Arts - History University of Melbourne

Overview

History offers both global range and detailed attention to particular places, times and themes. Subjects extend from the medieval world through to the recent past.

History pathways

From 2020, students undertaking a Arts - History program at University of Melbourne are able to follow one of three new optional pathways. The pathways give students the opportunity to focus on a particular aspect or era of History, meet students who share similar interests, and effectively plan their History major.

Politics and International History

• This pathway is for you if you are interested in international relations, but want to understand them more deeply and historically. You want to know more about decision makers, leaders – why events happened the way they did and who was responsible. You are interested in the big picture of world history and in understanding how nations and leaders helped shape our world.

Social and Cultural History

• This pathway is for you if you like immersing yourself in worlds far away in time, place and culture. Social history is about social relations, about class and gender and race, hierarchies of all kinds, but also about the ways people have organised and acted together to worship, eat, celebrate, perform. Cultural history is about meaning – what people said, thought and did in the past and how we can understand and interpret it now.

Gender History

• This pathway is for you if you are interested in gender relations and identities in the present and want a deeper understanding of how and why they have changed over time and in different cultural and national traditions. You may be most interested in the history of sexualities, or in the history of the politics of gender, or in movements for social change in gender relations, but you see the history of gender as an important and inescapable part of understanding the past, present and future.

Careers

History graduates find their way to positions in 

• education
• policy and administration
• publishing
• entertainment
• tourism
• writing
• museums
• information technology
• planning
• journalism and many other areas.