University of Essex ranked 9th out of 132 in whole of UK in the 2008 RAE!
 
Specific departments did exceptionally well as below;
 
1st in UK for Politics and International studies
2nd in UK for Accounting and Finance; all our business school programmes in Accounting, Finance, Management, Business banking and Investment
2nd in UK for History
2nd in UK for Sociology
3rd in UK for Economics and Econometrics (includes Financial and Business, Management Economics)
4th in UK for Linguistics (includes all our TEFL, TESOL, English language teaching and applied linguistics)
9th in UK for History of Art, Curating, Art Management
11th for Electronic engineering