American Studies and History BA

This module involves in-depth independent study of a subject in American and Canadian Studies. It encourages both student-centred and student-initiated learning. The topic you choose must be appropriate for your course and must be approved by the module convenor. You are assigned a supervisor with expertise in your chosen area of study.

The completed dissertation should be 5,000-7,000 words in length for the 20 credit module and 10,000-12,000 words in length for the 40 credit module. The 20 credit dissertation is for one semester only and the 40 credit version is year-long.

Recent dissertation titles include:

• To Ban or Not to Ban: Changing Motivations Behind Efforts to Censor African American Literature in America’s Public Schools, 1976-2018
• The Development of Television in the Canadian North and its Role in the Preservation of Inuit Culture
• The Feminist Justification for the Afghanistan War: The Cooperation Between the Bush Administration and the Feminist Majority Foundation
• "The Teeth of the World are Sharp”: James Baldwin’s Protest Novels
• Towards Humane Borders: Activist and NGO Responses to the Militarisation of the US-Mexico Boundary
• “A Blended World … A Safe Space for Everybody”: A Case Study of Underground Ballroom Culture
• “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues”: The Empowerment of Black Female Blues Singers - Romance or Reality?
• “Older Arts and Newer Technology”: Cultural Recoding in Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters

This module involves the in-depth study of a historical subject from which you will create a 10,000 word dissertation. You will have regular meetings with your supervisor and a weekly one hour lecture to guide you through this task.

Recent dissertation topics have included:

• Richard II, William Shakespeare and the Revolution of 1399
• The Image of the Male Witch in Early Modern Iceland
• Lord Salisbury and the Mediterranean Agreements: Revisiting Anglo-German Relations, 1886-1896
• A Re-evaluation of Prince Lichnowsky's Role as the German Ambassador in London in the July 1914 Crisis
• Interwar British Fascist Movements and Race, 1922-1940
• 'No Country, No Home': The Abandonment of the South Vietnamese by the United States after the Vietnam War
• Visions of Loathing and Desire: Representations of Masculinity in Late Soviet Posters

You will take a Special Subject module in History based on a range of options.These include:

• Culture, Society and Politics in 20th-Century Russia
• Victorians in Italy: Travelling South in the Nineteenth Century 
• The History of a Relation: Jews in Modern Europe 
• The British Civil Wars c.1639-1652
• Samurai Revolution: Reinventing Japan, 1853-1878 
• Faith and Fire: Popular Religion in Late Medieval England 
• The Black Death
• After the Golden Age: The West in the 1970s & 1980s
• British Culture in the Age of Mass Production, 1920-1950
• Life During Wartime: Crisis, Decline and Transformation in 1970s America
• Imperial Eyes: the Body in Enlightenment Thought, c.1730-1830
• Overseas Exploration, European Diplomacy, and the Rise of Tudor England
• Alternatives to War: Articulating Peace since 1815
• A Green and (un) Pleasant Land? Society, Culture and the Evolution of the British Countryside
• 'The Past That Won't Go Away': The Civil War and the Memory of Wars in Spain
• From Revelation to ISIS: Apocalyptic Thought from the 1st to 21st Century
• Plague, Fire and the Reimagining of the Capital 1600-1720: The Making of Modern London
• Transnationalising Italy: A History of Modern Italy in aTransnational Perspective

Experiences of and ideas about madness, insanity, and mental illness have varied and changed radically within American history and culture. This module will survey and analyse these changes from the mid-19thcentury to the present. We will consider how and why medical authority, gender, and class have all impacted the way in which mental illness is understood, and consider the significance of changing approaches to treatment. Sources used on this interdisciplinary module range from medical accounts and psychiatric theory to memoir, fiction and film. The aim is to place representations of mental illness in their historical context, and to ask what they reveal about related ideas about identity, conformity, social care and responsibility.

This module will focus on the histories of labour and capital and will explain how these two histories have shaped the modern world, particularly South Asia. It will approach a given topic from a global angle and then will illustrate it through specific western and non-western examples. It covers the following themes: 

• Industrialization: Time, Discipline, and Work
• Capital and Labour Alienation
• Capitalism & the History of the Night Work and Sleep 
• Welfare Capitalism
• Machines, Artisans, and Industrialization
• Craft Cultures and Skills
• Child Labour and Working-Class families
• Working-Class Childhoods and Schooling
• Domestic Servants and the Colonial Master

The module offers an overview of the history of witchcraft and covers a wide geographical area spreading from Scotland to the Italian peninsula and from Spain to Russia. Such breadth of reference is of vital importance because, in contrast to the uniform theology-based approach to witch persecution in Western and Central Europe, the world of Eastern Orthodox Christianity represented a very different system of beliefs that challenged western perceptions of witchcraft as a gendered crime and lacked their preoccupation with the diabolical aspect of sorcery. The module’s geographical breadth is complemented by thematic depth across a range of primary sources and case studies exploring the issues of religion, politics, and social structure.

Both Scotland and Ireland were neighbours to the medieval ‘superpower’ that was England, which throughout this period was not only economically more powerful than either Scotland or Ireland, but which was politically and militarily aggressive towards its neighbours.

This module will address how Scotland and Ireland fared with their troublesome neighbour. How Scotland and Ireland responded to English aggression will offer students the opportunity to explore and engage with the contrasting outcomes for both countries. 

This module explores the relationship between society, culture and the British countryside between 1800 and 1918. It examines both perceptions and realities, and reveals a dynamic British countryside which both reflected and shaped society and culture and forged an enigmatic relationship with the urban. Themes include:

• perceptions and popular representations of the British countryside
• constructing a rural idyll
• Englishness and national identity
• exposing the reality of living and working conditions in the countryside
• the (un) healthy countryside? - poverty, disease and insanity
• the agency of the labouring population
• the radical countryside
• constructing gender in the British countryside
• the leisured countryside
• animal-human relations
• the preservation and conservation movement 
• the evolving relationship between town and country
• public history: representations of the British countryside 

Module description to be confirmed.

International history is dominated by wars; historians and international relations scholars focus with an almost obsessive zeal on the causes and consequences of conflict. The intermittent periods of peace are rarely scrutinised, other than to assess the imperfections of peace treaties and thus extrapolate the seeds of future wars. This module offers a corrective to this tendency, taking as its focus the multifarious efforts that have been made since 1815 to substitute peace for war. These include diplomatic efforts (e.g. post-war conferences, legalistic mechanisms such as the UN, arms control protocols, etc.), and those advanced by non-state actors (e.g. national and transnational peace movements, anti-war protests, etc.). Taking a broad definition of the term peace , and focusing predominantly (though not exclusively) on Britain, this module revisits some of the pivotal episodes of the 19th and 20th centuries, exposing and interrogating the often complex relationship between war and peace that emerged, and thus arriving at an alternative history of the period.

Module description to be confirmed.

The module explores the cultural transformations in Britain brought on by the shift to a Fordist economy (roughly covering the period 1920-50), and the social and cultural contestations that resulted. It takes chronological and thematic approaches, and topics may include:

• New experiences of factory work and the rationalisation of diverse areas of everyday life;
• New forms of advertising and commodity culture, and the anxieties and opportunities these produced;
• New forms of industrial urban leisure (e.g. the cinema and dance hall) and their role in promoting social change;
• Performances of self-hood and the contested politics of movement and habit;
• The perceived impact of Americanisation on national traditions, values and ways of life;
• The rise of the ‘expert’ across a range of fields to manage working-class behaviour;
• The development of social science and the problems of knowing ‘the masses’; Post-WW2 reconstruction and the early years of the Welfare State;

In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party took control of mainland China, banishing the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan, and starting a period of massive social, political and cultural upheaval. Covering the period from the communist take-over of 1949 to the start of reforms in the 1980s – but focusing primarily on the period of Chairman Mao Zedong’s rule (1949 to 1976) – this module charts the massive changes to Chinese society, politics, culture and economics that were experienced in this time. The module introduces students to the key debates about this period from a variety of perspectives (social, history, cultural history, gender history, international relations, etc) and encourages students to engage with the lively field that is now referred to as ‘PRC History’. It does this by encouraging students to work primary sources from the period, from propaganda posters to audio-visual material and accounts of life under Mao available in translation.

Weekly topics which may be covered include:

• The 1949 divide: What really changed with the Communist revolution?
• Land Reform: an economic or social programme?
• The emergence of China on the world stage: Korea and Bandung
• 'Holding up half the sky’: Communist policies on women
• The Anti-Rightist campaign: Communism and the intellectuals
• The Great Leap Forward: what caused the Great Famine?
• The roots of the Cultural Revolution: a political purge or a social experiment?
• How cultural was the Cultural Revolution?
• ‘Global Maoism’: a Chinese ideological export?
• Was the post-Mao turn to reform inevitable?

In the two decades after the First World War, two modern western European countries, Italy and Germany, were transformed from liberal, parliamentary democracies into fascist dictatorships. Historians have offered detailed accounts of the political machinations that made this transition possible. Yet recent historical research has been led by different questions: what reconciled so many ‘ordinary people’ to the anti-democratic, illiberal and increasingly murderous policies upon which these regimes embarked? This course explores how fascism transformed ordinary life, and how culture was employed to translate fascist ideas into lived experience.

In this module we will make use of this recent work to study such issues as:

• how to use gender as an analytical tool with which to investigate early medieval evidence
• gender ideology
• codes of male honour
• men's life cycles
• relations between the sexes
• rituals of violence
• military and clerical ideals of masculinity.

The focus throughout is on the interpretation of the material which survives from the period, through the close reading of texts with gender issues in mind. We will focus on different social and political contexts – post-Roman kingdoms, Carolingian and Ottonian Europe, Pre-Conquest Britain – to understand and compare how masculine identities were understood and negotiated in these societies.

In seminars we will focus on primary sources which are available in good English translations and which are the subject of interesting modern commentary.

What is a human? What characteristics and qualities divide human and non-human animal? What accounts for human variation? Is the orang-utan a human or an animal? Do mermaids exist? Can humans possess both sexes in one body? To what extent do parrots possess intelligence?

During the eighteenth century, these kinds of questions were at the forefront of the minds of Enlightenment philosophers, natural historians, and physicians across Europe. They also played a role in popular interest in ‘curiosities’ and ‘wonders’ that were served by freak shows and reports of the monstrous and aberrant. Although societies across the world have posed similar questions for centuries, in eighteenth-century Europe the answers were directly informed by colonial conquest. European imperial encounter with non-European peoples, animals and environments opened-up new questions and ideas about what it meant to be human and where the boundary between human and non-human lay. 

This special subject explores European-imperial debates over the meaning of ‘the human’ and the relationship between humans and their environments in the period of the Enlightenment. The focus is largely on Britain but integrates study of networks of ideas that spanned European and imperial geographies. The module is based on a series of case studies including (but not limited to): mermaids, rhinos, troglodytes, ‘wild’ children, orangutans, intersex people who were displayed as ‘hermaphrodites’, dwarves, and parrots. In many instances, these and other human and non-human spectacles of difference were enslaved, transported, exhibited in freak shows, examined by physicians, and dissected after death. As a history of the entanglement between colonialism and science, this module is as much about violence and power as it is about ideas. By exploring how ideas of the ‘human’ were constituted through colonial encounter, this module draws on studies of race and racism, gender, sexuality and disability. The aim is to consider how the reframing of the boundaries of human during this period of European imperial expansion has impacted our modern relationships to each other, as humans, to non-human animals, and to the environment. 

This module investigates the development of politics and society in the crucial period leading up to WWI. In general, it was an era of liberal dominance in Europe s political landscape, though this can be disputed. The main focus will be the rise and fall of liberal politics across Europe in the period 1848-1914. A major theme will be the interaction between ideas and actions. Particular attention will be devoted to the intellectual foundations of European politics, the legacy of the 1848 revolutions, the drafting of constitutions, bills of rights and a suitable legal framework, the difficulty in building a liberal nation-state, the place of religion in society, the rising power of nationalism and the concrete reforms introduced throughout the period. The emphasis will be on how politics functioned in practice, within its own context, taking into account the possibilities and strictures of the time. Extensive use will be made of original source materials and comparative analysis will also be encouraged.

Module content to be confirmed

The need to infuse the present moment with apocalyptic meaning is an important theme in the history of ideas. Concerns about the day of judgement, Antichrist, the millennium and the end of time have a significant impact upon many different individuals and societies throughout history, finding expression in literature, architecture and a wide variety of artistic media. In some cases, apocalyptic anxiety directly influenced the actions of kings, emperors, ecclesiastical leaders and religious communities. Students will uncover systems of belief about the end of history and trace the impact of such traditions upon states, societies and religious institutions.

Module content to be confirmed.

Module content to be confirmed.

Once dismissed as the “Me Decade” (Tom Wolfe), or a time when “it seemed like nothing happened” (Peter Carroll), the 1970s have enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent American historical scholarship. This module introduces students to the narratives of crisis and decline that defined the 1970s and which helped make the decade such a transformative period in American life - recasting the United States and its society, politics and culture in significant and far-reaching ways - whilst encouraging students to think critically about those narratives and their utility for subsequent processes of political, socio-economic and cultural change. We will explore developments such as the growth of identity politics and the cult of the individual, debates over American foreign policy abroad and social policy at home, the rise of populist conservatism, the market and neo-liberalism, anxieties over the city, the environment and the political system, and a broader political and cultural power shift from Rustbelt to Sunbelt, as we seek to understand why the 1970s are now regarded as the decade “that brought us modern life - for better or worse” (David Frum).

Module content to be confirmed.

This module evaluates the ways in which ideas during the Renaissance had an impact on both long-distance exploration and interstate relations. Also, of primary importance will be situating Tudor England in a pan-European context, thereby helping students better understand the rise of this island nation to become a global superpower. Topics covered will include:

• Renaissance attitudes to human potential
• Motivations for overseas exploration and travel
• Beginnings of European imperialism
• Continuities and changes in diplomacy
• Religion and foreign policy
• Travel literature and cultural diplomacy
• Xenophobia and cosmopolitanism

The Black Death wiped out nearly half the population of Europe in little over a year. The impact on English society was profound and lasted for the next century and a half. Historians have long debated the extent to which the plague was the principal cause of historical change between the medieval and modern periods.

The module does not dwell on death. Instead, it explores the effect of this extreme mortality upon later medieval English society by analysing the lives and opportunities of the plague’s survivors between its arrival in 1348 and end of the middle ages in c.1520. The module studies three key sectors within that society in detail: peasants, merchants and the gentry.

As a social history module, the starting point for all discussion will be the surprisingly rich contemporary sources in translation. The course will present students with the opportunity, through essays and seminars, to tackle such issues as historical causality, and attention will be given to the different explanations which historians have offered in attempting to accommodate the devastating impact of plague within their own models of change or continuity in late medieval England.

Module content to be confirmed.

Module content to be confirmed.

This module surveys and analyses Russia’s development between the 1905 revolution and the end of the civil war in 1921.

The module focuses on key features of this period, including:

• the causes for and impact of the 1905 revolution
• Russia’s economic and industrial development
• challenges to rural life
• the development of civil society
• the impact of World War One on Russian society.

Themes include:

• the importance of social identity in revolution
• the importance of symbolism and imagery in understanding revolution
• the role of violence and the language of hatred
• the roles of individuals and key political groups within the revolutionary process.

Module convener: Dr Sarah Badcock

Module content to be confirmed.

Module content to be confirmed.

This is a discipline-bridging cross-campus module, involving colleagues from across the School of Humanities.

The Silk Road will be presented as a range of archaeological, historical and scientific themes. Broad cultural themes will be balanced with the presentation of specific case studies, such as:

• The definitions of the Silk Roads
• Byzantine, Islamic and later medieval Silk Roads
• Luxury production
• Trade and exchange from the Roman and later periods
• Ming Dynasty links with the West

Scientific techniques for the analysis of materials, and their role in the interpretation of trade and exchange along the Silk Roads, will also be considered. This could be between, for example, China, central Asia, Scandinavia and the Middle East.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Typically this special subject module surveys and analyses social and cultural change in the West during the `long Sixties' from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s.

Key issues include:

• The origins and nature of changes in norms of behaviour in the 1960s such as the sexual revolution, attitudes to authority, and the role of youth in society.
• The impact of wider historical developments such as post-war economic prosperity and the Cold War (the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in 1962, for instance).
• An emphasis on looking at the experiences of ordinary people while acknowledging the role of major leaders.
• The origins of a counterculture in the United States and Britain.
• The Vietnam War.
• The development of protest movements such as the civil rights campaign in the United States; the anti-nuclear movement (CND was founded in 1958); student protest movements; the anti-Vietnam War campaign.
• The movement of protest campaigns toward the use of violence, and ultimately the development of terrorist campaigns in the 1970s (Baader- Meinhof, the Weathermen, the Red Brigades).
• The `second wave' of feminism from the late 1960s.
• The representation of the decade in popular culture, both in the 1960s and in subsequent decades, and in particular the politicisation of debates about this controversial period.

Module content to be confirmed

This module introduces students to the social and cultural history of drugs, principally in terms of how they were promoted and received within the West, referring mostly to the period since 1900.

It examines not only certain key developments within the history of mainstream pharmacology, but also at the way (now) illegal narcotics originally entered the market place, often as medicines. It focuses upon the way polarised cultural opinions about drugs evolved, with attention particularly paid to the contingencies of geographical location and historical period.

Seminars introduce drug therapies and the controversies surrounding them, with the aim of highlighting wider social interests— including the power of the state, drug companies, religious organisations and the influence of public opinion

This module surveys and analyses political, religious, social, cultural and military changes during the civil wars fought across the British Isles and the British Atlantic between 1639 and 1652. The major topics to be explored include:

• the causes of the civil wars
• the mobilisation of civilian communities
• the course of the civil wars
• the impact of war on individuals and communities
• religious and political change
• the growth of religious and political radicalism
• print culture and propaganda
• the changing roles of women
• the issues surrounding the public trial and execution of the king
• the abolition of the British monarchy and the House of Lords
• the ‘Celtic dimension’ of the conflict
• the Civil Wars in the British Atlantic

In 1665, London suffered the worst plague epidemic since the Black Death, killing over 97,000 people. The following year, the Great Fire destroyed four-fifths of the ancient City of London within three days.

This course will seek to study the impact of these events and to place them within the context of the 1660s capital—a city left deeply divided after the civil war era and yet a vibrant commercial and cultural centre enlivened by the recent restoration of the monarchy.

Many see medieval Europe as a violent and dangerous place, one in which there was little by way of law and order. A war that lasted over a hundred years (c. 1337-1453) might well be taken as evidence of this. However, this war, which was at its heart about who should sit on the French throne, was far more complex (and interesting) than this would suggest. Indeed, in studying the Hundred Years War, we are able to learn a great deal about the people who lived and died in late-medieval England, France, Germany and Spain:

• Why did people fight?
• How did people fight?
• Were there laws dictating how war should be conducted?
• What role did chivalry play in all of this?
• How did war impact on women and non-combatants?
• Were there medieval pacificists?
• Do the sources of this period really allow us to understand war fully?
• Did this lengthy war lead to a new sense of national identity?

These are some of the core questions that underpin this module. While this is, then, a module about a war, it is also a module about the society who fought in and experienced this prolonged conflict. 

This module examines the final decades of slavery, the period of Abolition and Emancipation, and the many legacies of these institutions in the nineteenth-century British Empire. 

The module begins with the end of the campaign to abolish slavery and the final decades of the institution in the early nineteenth century, focusing on the British Caribbean and the attempts to reform slavery through the programme of “amelioration.” 

The second part of the module looks at the processes of emancipation and apprenticeship, by which the formerly enslaved workforce transitioned into a “free” labor system. 

Next, students will study the evolution of society, politics, and economics in the former slave colonies, paying particular attention to the changing roles of African-Caribbean men and women. 

The final section of the module examines what came to be known as “the new slavery,” the global system of indentured Indian and Chinese labor that was implemented throughout the southern hemisphere colonies of the British Empire in the 2^nd half of the nineteenth century.  

The module looks at the Eurasian continent in the period of the Mongol expansions, so, c.1200 to c.1300. It considers the Mongols themselves through the lens of the anonymous Secret History of the Mongols and the writings of numerous people who both encountered them or wrote about them at second hand, including:

• Rashid al-Dīn: a Jew in Mongol Central Asia
• John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck and the Papal missions to the Mongols
• Roger Bacon and Matthew Paris, English chroniclers
• Marco Polo: merchant and envoy
• Ibn Battuta: a pilgrim’s adventures
• ‘Sir John Mandeville’: an invented travel book.

Topics include:

• Mongols; Mongol warfare and conquests, court life and culture, Mongol queens, Mongol economy, law and approach to religions
• their impact on Eurasia; the four Mongol khanates and relations with peoples they conquered and neighboured, and the European, Islamic and South/South East Asian response; the Silk Roads.
• the concept of ‘races’ and ‘peoples’ in the Middle Ages and how they encountered each other.
• sources and historiography.

This module examines the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), its underlying causes and legacy for present-day Spain. Commencing with the establishment of the Second Republic in 1931, students will consider the principal historical forces and conditions that gave rise to the outbreak of war in 1936 in Spain. The module is delivered through a series of student-led seminars in which students present their understanding of a specific historical event, theme or ideas through their study of primary and secondary sources, and respective historiographical debates. Thus, students will develop an in-depth understanding of the war through propaganda, myth, revolutionary ideology, anti-clerical and gendered violence, as well as, for example, the significance of Badajoz and Guernica. The conflict is also considered in the wider context of the "European Civil War"; specifically, the role of military interventions on the part of regimes in Italy, Germany, Portugal, and the Soviet Union, and the influence of non-interventions by Britain and France. 

The module will engage with the social and political changes that took place in 1980s Britain. It will be concerned with the following themes:

• The ideology of Thatcherism
• The relationship between social change and political change
• The political significance of Margaret Thatcher
• Margaret Thatcher’s rhetoric
• The political legacies of Thatcherism.

The first half of the module is an in-depth chronological survey of the domestic history of England from the Good Parliament of 1376 to the deposition of Richard II in 1399. We will investigate how the royal family and their friends - a colourful and sometimes scandalous group - struggled to rule the country with the aid of such government instruments as show trials, intimidation, legal advice, murder and poll-taxes. The remaining part of the module considers England's relations with its neighbours and the impact of Lollardy on society and the Church in this period.

The module examines the roles and perceptions of women of medieval Christian, Jewish, Islamic identities in Medieval Iberia in the period 1000-1500. It considers different types of evidence, including literary, art and archaeology. It transcends the traditional Christian-western European focus on Medieval Studies and makes a stand against hegemonic narratives.

We will study how medieval women expressed themselves and how they understood their role in diverse societies and at the same time how their respective societies viewed them. We will evaluate how beliefs and patriarchal traditions shaped gender roles and how women expressed themselves under constrictive situations and how they demonstrated agency, conforming to or protesting against these restrictions. In the case of Medieval Iberia, the topic will consider broad debates about co-existence and discourses of identity and segregation.

We will focus on case studies of women, considering social status, economic occupations and engagement in the religious and intellectual life in their context. We will consider aristocratic women, queens, artisans, peasants, writers, nuns, saints and prostitutes, women going about their everyday business and women that had exceptional lives in an attempt to demonstrate the diversity of voices and expressions of female agency.

The analysis of evidence will pay special attention to the female voices as expressed in primary sources; on court cases, treatises, literature and we will contrast with legislation and misogynistic literature. The module will engage with feminist scholarship and gender studies historiography and consider the development of new theories and methodological approaches to the discipline.

The module looks at the history of modern Italy (19th-21 century) from a transnational framework in order to illuminate different facets of the connections between Italy and the wider world. The module makes use of the methodological innovations of a transnational approach to put emphasis on movement, interaction, connections and exchange. It examines key moments and developments in the history of modern Italy by addressing the connections and circulations (of ideas, people, and goods) that cross borders. 

Module content to be confirmed.

The purpose of this module is to encourage students to develop a detailed knowledge of primary evidence and recent historical debates in the Thirty- Years’War addressed at three levels: as a war of religion, as a clash of interests between the imperial crown and German territorial princes, and as a human catastrophe of monumental proportions. Although its drama unfolded primarily in the territory of the Holy Roman Empire, the war drew in such diverse participants as Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden and Spain. In pursuit of self-seeking political goals, they formed unlikely alliances and created obstacles to the conflict’s resolution. However, the outcome of the war was to ensure the survival of Protestantism in Central Europe as well as to provide a stable political and religious status quo that lasted into the modern age. The module discusses the Thirty Years’War by drawing on various historiographical traditions that represent the views of major international players.

This module will challenge students to critically engage with the period that Henry Luce referred to as the “American Century”. It will cover a range of case studies between Luce’s injunction and the subsequent US entry into World War Two in 1941 and the recent twin-crises marked by the 2008 Great Recession and the Covid-19 global pandemic. In doing so, it will prompt students to consider both the projection of American power on a global scale after 1941 and the considerable challenges that this project faced. Incorporating a series of focused case studies and reflections on the wider contexts relating to them, it will give students first-hand experience of weighing up the practical challenges US policymakers faced and the way that historians have subsequently assessed their efforts and understood their actions. 

Experiences of and ideas about madness, insanity, and mental illness have varied and changed radically within American history and culture. This module will survey and analyse these changes from the mid-19thcentury to the present. We will consider how and why medical authority, gender, and class have all impacted the way in which mental illness is understood, and consider the significance of changing approaches to treatment. Sources used on this interdisciplinary module range from medical accounts and psychiatric theory to memoir, fiction and film. The aim is to place representations of mental illness in their historical context, and to ask what they reveal about related ideas about identity, conformity, social care and responsibility.

Explore US foreign policy in the post-Cold War period.

You will examine the historical narratives of American international relations, considering the drivers behind the foreign policies of Presidents George H W Bush, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

More specifically, we will consider:

• Whether the post-1989 period constituted a break from previous traditions in US foreign policy, or whether there has been an essential continuity through the war on terror and beyond
• The impact of economics, geopolitics, ideology and security issues on post-1989 strategy in different regions of the world
• The impact of a new international environment, marked by the demise of bipolarity and the rise of globalisation

You'll spend around three hours per week in lectures and seminars on this module.

This module is worth 20 credits

This module examines North American short stories and novels and their film adaptations, paying attention to the contexts in which both the literary and the cinematic texts are produced as well as to the analysis of the texts themselves. In particular, the module takes an interest in literary texts whose film adaptations have been produced in different national contexts to the source material.

This module examines the development of photography in America from roughly 1945 onwards. The module breaks the period down into themes and considers:

1. the transformation of ‘documentary’ photograph;

2. the emergence and importance of colour photography;

3. experimental, conceptual and post-conceptual photography;

4. issues of serialism and seriality;

5. landscape photography;

6. the photobook

7. analogue/digital

The module will draw on the work of a diverse range of photographers, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Ed Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Robert Heinecken, Stephen Shore, Todd Hido, William Eggleston and Doug Rickard.

This module will consider the development of ‘ethnic’ and new immigrant literature in the United States from the late 19th century to the contemporary era.  You will examine a range of texts from life-writing to short fiction and the novel by writers from a range of ethno-cultural backgrounds, including Irish, Jewish, Caribbean and Asian American. Issues for discussion will include the claiming of the United States by new immigrant and ‘ethnic’ writers; race and ethnicity; gender, class and sexuality; labour and economic status; the uses and re-writing of American history and ‘master narratives’; the impact of US regionalism; how writers engage with the American canon; multiculturalism and the ‘culture wars’; and the growth of ‘ethnic’ American writing and Ethnic Studies as academic fields.

This module will familiarise students with the major strands of feminist thought which have emerged in the United States since the 1970s: from liberal feminism through radical and materialist to post-structural and neoliberal feminism. Although the module will focus on key texts and thinkers for each strand, we will simultaneously challenge any neat categorisation by exploring the central issues and debates, such as the sex-gender distinction, female sexuality, and pornography, which have preoccupied as well as divided feminist thinkers over the past few decades. Finally, we will contextualise these issues and debates by looking at contemporaneous representations of women in fiction, the mass media, and other cultural sites.

The magazine has been one of the most accessible and influential cultural forms in America since the mid-18th century. From the wide-ranging political and literary magazines of this founding period through the emergence of specialised and mass-market periodicals in the 19th century to the counter-cultural and consumerist magazines of the 20th century, this distinctive mode of publication has reflected the tensions and ideals of a rapidly developing society.

Using a broad range of representative magazines from different eras, this module will encourage students to get to grips with how American culture has shaped, and been shaped by, the periodical, and it will also introduce them to some of the unique literary and institutional qualities of the magazine. Primary sources covered on this module are likely to include The Dial (est. 1840), Harper's (est. 1850), The New Yorker (est. 1925), Life (est. 1936) and Rolling Stone (est. 1967).

Looked at in the context of their times, such sources show us how Americans have long engaged with and debated their own identity through the prism of print, as well as the ways in which this self-definition has changed across time. Moreover, alongside the magazine's regular testing of new political and cultural concepts we will be able to see how the periodical form itself embraced other emerging media, including illustration, photography, and popular music.

The main content-spine through each week will be a focus on changes in the nature of American journalism, the rise of modern advertising, and the development of the short story as a form, as well as the interactions between these three elements. In addition to the standard lecture/seminar set-up, the module will also incorporate a series of workshops focusing on hands-on study of hard copies of particular publications.

What is a film, television or literary classic? How has this term come under pressure and fractured over the past half century or so? In this module you will consider the concept of the mid and late twentieth century American “classic” in a variety of contrasting and overlapping contexts. These contexts will be elaborated on the basis of their formal, generic, period and/or cultural designations that will cover university and exam curricula reading lists, popular opinion and widespread critical consensus (such as the currently prevalent view, for instance, that the early twenty-first century constitutes a ‘golden age’ of US television).

This module will explore, in the broadest sense, politics and visual culture:

• how films, television, art and online forms of visual communication can be understood politically (i.e. how they say particular things about the societies they represent)
• how they present and, in some cases, comment upon specific political events and changes around the world
• how certain forms of visual culture have been produced and designed in order to act as agents of political change and activism, sometimes challenging the political structures of our society
• how individual artists, filmmakers and content producers can be said to have deliberate political motivation and intent, and the ways they interact with and are challenged by the organisations and institutions to which they are often beholden.

We will be looking at different genres, modes, forms and styles to examine how we can understand the interaction of politics and visual culture.