BA History and Economics

With our BA History and Economics you can understand the cultures and societies that shaped the past and explore the critical economic issues that influence the world today.

Discover a thousand years of history whilst experiencing all the specialist areas on offer at the University of Reading. The History Department's expertise covers a wide range of regions, from Europe and Africa to America, South Asia and the Middle East. Module choices cover diverse periods and topics, from the Crusades to Cold War Berlin and from Medieval Magic to the Rwanda Crisis. In 2022, we achieved a 94% satisfaction score for BA History (National Student Survey 2022).

In your first year, your core modules will explore people, politics, and revolution - finding out how people struggled for power in past societies - and the culture and concepts those societies developed. We will teach you the skills you need to study and research history through an individual project of your choice. This joint degree enables you to address contemporary issues and trace them back to their historical roots.

In economics, you will study practical issues and explore the relationship between economics and society. This course places less emphasis on mathematical and statistical content, and instead you will focus on the relevance of these techniques to applied problems. You will still learn necessary maths skills in your core modules, but extensive support is available should you need it. Your core modules span a number of topics including business, policy, economic history and even the economics of climate change.

Choose economics at the University of Reading

You will be taught in small interactive seminar groups, encouraging discussion and debate with teaching staff and fellow students. We place a great deal of importance on employability skills in both sides of your degree, and our modules History Education, Discovering Archives and Collections, and Going Public all offer students short work placements and act as an introduction to possible career paths. In economics, students can take a year out to complete a paid placement.

You can study abroad for a term in your second year at one of the University's partner institutions, including those in Europe, the USA, and Australia. The University also offers all students the chance to learn a modern language alongside their core subjects.

Placements are a prominent feature of our degree courses and highly encouraged. Placements are a good way to show you how you can use the skills acquired through studying history in the real world. In History we ensure that placements are incorporated into your core learning. In the second year, we offer opportunities for short group placements in museums and heritage and media organisations, and encourage students to reflect on what they have learned from previous employment or voluntary work experience. For third years, two optional modules offer placements of 10 working days in local archives and secondary schools.

Through our links with the Careers Centre, you can source potential employers and help with CVs and letters of application. Staff in the department also have close links with the university’s Institute of Education, Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) and Special Collections (archives), and with external organisations such as the Berkshire Record Office.

You also have the option to study abroad for a term in the second year. Some of the universities we have links with include University of Ottawa, Canada; University of Maastricht, Netherlands; University of Georgia, USA; and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.