| There has been an explosion in taught history Masters degrees in subjects as diverse as the media, the UK's Celtic past and early modern Britain. Huw Richards
investigates a new trend
Published: 15 September 2005
No academic has coined
a more damning put-down of his subject's limitations
than historian AJP Taylor's sideswipe at Napoleon
III. The prototypical telly-don wrote of the French
Emperor that "like most of those who study
history, he learnt from the mistakes of the past
how to make new ones".
In spite of this warning, opportunities
to study history at postgraduate level
have never been more copious. The growth of taught
Masters programmes offered by UK universities
over the past few years is graphically demonstrated
by the annual surveys in History Today magazine.
The 2000 survey noted that "the
range of choices... continues to grow exponentially".
It listed 156 courses.
By 2004 there were 289 on offer, while this year
the magazine - evidently feeling that too much
valuable space was being demanded - discontinued
individual listings but noted the wide range of
options available in some institutions, with both
Birkbeck College, London, and Glasgow offering
13 different courses.
Proliferation is equally in evidence
at institutional level. Barry Doyle, leader of
the MA programmes at Teesside University,
says: "We had courses in the 1980s, but they
fizzled out in the 1990s. We started bringing
them back in 2000 because there was clearly a
demand."
Sian Nicholas, director of
postgraduate studies in the department
of history and Welsh history at Aberystwyth University,
says : "Five years ago we had maybe three
programmes. Now we have nine or 10 separate pathways.
We introduced media history last year and this
year are bringing in Celtic history, historians
in the making of history - which is a historiographical
programme - and early modern Britain."
It recalls the dramatic growth
in the late 1980s and early 1990s of Master
in business administration courses, with
hardly a week seeming to pass without the announcement
of some fresh variation on the MBA theme, each
with its unique selling proposition.
Like that expansion, the growth
in history Masters reflects pressure
on both the supply and demand sides. But where
MBA growth was largely generated in the private
sector, with fast-expanding consultancies and
merchant banks offering employment to the newly
credentialed, the drive for historians is largely
rooted in changes in academic life.
This is not to say that every
MA student is bent on an academic
career. Michael Kandiah of the Institute of Contemporary
British History, part of London University's Institute
of Historical Research (IHR) points out : "There
are particular advantages for teachers who obtain
a Masters - a better chance of teaching sixth-formers
or of getting jobs in the private sector, where
pay can be very good."
Felicity Jones, the IHR's director
of development, points to a group of students
who "want to carry their engagement with
history through to a piece of focused research
on a subject of particular interest before going
off to careers in perhaps publishing or teaching".
There can be, Nicholas notes,
an element of "delaying the inevitable"
in spending one more year at university,
completing coursework and a 15,000-20,000 word
dissertation; it is, though, she warns, considerably
more demanding than the "alternative gap
year" that some students envisage.
These, though, are a minority.
The bulk of historians doing Masters courses are
bent on joining the more than 3,000 students currently
working on doctorates in British universities.
Two decades ago the pattern was for the newly
graduated, armed with their firsts or upper seconds
plus academic ambition, to go straight on to working
on doctorates, supported by grants officially
described as being "for research training"
- in practice, whatever could be extracted from
your supervisor.
No institution yet makes a Masters
a prerequisite of registering for a doctorate.
But if you want one of the studentships offered
by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC),
which awards about 100 each at Masters and doctorate
level, from three to four times as many applicants
each year, then your MA bid needs to be couched
in terms of progression to doctoral level, while
the PhD hopeful needs a Masters secured or, at
least, underway.
Jones points out: "Doing
an MA is a chance to find out whether you really
do want to do research and acquire basic research
skills and to define a subject that might be the
focus for your doctoral thesis - these are all
things that used to be done in the early stages
of studying for a PhD."
On the supply side, proliferation
is, in part, an income-generator. Each Masters
student is worth £3,000 or more in tuition
fees - and considerably more if they do stay on
to do a doctorate. Aberystwyth talent-spots among
its undergraduates, making sure that all third-year
students are made aware of the Masters option.
"We do see the courses as seedcorn for PhDs,"
says Nicholas.
Another factor is departments
playing to their strengths in order to offer prospective
students attractive options. Where they might
once have run a single historical studies MA,
institutions now offer a variety of options incorporating
core research skills from that course plus a speciality.
Nicholas says: "A lot of our Masters students
have been enthused by a particular element and/or
its teacher in their undergraduate courses and
they want to continue in greater depth."
The decision to offer media history
reflected her own expertise on broadcasting, and
history professor Aled Jones's extensive publishing
on the press. Similarly, Southampton offers Jewish
history and culture; Birmingham, African studies
and colonialism in history; Goldsmiths, visual
histories; and De Montfort, sports history and
culture.
Jones has noted growing interest in colonial and
imperial history, with its implications for modern
multi-racial Britain.
Another growth area is local
history, with many institutions shifting to a
more regional focus for their courses. The Centre
for Metropolitan History, part of the IHR, is
launching its first MA programme - on metropolitan
and regional history - this year.
Teesside, meanwhile, is cooperating
with the other four North-eastern universities
on an MRes in regional history which has grown
out of an AHRC project: "Students who register
with us will do two-thirds of the course here,
and a third with a series of day schools, at the
other universities," says Doyle. The programme
extends the trend towards collaborative provision
evident in the region, with Newcastle and Durham
already running a joint medical history Masters.
By recruiting on a national basis,
the regional MRes will broaden Teesside's otherwise
local base for its programmes on cultural and
local history.
To assume that courses will continue
to proliferate simply because they have for the
past few years is exactly the sort of error Masters-level
historians should long since have eschewed. But
that there's currently an unprecedented range
of choice - if not the funding to match it - is
not in doubt.
I realised that I wanted to do in-depth research rather than short-term projects
For Helen McCarthy, 25, who is
completing the dissertation for her Masters in
Contemporary British History at the Institute
of Historical Research, the course represents
a resumption of an academic career she chose to
interrupt. Three years ago she had the credentials
- a first from Gonville and Caius, Cambridge,
followed by a year at Harvard as a Kennedy Scholar
- but not the desire: "I could not be 100
per cent certain that I wanted to be an academic,"
she says.
Instead she went to work for
the Demos thinktank: "I worked on a whole
range of policy areas - everything through mobile
phones to social exclusion and policies for old
people. I did a report on professional women's
networks, got interested in tracing the history
and decided at that pointed that I wanted to go
back to academic life and do a PhD. I realised
that I wanted to do in-depth research rather than
quick, short-term projects."
If all goes well, she will build
on her comparative dissertation on men's and women's
business clubs in the 1920s and 1930s, taking
the story into the postwar period as a PhD student
at the Institute of Historical Research. She has
no doubt that her commitment to carrying on to
a PhD was vital to securing an AHRC studentship
for the Masters, or that her first year of study
has been worthwhile: "It has been a very
positive experience, getting me back into academic
life, with time to think about how I will do the
PhD and what I'll need to find out to ensure a
well-designed, well-organised course."
She also has no doubt that her
time at work has given her skills and disciplines
she would not have acquired by carrying straight
on as a student: "I'd recommend anyone to
spend a year or two working first." Psychology
rather than finance has been the main challenge:
"I am very aware that my peers are getting
on with careers, moving on and in some cases buying
houses while in a way I'm stepping back. But this
is a long-term investment in my long-time career
goals and in doing what I want to do." HR
No academic has coined a more
damning put-down of his subject's limitations
than historian AJP Taylor's sideswipe at Napoleon
III. The prototypical telly-don wrote of the French
Emperor that "like most of those who study
history, he learnt from the mistakes of the past
how to make new ones".
In spite of this warning, opportunities
to study history at postgraduate level have never
been more copious. The growth of taught Masters
programmes offered by UK universities over the
past few years is graphically demonstrated by
the annual surveys in History Today magazine.
The 2000 survey noted that "the
range of choices... continues to grow exponentially".
It listed 156 courses. By 2004 there were 289
on offer, while this year the magazine - evidently
feeling that too much valuable space was being
demanded - discontinued individual listings but
noted the wide range of options available in some
institutions, with both Birkbeck College, London,
and Glasgow offering 13 different courses.
Proliferation is equally in evidence
at institutional level. Barry Doyle, leader of
the MA programmes at Teesside University, says:
"We had courses in the 1980s, but they fizzled
out in the 1990s. We started bringing them back
in 2000 because there was clearly a demand."
Sian Nicholas, director of postgraduate studies
in the department of history and Welsh history
at Aberystwyth University, says : "Five years
ago we had maybe three programmes. Now we have
nine or 10 separate pathways. We introduced media
history last year and this year are bringing in
Celtic history, historians in the making of history
- which is a historiographical programme - and
early modern Britain."
It recalls the dramatic growth
in the late 1980s and early 1990s of Master in
business administration courses, with hardly a
week seeming to pass without the announcement
of some fresh variation on the MBA theme, each
with its unique selling proposition.
Like that expansion, the growth
in history Masters reflects pressure on both the
supply and demand sides. But where MBA growth
was largely generated in the private sector, with
fast-expanding consultancies and merchant banks
offering employment to the newly credentialed,
the drive for historians is largely rooted in
changes in academic life.
This is not to say that every
MA student is bent on an academic career. Michael
Kandiah of the Institute of Contemporary British
History, part of London University's Institute
of Historical Research (IHR) points out : "There
are particular advantages for teachers who obtain
a Masters - a better chance of teaching sixth-formers
or of getting jobs in the private sector, where
pay can be very good."
Felicity Jones, the IHR's director
of development, points to a group of students
who "want to carry their engagement with
history through to a piece of focused research
on a subject of particular interest before going
off to careers in perhaps publishing or teaching".
There can be, Nicholas notes,
an element of "delaying the inevitable"
in spending one more year at university, completing
coursework and a 15,000-20,000 word dissertation;
it is, though, she warns, considerably more demanding
than the "alternative gap year" that
some students envisage.
These, though, are a minority.
The bulk of historians doing Masters courses are
bent on joining the more than 3,000 students currently
working on doctorates in British universities.
Two decades ago the pattern was for the newly
graduated, armed with their firsts or upper seconds
plus academic ambition, to go straight on to working
on doctorates, supported by grants officially
described as being "for research training"
- in practice, whatever could be extracted from
your supervisor.
No institution yet makes a Masters
a prerequisite of registering for a doctorate.
But if you want one of the studentships offered
by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC),
which awards about 100 each at Masters and doctorate
level, from three to four times as many applicants
each year, then your MA bid needs to be couched
in terms of progression to doctoral level, while
the PhD hopeful needs a Masters secured or, at
least, underway.
Jones points out: "Doing
an MA is a chance to find out whether you really
do want to do research and acquire basic research
skills and to define a subject that might be the
focus for your doctoral thesis - these are all
things that used to be done in the early stages
of studying for a PhD."
On the supply side, proliferation
is, in part, an income-generator. Each Masters
student is worth £3,000 or more in tuition
fees - and considerably more if they do stay on
to do a doctorate. Aberystwyth talent-spots among
its undergraduates, making sure that all third-year
students are made aware of the Masters option.
"We do see the courses as seedcorn for PhDs,"
says Nicholas.
News by Independent Friday, 21 November 2008 | 
