MA in Historical Research
The MA in Historical Research provides an excellent preparation for students intending to proceed to research degrees in History. As well as specific research training in history, you will also gain a broad range of transferable skills that will be of value to employers outside academia. The combination of compulsory and optional modules allows you to further your own interests, broaden your field of knowledge and, at the same time, hone the research skills needed for the dissertation.
All students on the MA in Historical Research take the 'PhD Proposal' module which prepares you for PhD study and enhances your chances of obtaining AHRC funding. You will also take the 'Research Presentation' module which provides an opportunity for students to deliver papers at a day-conference the Department runs for MA students towards the end of each academic year. Depending on your experience of independent research to date you might find it useful to take 'Research Skills for Historians' which runs in the opening weeks of the year and provides the skills and methods necessary for advanced historical study. As well as developing generic research skills, you will explore a particular period of history through a team-taught core module, choosing from a range that currently includes: Approaching the Middle Ages; Early Modernities; Approaches to the American Past; Approaches to International History; and Modernity and Power: Individuals and the State in the Modern World. The core module deepens your understanding of historical context, historiography, and source criticism in your chosen area of study.
You will then choose from a range of optional modules that allow you to examine particular periods and themes, such as Ways of Seeing: Art, History and the Renaissance, Life during Wartime America in the 1970s and 1980s, Eighteenth-century Print Culture and The Scramble for Africa. You may also use the optional slots to acquire additional skills such as Latin, modern languages or Palaeography.
If you are planning to pursue doctoral study after your MA, an optional module, PhD proposal, allows you to devise and refine a research proposal, following the guidelines and advice set out by the funding councils, particularly the AHRC. Another distinctive module on this programme is the Work Placement scheme.
Work Placement Scheme
This opportunity to acquire vocational experience is a unique feature of the Sheffield MA. A taught module entitled Work Placement provides an opportunity to develop history-specific vocational skills in a working environment. Examples of recent placements include archive work for a local archaeological consultancy company, exhibition research and design for English Heritage, working with teachers in Sheffield schools, cataloguing small collections in the Sheffield Archives, working in the Humanities Research Institute on Old Bailey criminal records, devising a publicity strategy, analysing digitised material, and designing online learning environments for school children studying history.
What our students say about the work placement scheme...
I was a secondary school history teacher and wanted to make a move into museum-based education. I applied for a few jobs straight from teaching but was told that without specific museum experience I was unlikely to be successful. I soon realised I would need help to find a volunteer opportunity that would give me the experience I was looking for, so when I saw that the MA at Sheffield had a work placement module, I realised it was perfect for me because it allowed me to get experience, whilst gaining a higher qualification in Twentieth Century History.
I was placed with English Heritage at Brodsworth Hall and worked on a range of projects that gave me museum experience I would never have been able to get by myself, including a project of my own that involved researching and writing the stewards' reference file for the newly opened Aga Kitchen. I was also able to make other useful contacts in the wider English Heritage organisation who gave me additional volunteer opportunities, the largest of which involved me designing and producing educational materials for an entire English Heritage site.
I am about to start a new job at the Imperial War Museum as an Education Officer in their formal learning department, something I would never have been able to achieve without the experience I gained through the work placement module at Sheffield. I am really glad I decided to do my MA at Sheffield! 
Eleanor Macdonald