B.A. History

The Department of History has been functioning since 1915. The Department has a magnificent history of over 106 years with competent and notable faculty members including the founder Principal Ms. Eleanor McDougall. 

The History Department provides learning opportunities for students to develop the skills needed to engage in historical research and analysis and to engage with the present by exploring and interpreting the past. The Department cultivates in its students the skills they will need to become critical and independent thinkers and citizens, thus imparting the skills necessary for full participation in society.

The Department aims to be an open and welcoming site for a robust exchange of ideas and the encouragement of scholarly excellence. We are committed to developing in students vital skills such as critical thinking, analysis, verbal expression and effective writing.

The History curriculum is therefore designed with four goals in mind.

• Enhancing critical thinking and analytical skills
• Enhancing writing and communication skills
• Acquainting students with the basic tools of interpretation 
• Developing students an  awareness of the diversity and complexity of human, social, cultural, political, and economic institutions

Student Learning outcomes of the Department

• Historiographical Literacy: Students will be able to identify and describe the contours and stakes of conversations among historians within defined historiographical fields.
• Critical Thinking: Students will learn to apply historical methods to evaluate critically the record of the past and how historians and others have interpreted it.
• Research Skills: Students will acquire basic historical research skills, including (as appropriate) the effective use of libraries, archives, and databases.
• Communication Skills: Students will learn to organise and express their thoughts clearly and coherently both orally and in writing.
• Writing and Intellectual Integration: Students should demonstrate their mastery of the knowledge and skills involved in historical practice by conceptualising and executing a significant piece of original research.

        High-quality teaching and learning deserve a prominent place in the professional culture of the discipline. They are essential to the vitality of the subject and its long-term survival; to the intellectual and personal development of staff and students, to the dissemination of research findings to a wider public, to the whole reproduction of the discipline. We fully acknowledge this, and embody it in our professional practice, so that not only will the discipline thrive as a subject in higher education but academic historians will be better equipped to persuade a more demanding student body, and an increasingly skeptical public, that the study of history truly matters.