History

Core Modules

• The Historian’s Toolkit: Studying and Communicating the Past

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the range, scope and access to physical and digital archives, museums and resources. You will learn how to evaluate and interpret documents, recordings and artefacts; how to construct a convincing historical narrative; and how to effectively communicate your findings in print, oral and digital formats. You will interpret a variety of evidence including manuscript and printed texts, oral testimony, film and photography, and material objects, as well as look at some key interpretative methods such as oral and digital history. You will learn from members of staff who are experts in their fields and from visiting speakers who are specialists and practitioners, examining a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to historical interpretation and its communication to academic and public audiences.

• Dissertation

  You will carry out an extended piece of research on a topic of your choice from within the wide range of research expertise available within the History Department. You will be appointed a member of academic staff who will act as your supervisor, providing you with support and guidance. You will produce a written report of between 12,500 and 15,000 words in length.

• Academic Integrity

  This module will describe the key principles of academic integrity, focusing on university assignments. Plagiarism, collusion and commissioning will be described as activities that undermine academic integrity, and the possible consequences of engaging in such activities will be described. Activities, with feedback, will provide you with opportunities to reflect and develop your understanding of academic integrity principles.

   

Optional Modules

Below is a taster of some of the exciting optional modules that students on the course could choose from during this academic year. Please be aware these do change over time, and optional modules may be withdrawn or new ones added.

Optional modules may include:

• Looking at the Victorians: Visual and Material Culture in Britain, 1837-1901

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the visual and material world of Victorian Britain between 1837 and 1901. You will look at the key changes in art, photography, and architecture, as well as consumption, popular culture and the use of built space. You will examine the role of the visual and the material in the construction of key narratives in Victorian economic, social and cultural history, including class, gender, and other forms of identity.

• (Micro)Histories of Race and Conflict in North America

  Text: What can the intensive study of a small unit of analysis – an individual, a family, a community – tell us about wider historical phenomena? That is the central question that underpins this module, which strives to explore and understand the gargantuan issues of race, ethnicity, and conflict in North America through a microhistorical approach. It does so by focusing on rich and detailed examples (through the close reading of five monographs) that stretch from the colonial period of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century and offer us the viewpoints of men and women, slave and free, Euro-Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans. Through these intimate and diverse profiles we will endeavour to make sense of the turbulent history of race and conflict in North America from a multitude of perspectives.

   

• Interpreting the Holocaust (taught in Central London)

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the theoretical approaches to the Holocaust. You will look at the ways in which historians' positions and use of sources are influenced by their theoretical and methodological assumptions. You will examine the ways in which sociological and anthropological texts, testimony and memoir, film, art, photography, comics, museums and monuments relating to the Holocaust are handled. You will consider the key theoretical explanations for the Holocaust, such as modernity and genocide, the politics of Holocaust memory, and contemporary discussions about memorialisation.

• Culture Wars: A Genealogy of the European Civil Wars between 1917 and 1947

  In this module you will develop an understanding of how in the mid-twentieth century, European states, societies and nations were reconstructed through the execution, imprisonment and castigation of compatriots. You will look at the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, Soviet gulags, and the brutal recasting of state and society via the creation of categories of the ‘anti-nation’, i.e persons without civil rights. You will examine the genealogy of these forms in context of the politics, culture and society of Europe after the Great War. You will consider the factors that facilitated or reinforced 'brutal categorisation', or were manifestations of it, including deep psychological fears of social and economic change, pathological ways of thinking, and segregationist forms of social and political organisation.

• The Memory and Legacy of the Crusades in the Modern Age

  In this unique and ground-breaking module you will develop an understanding of the memory, impact and legacy of the crusades in the West and Muslim world since the medieval period. You will look at the evolution and mutation of the crusading idea over (especially) the last 200 years, examining how and why the European colonial and imperial powers adopted crusading during the nineteenth century, and how the idea was used in World War 1 and by General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. We will also consider how the idea has taken on, in the West, a more secular meaning. You will analyse how crusade and jihad have been treated in the Muslim Near East, tracing cultural developments in theatre and poetry, as well as politics and religion, from the nineteenth to the present day, with particular emphasis on the figure of Saladin, the hero of the Muslim world for recovering Jerusalem from the crusaders. We will see how his image, and the memory of the crusades has been used by Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and Arab Nationalists such as Nasser of Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Hafez al-Asad of Syria and Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians.

• Women, the Crusades, and the Frontier Societies of Medieval Christendom, 1000 to 1300

  In this module you will develop an understanding of how the crusading movement arose at a time of significant change for women. You will look at the effects of the Gregorian Reform and contemporary societal change on women’s traditional roles. You will examine how medieval historians used gendered language and moral tales to express their disapproval of women who took the cross, and the role of women in supporting crusader battles, often becoming the casualties of warfare. You will consider the role of noble women in providing political stability through regency and marriage after the First Crusade in the Latin society established in the East, including the dramatic reign of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, and the effects of crusading on women who remained in the West.

• Breaking Waves: Histories of Feminism in Britain

  This module explores the history of feminism in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The module explores the varied formation, configuration and contestation of feminist politics and activism, encouraging students to look beyond well-worn narratives of ‘waves’ of feminism. The module illuminates the development of feminist political thought, as well as diverse histories of activism and campaigning. Core themes include: feminism and the state; body politics and sexualities; women’s work; family life; and feminist political thought. Students are encouraged to develop their critical understanding of feminism through engagement with diverse primary material (including political texts, social surveys, photographs, film and oral histories) and via wide-ranging historical and multi-disciplinary scholarship.

• Fairy Tales: Narrating Queer Gender and Sexuality in the Twentieth Century

  This module examines the role of narrative in queer identity and queer life in modern and contemporary history. The lives of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) people have historically been silenced and marginalised within and by traditional dismodules. Therefore, this module will examine the ways in which queer people have sought to represent and analyse their own experiences through the narrative-driven mediums of oral history, film, and fiction. By using these ‘unconventional’ historical primary sources we will uncover how queer people have worked both with and against the grain of narrative in order to tell stories that are meaningful to them. Using archetypes and common narrative tropes queer people have sought to situate their lives and their stories within wider cultural dismodules. Nonetheless, we will also explore the concept of queer temporality, considering the potential for queer narratives to disrupt and challenge mainstream dismodules, even problematising chronology in the process. We will also consider how the narrative of queerness is slowly being integrated into the historical record, and the implications of this shift.

• New Imperial Histories

  This option explores recent approaches (particularly those of the last decade) to British imperial and colonial history, placing particular emphasis on those which advocate a transnational or comparative approach. It allows students to develop an appreciation of the influence of postcolonial studies, geography, anthropology, and sociology on history writing in this context. Seminar topics can include settler colonialism, colonial violence, the material culture of empire, the relationship between metropole and colony, sex and gender, race and racism, imperial networks and trajectories, law and empire, and attempts to reconnect cultural and economic interpretations of empire.

• A Transnational Holocaust (taught in Central London)

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the history, impact and memory of forced movement of Jewish victims of the Nazi regime outside of the familiar places of ghettos and camps. You will look at the transnational and translocal history of the Holocaust, beginning in the mid-1920s and concluding in the early 1950s, including the founding of Israel, the establishment of the Displaced Persons Act in the USA, the division of Germany, and the UN refugee convention. You will examine the journeys and experiences of victims of forced movement and their emerging spatial agency in new locations, and also focus on the geopolitical contexts of the locations they moved through and stayed in. You will consider emerging research in Holocaust studies on refugee diasporas, transnationalism, and landscapes of the Holocaust, and analyse literature on postwar Europe, humanitarian relief organizations, and histories of asylum seeking pertinent to Jewish, European and as relevant, refugee diasporas in regional locations of Africa, the Caribbean and South America.

• Genocide: Comparative Approaches

  In this module you will develop an understanding of the comparative approaches to the study of genocide. You will examine comparative themes central to modern scholarship, such as modernity, state violence, and gender, and others arising from the phenomenon itself, such as child transfers and the use of memories of past violence to justify genocide in the present. You will consider the complex causes and dynamics of genocide, with case studies analysing colonial genocide in North America and Australia, and the mass killings in Darfur at the beginning of the 21st century.