History (Professional Placement Year)

Apply your knowledge of History to contemporary challenges, issues and debates. Our innovative History degree has been designed to enable you to acquire specialised subject knowledge alongisde practical and professional skills.

Our History course is inspiring, innovative and compelling. Our Newton Park campus is beautiful, but it’s also a historic resource in its own right and a way into a wide range of historical subjects and approaches – from reading a landscape to analysing the symbols of wealth and power and tracing their international connections.

The nearby cities of Bath and Bristol offer an extraordinary wealth of material for historical study. Bristol, after all, is where the statue of Edward Colston was toppled into the river, and made us all reflect on the ways history continues to shape the present; we need to understand where we’ve been to have a sense of where we might go next.

Develop practical and professional skills

Working collaboratively with a wide range of disciplines, we offer a unique approach to learning in and outside your subject.

You’ll become a confident communicator, able to sift through the raw materials of history and re-present your findings to any audience – on any platform. Yes, you’ll write essays. But you’ll also learn to podcast, tweet, blog, create scripts for film and radio, and adapt your style to suit a range of consumers, including young audiences. We also want you to be able to plan and initiate projects, work with your peers and with our external partners, and make a contribution to our wider community.

Our programmes are taught by people whose research embraces past and present, abstract concepts and physical structures. It crosses continents. You'll analyse big data and tiny fragments of text, and explore objects and images, the rhetoric of power, the gaps in the narrative.

What can you do with a History degree?

Our research has impact internationally, nationally and locally. Our teaching draws on this and on our work as policy advisors, trustees, fundraisers, advocates, curators, conservators, broadcasters, game designers, web editors, poets. Our graduates go on to do all of these things – and more.

More about the Professional Placement Year A Professional Placement Year (PPY), traditionally known as a sandwich year, is where you undertake a period of work with an external organisation for between 9-13 months. The placement occurs between your second and final years of undergraduate study. You can engage in multiple placements to make up the total time and are required to source the placement(s) yourself, with support from the Careers team.