MSc/PgDip Historical Studies

This team-taught module will introduce students to the key research skills and resources required for successful completion of this programme and for pursuing further research.  It will provide them with greater understanding and deeper historical awareness of methodological approaches (e.g., international and diplomatic history, oral history) and historiographical debates (theories of history); students will learn how to locate and use key archival depositaries (for early modern sources as well as more contemporary material) and online resources, how to approach the use of newspapers, personal testimonies and non-literary sources. Students will be able to apply their understanding of the theories and methods of historical research in the two pieces of coursework set up for this module, the literature review and the research proposal, which will also constitute the foundation of their dissertation.

This module provides a structured approach to preparing Masters students for their dissertation projects. The nature of the class is to ensure that students can make use of the time dedicated to dissertation preparation in Semester 2 by following a structured programme focused on productive supervisory conversations and assessments targeted at supporting them towards robust and innovative dissertation research.

This class explores the diplomacy of the post war world. It will provide students with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the key international issues faced by Britain, France and the United States after the Second World War. Students will examine the issues which strengthened the post-war alliance and those which challenged it.

This class will explore political, cultural and social conditions that favoured the emergence of an Arab political national identity in the region. It will consider a number of case studies (for example, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Iraq) and will examine the origins and development of Arab nationalist movements and their contribution to the creation of nation-states in the Middle East, against existing trends of historical interpretations. Through the use of primary and secondary sources, this class will examine the regional distinctive features of nationalism in the Arab world and assess its impact on the emergence of nation-states during the interwar years; it will also examine the transition from nationalism to pan-Arabism, which dominated Arab politics in the period after the Second World War.

This class allows students to explore advanced oral history theory and practices as a valuable means of understanding the past. In weekly seminars, we will examine the advantages and limitations of oral history as both a research methodology and an outcome by reading and discussing key texts written by leading oral historians and related practitioners. In addition, students will gain practical experience designing and implementing a mini oral history project directly related to their postgraduate dissertations. By the end of the semester, students will have submitted their dissertation project proposals for ethics approval, and gained preliminary experience in conducting and analysing an interview of relevance to their dissertation topic. Students seeking careers in history, museum studies, human rights advocacy, international law, diplomacy, and journalism will find this course particularly relevant.

This class will teach students how to read handwriting from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries.  It will introduce students to different types of hand (e.g. secretary) and the various contractions often used in documents from the early modern period. Palaeographical skills are crucial preparation for any trip to the archives and, consequently, this is a class that all students of early modern history are advised to take.

This class explores the changing concepts of death in war in the European conflicts between the French Revolution and the First World War. From being left on battlefields to being granted permanent resting-places and being remembered in war memorials, this period saw fundamental shifts in practices and attitudes towards soldiers’ death in war. Students will therefore analyse the efforts to create meaning for soldiers’ sacrifices and to inspire future generations to follow in their footsteps. The underlying themes of this class will be the emergence of national sentiment and national consciousness and the role of religion in concepts of sacrifice in war. The class will focus upon Europe (including Britain), but comparisons will also be made with the American Civil War, in which treatment of the war dead and memorialisation shifted fundamentally, prefiguring changes that were to occur with the Franco-Prussian War only a few years later.

This class is designed to help students reflect on the subject specific and transferable skills they have acquired through their academic journey, articulate them to a potential employer and apply them in the workplace. This module aims to provide students with an insight into the day to day workings of an organisation, in order to develop history-specific vocational skills and promote reflection on employability and also on the issues involved in disseminating history outside academia. The class offers students the opportunity of spending eight weeks in a placement of their choice with museums, archives, historical associations, third sector organisations, university professional services. Placements are provided but students who have already identified an organisation or project they would like to work with, can discuss this with the class lecturer. Students will be asked to complete a small project or piece of research for their host. Assessment for this class include an initial work plan and a reflective essay on the student's work experience.

This class explores the development of the British empire throughout the Atlantic and Indian Oceans between 1590 and 1720. Focusing on the comparative analysis of two settlements each week, students will explore diverse themes including piracy, slavery, trade, religion, settler-indigenous relations, disease, and colonial rebellion. Throughout the course of the module, students will cover cash-crop plantations like Virginia and Jamaica, religious colonies like Massachusetts Bay and Maryland, commercial bases like Bombay and the Gold Coast, and piratical outposts like Campeche and Madagascar. In doing so, students will investigate the ways in which empire was formed through the haphazard activities of individuals operating throughout Britain, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and India. In assessing the means, methods, and consequences of these projects, students will engage with a wide range of primary sources including settlers' journals, official letters, voyage logs, and political pamphlets. Students will also be encouraged to shape the class assignment to match their own particular interests.

This postgraduate module examines the relationship between Scotland and Ulster in terms of the 'Three Kingdoms History' of the early modern period and how this then developed and interacted in the context of colonial North America in the eighteenth century. The module examines the Plantation of Ulster and its impact; Scotland, Ulster and the British Civil Wars; Restoration links between Scotland and Ulster, c. 1660-88; The Williamite revolution and Scottish migration to Ulster in the 1690s; Ulster migration to colonial North America in the eighteenth century and Scots v. Scotch-Irish/Scots-Irish. Conflict in a colonial context? Historiography, sources and debates will be discussed in the class and students will be given information on key resources and how to access them. Guidance on primary sources and manuscripts will be given. Students are strongly encouraged to develop and consolidate their knowledge of primary sources and transcribed manuscripts within a broader historiographical context.

The class surveys and analyses the changing nature of conflict management and resolution in the Arab-Israeli dispute, together with the range of conceptual tools that seek to explain the international activity in this region. The objective is to examine the relationship between the theoretical literature within the field of diplomacy and conflict resolution and specific case studies with a particular focus on the period from the 1947 UN Partition Plan to the brink of the 1979 Camp David settlement, realised under President Jimmy Carter. The first part of the module will focus on the influence of the United Nations on the region and the establishment of Israel in 1948. Students will then explore the impact of the Cold War on the Middle East and the role of the UN in international conflict resolution. Then the course will examine the 1973 crisis management and the US-Soviet competition to become a unilateral peacemaker in the region. Students will then explore Henry Kissinger’s negotiation tactics, including shuttle diplomacy, step-by-step approach and hard bargaining. The latter part of the module will then focus on summit diplomacy with Jimmy Carter’s single-negotiating text approach and Camp David Accords as a case study. 

This class explores Ireland’s complex historical relationship with colonialism and engages with critical questions that have been animated by recent public debates in Ireland, the UK and globally about empire. Ireland’s history has been shaped by British colonial policies and dispossession, and by the nationalist and anticolonial movements that challenged British authority. At the same time, Ireland has different colonial pasts. Some Irish people participated in the administration of the British empire in the 1800s, and Irish merchants traded with plantations in the Caribbean and colonial America in the 1700s. Irish Catholic missionaries played significant roles in building a religious empire from the nineteenth century. Taking a broad perspective and periodisation from c. 1700-2000, this class investigates aspects of British colonialism in Ireland and resistance to it, as well as Irish participation in types of colonialism in different locations. Students will examine the historiography of empire in Ireland and the role of Hibernocentrism or ideas of Irish exceptionalism within it. This class situates Ireland’s colonial history within a broader global history of empire in which the relationship between Ireland, Britain, and its colonies is just one constituent part. Students will develop critical thinking skills through engagement with the secondary literature on these themes and through the evaluation of a range of primary sources that will form the basis of each class.

This module explores the co-production of industrial civilization and the environment in multiple contexts. It will prompt students to consider how human beings study and interact with natural environments, conceive the relationship between nature and society, and select frames of reference in studying relationships between people, animals, and natural places. Students will engage methods, theories, and concepts across a number of disciplines, utilizing a variety of textual and filmic materials in considering the ways that people imagine, analyse, and utilise nature in science and technology, work and leisure, and philosophy and religion. They will consider diverse ways of knowing including natural history, environmental studies, environmental history, the history of science and technology, and studies of science, technology, and society. They will critically engage concepts such as envirotechnical regimes, organic machines, deep ecology, and environmental sustainability. And they will consider the practices that distinguish conservation, preservation, regulation, historical and contemporary environmental justice movements, ecosystem services, and green industry. Throughout the class, students will attend to how ideas of the relationship between society and nature have changed over time.

This class introduces students to major debates in the history of the Cold War in Africa, especially focusing on the agency of Africans in international politics. The class is arranged roughly chronologically. The opening weeks set out major themes of the course, such as the nature of African nationalism and the outcomes of decolonization, before moving onto debates about development, modernisation, and culture in the African context. The class then considers several thematic case studies, which explore the causes of war, and conflict resolution, in southern Africa before finishing off with a discussion of the repercussions of the Cold War for the African continent. We will look in detail at the decolonisation in British and French Africa, before looking in some depth at the upheaval in the Congo. We will also investigate the ‘diplomacy of liberation’, employed by African revolutionaries from the Portuguese colonies and South Africa to achieve majority rule and independence; examine the onset of the civil war in Angola, and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. While the course will deal with the policies of the Soviet Union and the United States in Africa, its main objective is to study the diplomacy, strategies and statecraft of Africans in the twentieth century and investigate their impact on the ‘Global Cold War’. Were Africans simply proxies of superpower competition or did they use diplomacy to their own advantage? The class thus aims to assess the ways in which the Cold War affected the processes of decolonisation, nation-building and democratisation in Africa. It also studies the importance of the continent for the global struggles and transformations of the post-War era. The course also allows students to creatively engage with a growing body of secondary literature and documentary evidence.

This module is designed to help students develop a detailed knowledge of some of the principal national experiences of Resistance in the Second World War and gain insights into the complexities of the relationships between the various forces involved, including Allied strategists, governments in exile and forces on the ground. Through the weekly seminars, students will explore the factors, both external and internal, which shaped the various Resistance movements in the Second World War and examine the nature and manifestations of the Resistance legacy over the long term, including its place in the history of cinema. Learning in the class will lead students to interrogate the interaction between history and culture, broadly conceived and to reflect on the ‘public use of history’ in a range of European countries. Home study and preparation for the seminars are crucial to this module. Students will be given weekly seminar reading assignments, including journal articles, book chapters and primary sources to be undertaken individually or in small groups.

The dissertation is an exercise in independent study. You will research a topic of your choice, under the supervision of an expert member of the programme staff. You will make full use of primary and secondary source material, including the identification and use of relevant archival holdings. While guidance will be provided by the supervisor, you will propose the area of study, compile an adequate bibliography, and take all initiatives necessary to carry out the work.