Social and Cultural History – (M.A.)

Social and cultural history tells the story of everyday life, ordinary people, their cultural conditions, creations, expressions, and the mental worlds they inhabit.

The MA in Social and Cultural History is an established, long-running postgraduate degree, which has recently been revamped and reinvigorated by the recruitment of a number of new lecturers. We offer an attractive menu, and classes are taught by qualified and nationally recognised researchers and teachers. Various taught MA programmes are on offer at different Welsh universities, but there is nothing which would compete directly with our innovative Social and Cultural History award.

For example, we are developing online learning and we hope to offer students the option of doing all of our modules online. Students would then have the widest possible choice of how they want to study. They can come to our evening classes or do all of the MA via online learning. The addition of online modules should also prove attractive to students who cannot attend every class, who could instead take a mixture of taught face-to-face modules and online modules. All lecturers use Blackboard (the University’s Virtual Learning Environment) as a teaching tool. This will be particularly useful for part-time students who may wish to access materials from home.

The University is investing over £130million in its facilities and campuses to ensure students get the best possible learning experience. Among these developments is a new, modern postgraduate centre complete with spacious open plan social learning areas, meeting rooms, reception and study areas. The History Division has also invested in resources for students: for example, we have purchased JSTOR, an online database with a thousand academic journals and over one million images, letters, and other primary sources.

In addition, we have bought History Reference Center, a comprehensive online database which provides full text access to more than 1,990 reference books, encyclopedias and non-fiction books from leading history publishers. These resources are available through our Learning Resources Centre, which contains a large and varied selection of historical books, encyclopedias, academic journals and magazines, e-books, e-journals, e-newspapers and e-databases.