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 explores the complex interactions between medicine, gender, health and illness in the 19th and 20th centuries. You'll explore the key role that gender has played in the emergence of modern healthcare and medicine in a variety of settings, such as Britain, Ireland and the United States. You'll also examine a diverse range of topics to assess how men and women, and concepts of femininity and masculinity were defined by the medical profession and how responses to men and women’s health issues became increasingly gendered over time.

As well as developing your critical thinking skills through engagement with the secondary literature on these themes, you'll have the opportunity to get to grips with a variety of primary sources such as women’s magazines, advertisements, films, medical journals and oral histories.

This module provides an advanced study of the evolution of diplomacy. While giving an historical overview it asks questions throughout about the current relevance of various diplomatic practices such as the appointment of ambassadors and the elite nature of policy-making in the diplomatic field. The class will also discusses the broader issues about the definition and purpose of diplomacy.

The module 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 module investigates the history of secret intelligence and international security from the Cold War to the global War on Terror. It looks at the development of intelligence services and their rivalry in the context of the Cold War. The course goes beyond the Western-centric narrative, to investigate the impact of the intelligence rivalry on the process of decolonisation and state-building in post-colonial societies. Moreover, it investigates the role of intelligence in counter-terrorism in historical context.

20 credits

This interdisciplinary module focuses on narrative, memory and public history. You will receive a mixture of theory and practical skills and engage with questions like: what is public history? How do we tell stories about the past?

The module casts a critical eye on what voices are privileged at the expense of others, thinking about sexualities, race and ethnicity, disability and gender. This public history class will equip you with transferable skills for careers in heritage, public engagement, creative practice and journalism.

Embassies are integral to international diplomacy, their staff instrumental to inter-governmental dialogue, strategic partnerships, trading relationships and cultural exchange. But embassies are also discreet political spaces. Notionally sovereign territory ‘immune’ from local jurisdiction, in moments of crisis embassies have often been targets of protest and sites of confrontation. It is this aspect of embassy experience that this class will explore.

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.