As a historian at Lancaster, you’ll explore the challenges that confront our world. You'll build the skills to hunt down and analyse evidence to solve these challenges, making your home in a city whose castle, cathedral and cobbled streets are part of the stories you’ll discover. Our expert historians will guide you through hands-on training, as you prepare to take your place in the world.
Why Lancaster?
- Address the challenges of our world past, present and future, from environmental change to war and conflict, human rights and scientific revolutions
- Develop your skills through training by expert historians with international reputations
- Hone expertise in analysis, critical thinking and persuasive argument to prepare you for a range of ambitious careers
- Study in historic Lancaster, a city steeped in centuries and culture
- Be inspired by the latest research through our centres in Regional Heritage, War and Diplomacy, and Digital Humanities, and benefit from extensive historical resources and archives
Lancaster’s rich history
The city of Lancaster and its surrounds – from the Lake District to the Bay coastline and the Forest of Bowland – are steeped in history. From Bronze Age stone circles to Viking-age graves and medieval abbeys, and from Roman forts to memorials of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the region is rich in the living remains of past cultures for you to explore. Over ten centuries, Lancaster’s Norman castle has been a fortress, court and prison, now the heart of a vibrant historic city.
Become a historian
Our team of expert historians will guide you through hands-on training in primary source analysis, with one-to-one advice and feedback from expert historians. From your first days at Lancaster, you’ll build your skills, knowledge and confidence in source analysis, critical thinking and argument.
You’ll learn how to understand the world of others: their cultures, values and beliefs. You’ll observe how individuals coalesce – into families, mobs and gangs, into companies and unions, into parties, armies, nations and empires – and know why and how these units break apart.
From the medieval world to the twenty-first century, across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa you'll learn how to master understanding of a place, from villages to cities, countries and continents. You’ll see how landscapes have shaped peoples and been shaped in turn, and how populations and lands are ravaged and reformed by war, famine, and flood. And you’ll learn how money, knowledge and technology, people and disease, are moved from one place to the next around the world.
You’ll understand how societies across history have struggled with what it means to be human – how to cure and how to die, when to pardon and to kill, the balance of our rights and what we owe to others.
As a historian, you’ll have honed a special skill: how to seek out evidence, and how to analyse and interpret it – from laws, letters and diaries to paintings, photographs and maps, and physical remnants such as buildings and burial places. Sifting false claims and faulty data, you’ll reveal what that evidence can tell us. With your discoveries, you’ll build the big interpretations that illuminate how humanity carves out its course.
Be inspired by our research
You’ll be trained by our world-class historians, whose research expertise stretches across Britain and Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. Lancaster historians work at the cutting edge of the discipline addressing world challenges past and future, from global conflict and trade to the ethics of government and human rights, and from environmental transformations to technological revolutions. This research shapes our high-quality teaching. We invite you to join us at the cutting edge of History.
With Lancaster historians you’ll explore the history of:
- War and diplomatic relations
- Rights, crimes and punishments
- Medicine, science and technology
- Societies, nations and empires
- Finance, trade and globalisation
- Environment, landscape and technologies
Develop your expertise through our History Seminar Series with guest historians from across the UK, and our specialist research centres, where academics, practitioners and students across disciplines gather for public talks, conferences and training. These include:
- Centre for War and Diplomacy – experts on History, Law, Politics, Contemporary Arts and more provide historical context and strategic analysis of geopolitical challenges
- Regional Heritage Centre - promoting the social and cultural heritage of North West England
- Digital Humanities Centre- uniting excellence in spatial humanities, corpus linguistics and natural language processing
Access Lancaster University’s rich archival resources that include thousands of items, from sixteenth-century books from Cartmel Priory to Victorian photography. Investigate regional archives in Preston and Carlisle and join the student-led History Society for organised trips and talks.