What is History?

History is about people. Studying History means studying lives, events and ideas in times and places often very different from our own. History embraces everything from the rise and fall of empires, or the birth of new ideologies, to the contrasting everyday lives of people in a whole range of settings, across time and across the globe. Studying History means developing critical skills, learning to express your ideas and arguments clearly, and becoming self-directed in your studies.

 

Do you enjoy...

• Undertaking your own research into historical questions?
• Reading widely and critically?
• Expressing and debating your ideas in essays, presentations and class discussion?

 

History: The course for you?

History is a subject for the intellectually curious. It offers an enormous diversity of subjects to explore, questions to ponder and problems to resolve. The History modules at Trinity allow you to study a remarkable range of types of history—whether cultural or political history, military or social history, environmental history or the history of ideas—from the early Middle Ages to the very recent past. We offer survey modules allowing you to grasp the broad patterns in history, specialist modules where you can study topics of particular interest to you in small classes, and opportunities for you to pursue your own independent research.

 

History at Trinity

The History department at Trinity offers a remarkably broad range of discipline options for its size. The four-year programme allows students to lay firm foundations in the first two years, with wide-ranging modules on medieval and modern history, Irish, European, American, environmental and global history, as well as on historical methods and approaches. The final two years of the programme allow students the chance to study several specialist modules in-depth and to undertake independent research on a subject of their own choice. The breadth and depth of study in this programme is unique in Ireland and has few rivals internationally.

 

Trinity is a leading university internationally for the study of History. Our staff has published extensively in the fields of Irish, British, European and American history. We take special pride in the small-group teaching which characterises the final two years of study in particular, and for being a department which places student learning at the centre of its values.

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