Course summary

Our Integrated Foundation Year for Arts and Humanities will take you through a carefully-designed programme to help you to progress confidently onto your undergraduate degree. Arts and Humanities subjects, like History,  provide key ways of understanding our complex world, its histories, and current debates facing contemporary society. Identity, political and social conflict, our interaction with new digital and genetic technologies, our stewardship of the environment are all issues where the voice of creative and critical thinking are key. Literary texts, films, plays and digital games offer important ways in which societies have debated - and continue to represent - their values and their futures. The Foundation Year provides progressive structures in which you are able to gain knowledge and understanding of approaches to humanities study and your chosen degree subject.  All Foundation Year students take ‘Global Perspectives’, then four subject-based courses provide approaches to the study of arts and humanities subjects, giving you critical skills to explore a range of literary, visual, and cultural forms, including plays, films, and digital media.  Once you have completed your Foundation year, you progress onto the full degree programme, BA History. Studying History is exciting and rewarding; it encourages you to appreciate the human experience in other places and at other times. Exploring what people have felt, thought and done in the past expands our self-awareness. It will help to satisfy your curiosity about the past, acquire understanding of specific periods and problems, and make discoveries. As well as an in-depth knowledge, History students also develop essential skills of analysis, argument and communication - all highly valued in today’s competitive employment market. Our internationally renowned academics are developing the very latest thinking on historical problems; this cutting edge knowledge informs the curriculum and will enhance your learning experience. By studying at one of the largest and most influential departments in the country you will be able to choose from an exceptionally broad range of subjects, enabling you to spread your studies across the medieval and modern worlds, from Ancient Rome through to modern China, from Saladin through to Margaret Thatcher, exploring topics as diverse as the Byzantine Empire, English family life in the sixteenth century, and international terrorism in the twentieth century. You will receive individual attention and learn in small teaching groups, whilst having access to some of the richest facilities for historical research anywhere in the world; in addition to the College’s substantial library collections, in London there are the National Archives, British Library and other libraries of the University of London.