History and Joint Schools

Wadham has been a place for curious, argumentative minds since the 1650s, when Warden John Wilkins gathered the scientists and thinkers who would go on to found the Royal Society. That same appetite for rigorous, wide-ranging inquiry runs through History here today, across a genuinely broad range of periods and approaches, and among a big, sociable community of historians who spend as much time debating ideas over dinner as they do in tutorials. Whoever you are, and wherever your curiosity takes you, you'll find a warm welcome here.

BA (Hons) History
BA (Hons) Ancient and Modern History
BA (Hons) History and English
BA (Hons) History and Modern Languages
BA (Hons) History and Economics
BA (Hons) History and Politics

At any one time we typically have around 15-20 undergraduates reading History or one of its joint schools at Wadham, alongside a further 5-10 graduate students working towards the MSt, MPhil or DPhil. They come from every kind of background and every corner of the world, and one of the real advantages of studying in a college rather than the Faculty alone is proximity: the medievalist and the modern imperial historian end up sharing a staircase, a dining hall, and — more often than not — an argument that started in the library and hasn't finished by hall.

The degree itself is built on independent study, as it is everywhere at Oxford, but Wadham surrounds that solitary work with plenty of company: weekly supervisions, subject seminars, and tutors in neighboring fields who are genuinely easy to track down for a conversation. In addition, Wadham has a lively, History Society which hosts talks, outings and socials several times a term, and the Annual History Dinner is always a highlight of the calendar.

Starting a history degree can feel daunting, especially if you're the first in your family to apply to Oxford, or you're not quite sure what "doing history at university level" really involves. Wadham has a longstanding, genuine commitment to widening access, and our tutors are used to working with students from every kind of educational background. What matters to us is curiosity and a willingness to think hard, not where you've come from.

At Wadham, teaching follows the student rather than a fixed syllabus, and the subject itself is treated as inherently multi- and interdisciplinary, two ideas that shape how the degree actually works here.

The first shows up structurally. Oxford's self-contained first-year Prelim lets you explore areas of history you may never have met at school, so your later choice of both outline and specialist papers is genuinely informed rather than accidental, and most students also take up the option of studying a language alongside History. No two Wadham historians end up on quite the same intellectual path — that's a matter of principle rather than an accident, since we'd rather help you find your own way through the course than assume there's one right route through it — and tutors retain oversight of that path even when a specialist paper takes you to a tutor elsewhere.

The second starts with the joint schools that around half our undergraduates take, and the conversations they bring back into hall from politics, economics, languages and English, but runs deeper than that. It's there in the actual range of history taught and researched at Wadham. One long-standing strand is the economic and social history of modern Britain and its empire: how trade unions, central banks and shifts in global trade have shaped ordinary lives, from the Labour movement to the economics of decolonization. Running alongside it is a parallel strand in intellectual history, tracing how political, religious and philosophical ideas took shape and travelled, from medieval theories of kingship to the doctrinal upheavals of the Reformation.

Over the past two decades, that range has grown further still, taking in early modern literary and religious history and a strong focus on colonialism and its long aftermath in Africa and the wider British Empire. That range matters beyond the reading list: we think history, done properly, is a liberalizing discipline, training you to see the world through evidence and perspectives other than your own, and to hold the line against a world of alternative facts, and we're just as open to newer approaches, from global and environmental history to the history of material culture, provided they're pursued with real rigor. It's also a profile that keeps shifting: each early-career fellow or JRF who joins us brings their own specialism, so the history on offer at Wadham is never quite fixed.

Wadham also hosts the Koch History Centre, a one-of-a-kind joint venture with Oxford's Faculty of History and the largest philanthropic gift History at Oxford has ever received: each year, twelve visiting historians — three senior, nine junior — spend the year in College working on a single shared theme, drawn deliberately from different regions, periods and disciplines.