History MA

You’ll discover how an arts and humanities masters degree can be used to:

• transform society, politics and culture
• enhance your range of careers and opportunities

You’ll explore the skills particular to your own discipline and how they can impact on wider issues. This will help your understanding of the function of arts and humanities, and how they can be applied, in wider society. In particular you’ll get greater understanding of what is meant by knowledge exchange and public engagement.

With an emphasis on ‘learning through doing' you’ll collaborate with other masters’ students on consultancy projects, working to solve real-life briefs from a range of cultural industries and schools.

By the end of the module you’ll have:

• developed a portfolio of professional skills and experience
• worked on issues of research, networking, grant-writing and cultural exchange
• learnt how to engage, communicate and create.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module teaches you how to construct theoretically-informed arguments and to engage critically with primary material.

You will gain the skills needed for advanced historical research, both in methodology and conceptual approaches. These include:

• bibliographical searching
• locating primary sources
• using archives
• writing research proposals

We will also consider how historians engage with more theoretical and conceptual texts, and how they borrow from other disciplines. This includes exploring a wide range of sub-disciplines, approaches and individual thinkers.

This module is worth 20 credits.

We use the theme of conflict and coexistence to examine topics across a wide European geography and early modern chronology.

By studying comparative frameworks (i.e. England and France), case studies (i.e. The Thirty Years’ War), and broader international environments, you will encounter conflict in multiple forms. This includes:

• political
• religious
• military
• ideological
• mercantile
• public

The avoidance of conflict and coexistence are also central to this module. Peoples and governments of the period often looked to peaceful resolutions and solidarity at the same time as they sharpened their wits (and swords) for polemical (and political) combat.

This module is worth 40 credits.

Explore the social, cultural and political history of the twentieth century. 

Rather than re-telling familiar narratives from the starting point of high, we instead examine them by drawing upon the themes of temporality and memory.  

As well as exploring the different conception of temporality that informed social and political thought, we will also engage with the ideas of progress and decline that were advanced to conceptualise certain events and phenomena. 

Four inter-related themes will be explored: 

• Temporality and change
• Social change and memory
• The politics of reproduction
• Consumption, mobility and time 

This module is worth 40 credits.

What our students say:

"[My favourite module] was called ‘Past Futures: Reimagining the Twentieth Century’. It looked at the way time works to dictate our understandings of history and how time shapes the way we view things and the interconnectedness between the past, present and future. As someone who is quite interested in topics like World War Two and things that are so culturally relevant today – so issues like Brexit and Coronavirus – you think about how time has shaped how those issues are both articulated and received by the public."

– Christos Mouis, History MA

Discover a broad range of skills required for researching the Middle Ages.

We explore an exciting, eclectic range of different periods, topics, and approaches relating to the themes of power, authority, and dissent in the Middle Ages. This will help you to build your knowledge of the period and its history.

Examples (subject to availability of tutors) include:

• Early medieval Italian charters
• The writings of Bede
• Medieval Jewish women
• Twelfth-century Ireland
• Apocalyptic thought in southern France
• Medieval heresy trial records
• The Rise of the Mongols
• The deposition of Edward II
• Sources for English peasant society

You will also examine a range of sources in translation, considering how historians interpret the often problematic sources available to them, and the investigate the processes which lay behind these interpretations.

This module is team-taught, meaning you will benefit from the research expertise of the large number of medievalists within the department.

This module is worth 40 credits.

This module explores how living under authoritarian régimes affected the daily lives of populations.

Topics that may be addressed, dependent on staff availability, include:

• late Tsarist Russia/USSR
• Nazi Germany and the GDR
• Fascist Italy
• Franco’s Spain
• Communist China
• Imperial India
• Mugabe’s Zimbabwe
• Egypt
• Péron’s Argentina

We may also look at Salazar’s Portugal, Vichy France, the states of the Warsaw Pact beyond Germany and the USSR, Putin’s Russia, North Korea, Marcos’s rule of the Philippines, military rule in Myanmar, the military dictatorship in Brazil, Castro’s Cuba, Pinochet’s Chile, and even the USA during McCarthyism, South Africa under Apartheid, and various incarnations of twentieth-century imperial rule.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Recent debates surrounding Brexit and its aftermath have refocused attention on what it means to be English. But what exactly is ‘Englishness’ and how should we understand it historically?

This module explores questions including:

• What has it meant to feel or be English?
• What has been the relationship of this to ‘Britishness’ and how has that dual relationship played out in practice?
• Is English identity fundamentally rooted in empire and its legacies? If so, how?
• Could English nationalism be a positive, progressive force, or must it be divisive and backward-looking?
• Where historically has Englishness been located? Is it in a language? A monarchy? In a set of ideas? A territory? A set of preferences, or tastes?

Recent historians have been conscious of English identity not as a stable phenomenon ready to be described, but as a historical construct subject to regular change, revision and contestation.

In the course of this module, you will consider ‘English identity’ as a historical phenomenon, exploring the creation of an assumed English national identity that has both developed over time and been imposed retrospectively on an idea of the past.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module gives an overview of Latin grammar and vocabulary.

We will pay special attention to the forms of the language used in different types of medieval documentary text, including legal terms and ways of expressing dates and sums of money.

In each class, you will read sentences from real Latin documents. You may also bring along examples of texts that you are reading for other modules, for guidance on interpretation and translation. No previous study of Latin is required.

This module is worth 20 credits

Build your understanding of various conceptual approaches to studying modern history.

Following a broadly chronological approach, we shall use specific case studies to investigate and challenge common themes, including memory, identity, and social change.

You will explore the construction and representation of national, political, local, and ethnic identities which are born of (and continue to shape) social change. These collective identities will be analysed in terms of memory and commemoration, considering how the recent past is remembered and memorialised.

By the end of the module, you will understand how the past has contributed to the construction of contemporary identities in Europe and beyond.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module investigates how western Europeans constructed and categorised peoples as 'other'. We explore this in a wide range of eras and places including (subject to staff availability):

• Views on the Jewish and Islamic faiths in the medieval period
• Notions of Russians between the 16th and 20th centuries
• Representations of different genders across the British Empire, particularly in India
• Views of various societies in the 19th and 20th century, including China and Japan

These 'others' were variously constructed as savages, barbarians, or exotic, and were often sexualised or eroticised. Even when the 'other' was perceived as fabulous, those constructions usually had negative connotations, often being used to justify the actions towards them of those doing the 'othering'.

We shall cover the following key themes:

• conceptualisation and construction of the 'other'
• using the other to justify actions
• civilisation versus barbarism
• decadence vs progress
• East versus West
• Christianity versus paganism

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module teaches the essential skill of palaeography, which is required for medieval historical research.

It is designed to be taken alongside the introductory ‘Latin for Medievalists’ module, which introduces the kinds of Latin used in medieval documents. This will be supplemented in the manuscripts module by studying typical medieval documents available in an edited format.

The ability to read early manuscripts is a fundamental skill for all those interested in researching the medieval period. On this module, we shall:

• Introduce you to the various types of handwriting used in medieval documents
• Allow you to begin to read these documents in their unedited, manuscript forms
• Encourage you to think about issues relating to codicology, illumination, and transmission

This module is worth 20 credits.

During the summer, you will complete a 60-credit dissertation (12-15,000 words) based on primary sources and supervised by a member of staff with expertise in your chosen field.

You will have regular meetings with your supervisor.