Oxford Brookes has entered the league of Britain's top 50 universities for the first time, in The Times Good University Guide (18 May 2001). For the sixth time running, Brookes has emerged as the leading new university in the UK, but this year at number 48 in the league, it has overtaken nine old institutions.

Graham Upton, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes, says: ‘This is a huge vote of confidence for Brookes, and bears witness in particular to the excellent quality of teaching and the success of our graduates in the job market.’

The Times comments: ‘Oxford Brookes, drawing on more than 20 years of experience of the modular degree system, offers more than 2,000 modules in its undergraduate programmes, pairing subjects as disparate as catering management and history of art.’

Three subjects; History, English and History of Art, are grouped in the School of Humanities which is located on the University’s Gipsy Lane Campus, one mile from the centre of Oxford. There are thirty-five academic and administrative staff in the School and five hundred students, one hundred of whom are postgraduates studying on the Masters Programme or for Research degrees. The School forms part of the University’s Modular Degree Programme which enables you to design your own Undergraduate Course in which you can combine History, or English Studies or History of Art with each other or with any one of forty other fields ranging from Sociology to Computer Science, French Literature to Politics or Music. You can also study for a single honours degree in any one of the three subjects in the School.

An important feature of the School is that research and the integration between research and teaching are central to our work. We have a thriving Humanities Research Centre and staff who have won national and international reputations through their research and publications. At the same time our teaching has been recognised as ‘excellent’ (English Studies) and ‘outstanding’ (History of Art). We pride ourselves on our innovative approaches towards both undergraduate and postgraduate education. The School has growing international links, through the overseas students on our undergraduate and postgraduate courses, through student exchanges, staff research, the Visiting Scholar Programme, and postgraduate collaboration with universities in Denmark, Germany and Ireland.

There are approximately 250 History undergraduates with a male/female ratio of approximately 45-55