to palaeogenetics, unlocking the passage of disease.

Hone a strong sense of purpose and gain the satisfaction of applying your skills and knowledge to a community, charity or student-led initiative.

Your challenge will be to take responsibility for arranging and completing a voluntary or fundraising activity—locally, virtually or during vacation periods at home. You will need to show that you have made a positive difference through this activity.

In class, you will be asked to reflect on this experience and explore the wider social impact of the work. In doing so you will build your confidence in your ability to contribute meaningfully to society through your future personal and professional path.

You are invited to collaborate in an interdisciplinary team with other students as you explore major global challenges such as climate change, inequality or emerging technologies.

Throughout the module you will examine how the humanities, arts and social sciences contribute to understanding and addressing complex issues. Classroom discussions and activities focus on the process of identifying problems and considering innovative, ethical responses, while helping you to consider and articulate the relevance of this work to your personal and professional development.

How do people share ideas? Who controls information? What technologies make communication around the world possible? From medieval to modern history, knowledge and ideas have been written, printed, hidden, copied, gossiped about, archived, and destroyed.

You’ll examine cultures of information and misinformation around the world. Circuits of information have been cultivated in state and religious institutions, social networks, mass media, and, more recently, the internet. From espionage to scandals and fake news, you’ll ask who is shaping information, with what tools or media, and with what political, ethical, social, and economic motivations and consequences.

You’ll study how ideas are transmitted, for example in songs, slave networks, books, laws, maps, advertisements, newspapers, and letters. You’ll build critical skills in assessing provenance and context of information, past and present, preserved and lost, digital and analogue, true and false.

To what rights are humans entitled? How are those rights balanced with the rights of other organisms and the environment? How are they balanced with the needs of societies and governments? The protection of human rights has been used to justify international conflict and military intervention to save lives, yet human rights critics have argued that they are a form of cultural imperialism limiting the sovereignty of local populations.

You will explore the codification of rights, from Magna Carta and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the Geneva Conventions, and how questions of rights have manifested in movements for decolonisation and self-determination, debates on the use of capital punishment, and campaigns for gendered, disability and same-sex relationship rights. You’ll also explore how societies have considered rights in relation to landscapes, from the right to roam to the protection of spaces, from medieval forests to the creation of national parks.

Explore how ideas can be developed into real-world projects with lasting value. Through hands-on collaboration and problem-solving, you will develop innovative projects, learn how to bring ideas to life and explore ways to sustain them.

Whether you are working in a team or individually, you will be encouraged to experiment with different approaches to making a difference in artistic, cultural, social and community spaces.

In your third year you will study at one of our international partner universities. This will help you to expand your global outlook and professional network, as well as developing your cultural and personal skills. It is also an opportunity to gain a different perspective on your subject through studying it in another country.

You will choose specialist modules relating to your degree and potentially modules from other subjects offered by the host university that are specific to that university and country.

The availability of places at overseas partners varies each year. In previous years destinations for students in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences have included Australia, USA, Canada, Europe and Asia.

As an advanced undergraduate historian, you’ll identify a historical topic that excites you and where you can make your own contribution to historical understanding, gaining the satisfaction of forging your own research project.

To guide you throughout, you’ll be allocated an expert historian as your supervisor, with whom you’ll meet regularly to discuss your choice of topic and research design, your hunt for primary sources and your analysis of secondary literature. With their support you’ll research and write a dissertation: a written research project exploring a challenging historical problem.

Research for dissertations involves building systematic understanding of your topic and engaging with the latest research, forming critical evaluations of historians’ arguments and deploying the skills you’ve been developing so far in source analysis to identify and address historical problems. You’ll hone your expertise in building a sustained interpretation and writing effectively and engagingly to inform and persuade.

Why does History matter? What does it contribute to our world? Challenge yourself to consider how our discipline is applied.

Beyond working in universities, historians are active in public debate and influence the policies of institutions and governments on matters from the memorialisation of historic figures and institutional links with the Transatlantic Slave Trade to geopolitical threats to UK security. They collaborate with museums, helping visitors engage with material remains of the past, and write books for a wide public readership.

You’ll develop a critical awareness of your discipline and gain confidence in articulating its significance in our world. You’ll also contend with the subjective use of History: how political leaders have co-opted stories of the past to justify war and conquest, and ideologically driven groups claim historical legitimacy. What role should historians play in shaping how our understanding of the past influences the present?

In line with recent historiographical developments, this module shifts the focus away from the two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – and Europe, to provide a Global History of the Cold War. Engaging with leading international scholarship, you will explore key episodes of the conflict across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

This approach enables a thorough understanding of the regional and local dimensions of this global conflict and highlights the influence of 'Third World' actors and lesser Cold War powers such as the People's Republic of China.

You will hone your analytical and technical skills by working with a diverse array of primary sources from around the world. These sources, used in both classroom discussions and assignments, will help you conceptualise and critically analyse the Global Cold War while positioning yourself within the dynamic historiography of the field.

Uncover the origins of modern consumer society in Britain. In the century from the abolition of advertising tax in 1853 to the birth of commercial television in the 1950s, advertising became a pervasive feature of modern life, and Britain became a nation of consumers. Through a range of sources, including press reports, social surveys and – of course – advertisements, you’ll investigate the impact of new shopping environments like the department store and the supermarket, and the rise of ethical consumerism.

Advertising is political, and you’ll also examine how it helped Britain win two world wars and market the Empire to its citizens. By the end of the module, you will understand how advertising sells us much more than simply clothes or food, how it shapes the way we view gender and race and how it creates support for a market economy based on the principles of freedom and choice.

What happens when radically different forms of art meet? How do these fused forms change our understanding of the world? We will draw on material from different periods and continents, to explore works of art where, for example, film meets history, poetry meets philosophy, fine art meets sociology, religion meets fiction, and theatre meets politics.

Examine how cogent issues in crime, justice and punishment have been treated historically from the eighteenth century. Taking advantage of online historical datasets, including Digital Panopticon and Old Bailey Online, you will be introduced to the vast range of historic criminal justice records.

On the module, the classroom becomes the archive. You’ll get hands on with primary sources evidencing the social and cultural history of modern Britain, and act as Digital Detectives to gather evidence to unlock the world of Victorian crime and punishment.

By using digital approaches to this evidence, you will be able to navigate a history from below and explore the impact of crime and injustice on diverse social groups including women, the working classes, migrants and youth. You’ll explore historical experiences of crime, justice and punishment both at scale and at the level of the individual in its fullest evidential context.

How might we engage with the implications of environmental transformation locally, nationally and globally? Where do we have agency and capacity to intervene?

This module brings together a range of perspectives—historical, political, philosophical and cultural—to explore the nature and severity of the effects of the climate crisis on our world.

Soviet history is often told through the prism of totalitarian oppression, but beneath layers of state control a vibrant dissident movement was active. In this module, you will explore the breadth, depth and complexity of the Soviet dissident movement and critically analyse the impact that they had on the wider world.

You will explore the nature of political life in the Soviet Union, ranging from the labour camps under Joseph Stalin, to the use and abuse of psychiatry under Nikita Khrushchev and the silencing of dissidents under Leonid Brezhnev. You’ll also consider the role dissidents played in the collapse of the Soviet regime and the position of dissidents in contemporary Russia.

By focusing on political dissidents in the Soviet system, you will critically assess how totalitarian governments function, how opposition movements operate and how the international community responds to this persecution.

Explore the history of South Asia from the abolition of sati to the death of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. You will consider the social, cultural and political histories through which the idea of India was expressed and contested.

You will examine the debates and rebellions through which the European colonial project was resisted and South Asian identities were expressed and cohered. You’ll begin by considering how, in the nineteenth century, the translations, interpretations and classifications of subcontinental history, society and language were created.

How were ideas of identity, community and freedom formed in response to and against the incursion of European power in the region? Subsequently, how did the idea of the nation coalesce into something beyond Empire to create not one, but two nations: India and Pakistan?

The thirteenth century brought rebellion against a tyrant, then a revolution: a party seized power from the king to govern England. This period is hailed as the foundation of democracy – but the reality is darker. Religious leaders were empowered to punish kings, rebels fought as crusaders, and people killed and died for a political cause.

You’ll explore events including the making of Magna Carta, the 1258 coup, and the Battle of Evesham that ended England's First Revolution. You’ll meet queens like Eleanor of Provence, leading knight William Marshal, and Pope Innocent III; tyrannical and hapless kings; Simon de Montfort, the revolution's leader; and the low-born people who flocked to his banner.

You’ll investigate their stories through letters, testimonies, and eye-witness accounts, and challenge historical interpretations of this era. What moves women and men, poor and rich, to risk their livelihoods, take life and give their own to decide who rules?

What does it mean to imagine a world without borders? Using materials typically derived from case studies, reports, archives, film, television and literature, this module foregrounds interdisciplinary approaches.

You will be encouraged to develop your understanding of migration and displacement, and to envision alternative global migration futures in ways that can impact future policy, political and societal perspectives.

With the blurring of the Home and Battle Fronts in Britain in the Second World War, the conventional wartime gender contract — in which men fight to protect the vulnerable at home and women keep the home fires burning — was challenged. In this module you will examine how war was experienced by those who conformed to and those who challenged gender norms, by those included in the war effort and those who stood outside it.

You’ll consider different categorisations of experience (military/civilian; home front/ battle front; male/female) and how historians have grappled with key concepts including the People’s War and hierarchies of service. Through a wide range of primary sources, including autobiographical materials, poems, photographs, films, parliamentary minutes, newspapers, posters and cartoons, you will seek to understand individual and collective experiences of the war and their gendered dimensions.

Today the claim that God designed everything in the universe has given way to the theory of evolution. The usual story of this change is one of conflict between science and religion. But we will challenge the popular narrative.

You will reconsider the rise and fall of the idea that nature was the work of a divine designer, focusing on the period 1450-1800. As well as trying to understand why the design argument became so important in the early modern period, you will seek to understand why it fell out of favour during the 18th century - long before the theory of evolution. But you will not simply be studying the history of ideas. To understand how early modern science changed, you will study a wide range of practices - from intellectual disciplines like philosophy, rhetoric and theology, to material practices including chemistry, architectural design, archaeology, and art.

Colonisation fundamentally transformed Jamaica’s paradisical environment. In this module, you will gain a detailed understanding of how this process occurred. You’ll begin by studying how the first colonists comprehended the New World environment and the importance of that environment for shaping settlement. You will then study how settlers exploited the Jamaican environment using enslaved African labour.

In the concluding section, you will examine how colonists sought to mitigate the devastating effects of plantation agriculture through nascent environmentalism. You’ll study this fascinating history using a diverse array of primary sources and by reading deeply in environmental history. In the assessment, you will be able to undertake your own research in environmental history. You will emerge from this module with a detailed understanding of Jamaica’s natural history and the field of environmental history more broadly.

What are the possibilities and pitfalls of community and citizen action, voice and agency? This module uses interdisciplinary case-studies to critically examine collaboration with communities.

You will participate in activities such as a mock citizens' assembly, visit local community groups and hear different points of view from a range of guest speakers on concepts like power, race, gender, class, affect and justice.

What do we understand by queerness? Looking back at earlier interpretations, we imagine how queerness might evolve—how it might be lived, felt and understood in the future.

You will explore queer futures from a range of perspectives and viewpoints, while examining both feminist and queer theory, as well as queer media and cultural texts and material relating to areas such as activism, politics and healthcare.

Who does technology benefit or harm, and what should its role in society be? This module examines the social and ethical issues surrounding the development of modern technologies and their use in the modern world, with a vision to shape our future relationship with technology.

How do ideas understand, transform and conserve the world? In this module we will study examples of powerful ideas such as the nation, free speech, liberation, the free market, culture and nature. We will use case studies to help us explore the relationship between analysis, imagination and practice.