Modern, thriving and quirky, the bustling 21st-century Chester we see today has been built around history. The city's ancient cathedral, medieval walls, Roman amphitheatre and gardens, and the 13th-century Rows, all keep us in touch with Chester’s compelling and important past.
In the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Chester, the study of the past ranges over nearly twenty thousand years; from the hunter-gatherers living in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age through to the fall of Rome and Cold War America. Members of the Department are experts on a wide range of topics and periods, covering early and later prehistory, the Romans, Saxons and Vikings, the Crusades, the Consumer Revolution, the English Civil War, the Holocaust, Genocide, and minorities and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a truly global mix of specialisms.
During the COVID-19 lockdown, the Department’s historians and archaeologists set themselves the challenge of rooting their own research in the city of Chester itself, to demonstrate how the local history of Chester is undeniably part of a rich and dynamic global history.
The Forgotten Germans of the First World War
Undergraduate and Postgraduate courses available at University of Chester
University students will bring prehistoric Chester to life with an exhibition at Grosvenor Museum featuring rare tools and jewellery.
A series of free talks at the University of Chester continues in 2023 with researchers in psychology, music, languages, cultures and history sharing their insights.
The stories behind Cheshire and the region’s landscapes and features - from its churches and houses to railways and canals - are shared in a new book marking the anniversary of a Chester society.
How the legacy of a Chester family famous for their role in retail history is ‘more than a shop’ and giving clothes a new lease of life will be the focus of free events.