Modern History with a Year Abroad

Modern history is concerned with the forces, decisions, and contingencies that have shaped the world from roughly the seventeenth century to the recent past. Studying it means learning to read evidence critically, to weigh competing interpretations, and to write clearly about complex causation. These are disciplines that matter well beyond the seminar room, because understanding how the past has been constructed, argued over, and remembered is central to making sense of the present.

This four-year full-time programme at the University of East Anglia includes a year abroad, a significant structural feature that gives you the opportunity to study at a partner institution in another country. Spending an extended period within a different academic and cultural environment deepens your understanding of how history is studied and taught elsewhere, and the experience of navigating unfamiliar institutions and societies is itself a form of historical and cultural education. With a typical tariff of 120 points, the programme attracts students who are already engaged with reading and writing about the past at a serious level.

At UEA you will explore modern history across a range of periods, places, and thematic concerns, developing the ability to move between different scales of analysis, from individual lives and local events to global transformations. You will work with primary sources, engage with historiographical debates, and produce extended analytical writing that requires you to synthesise evidence and construct sustained arguments. The intellectual habits formed in this way, careful reading, scepticism about received accounts, and precise expression, are directly transferable to a wide range of professional settings.

Graduates from modern history programmes work across a broad range of careers. Many enter fields such as the civil service, journalism, policy analysis, publishing, law, education, and heritage or archive work. The research, writing, and critical thinking skills developed during the degree make history graduates adaptable across sectors.

Some continue to postgraduate study, pursuing further research in history or moving into adjacent disciplines such as international relations, politics, or area studies.