Second Year Research Seminar Modules (2024/25)

We have grouped the 2024-25 Second Year Research Seminars by geographical region to help you think about your choices. The four regions are:

• British Isles
• Europe and the Middle East
• South Asia and East Asia
• The Americas and Atlantic History

BA Ancient History students are reminded that they must take an Ancient History SYRS, and you have a choice of either Emotions and the Ancient Greeks or Migrants and Expats: Old Assyrian Identity Politics 20-17cs C BC.

British Isles

HIST0089: Conscience and Authority in the Age of Chaucer

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Conscience and Authority in the Age of Chaucer
Tutor	Dr Emily Corran
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	This course allows you to study late medieval religion in England through the lens of literature. The second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth was a period in which England underwent extreme climactic and political pressures: the Black Death, and the smaller epidemics that followed, killed many and forced those who lived reflect on death and social change. Political unrest and war, as well as turbulence in the Catholic Church, was a spur to profound religious thought. Whereas in previous centuries, most genres of religious texts were written exclusively in Latin, late medieval England saw a blossoming of the vernacular. This was thus a period in which the mainstream church became accessible to lay people to an unprecedented degree. There were more sermons in English recorded, more works intended for personal devotion and, increasingly English guides for parish priests. On the other hand, criticism of the church only grew throughout this period. New heresies emerged, most significantly the Lollards.  This course focuses on vernacular writings as a source for religious culture in late medieval England. You will study a variety of texts, including fiction (such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Langland’s Piers Plowman), normative texts, (such as Robert Mannyng’s Handling Synne), and texts produced by lay men and women intended for personal devotion. The questions we will address include the relative role of ecclesiastical authority and lay enthusiasm in this period, explanations for extreme religious enthusiasm, the relationship between orthodoxy and heresy, and the reasons for the rise and flourishing of the vernacular in England in this time. You will be encouraged to read texts in the original Middle English, but there is no obligation to rely on untranslated text for your final assessment, since many of these texts are available in in modern translations. However, Middle English can be picked up reasonably easily and you will be given the opportunity and teaching to do so.
Moodle page	2021-22 Moodle page

 

HIST0089: Gender, Sex and Bodies in Early Modern England

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Gender, Sex and Bodies in Early Modern England
Tutor	TBC
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	This module focuses on ideas about gender and the body in early modern England. It investigates how different communities, from learned physicians to midwives to the everyman, understood and discussed sex and their bodies, with a particular focus on generation and concepts of sex difference. We will explore a range of methodologies and analytical frameworks used by historians of medicine and the body and historians of gender and sexuality, and examine an array of primary sources including textual sources such as medical treatises, religious tracts, diaries and letters and visual sources such as anatomical images. While the main geographical focus will be on England, comparatives studies in other European contexts will be introduced. Topics covered include: ideas of the humoral body, ideas of conception, fertility and infertility, generation and reproduction, bodies old and young, leaky bodies, fluxes and menstruation, wondrous and marvellous bodies, sex difference and race. Students will be encouraged to develop their own research questions either based on the broad range of topics discussed in the seminars or on their own chosen topic, in consultation and with the support of the module leader.
Moodle page	2023-24 Moodle page

HIST0089: National Identity in Britain since 1940

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: National Identity in Britain since 1940
Tutor	TBC
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	This research seminar involves firstly asking what national identity is and secondly thinking through different ways that national identity has manifested itself as a historical problem in ‘these islands’ since 1940. The seminar will be conducted in a spirit of openness and intellectual curiosity, with courtesy and respect for all. The meaning of ‘Britain’ is itself open to interpretation and has been challenged by nationalism from within the archipelago (Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English) as well as regional, local and transnational identities. The profile and salience of national identity waxes and wanes over time, and is shaped by a range of actors and forces: economic and social change, political ideas and leadership, decolonisation and the loss of empire, European identities, Americanisation, immigration and ‘race thinking’. This research seminar will equip you with the theoretical tools required to examine a historical case study of your choosing and then help you to identify an appropriate archival basis and research methodology for your essay.
Moodle page	2021-22 Moodle page

Europe and the Middle East

HIST0089: Cultural History through Visual Sources: Europe 1450-1700

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Cultural History through Visual Sources: Europe 1450-1700
Tutor	Prof. Ben Kaplan
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	While most historians work predominantly with texts, images offer another extensive body of materials that can be utilized as primary sources for the study of ‘popular’ as well as ‘elite’ cultural history. Such visual materials include not only paintings but also engravings, woodcuts, maps, medals, and tapestries. While they sometimes seem to present us with transparent windows onto a historical ‘reality’, in fact they are crafted representations that reveal much about the cultures that produced them, including their norms and values, systems of meaning, and ways of seeing. This module is not an art history module and does not require any previous background in art history. Rather, it takes a distinctly historical approach, or rather series of approaches, to visual materials from early modern Europe, especially but not exclusively from the Netherlands. It begins by offering an introduction to the methodologies that cultural historians employ in using images as historical evidence. These include iconographic analysis, socio-economic contextualization, and anthropologically informed approaches to ‘visual culture’. It then focuses on a series of case studies, examining the visual sources available for them and how historians have used them. These case studies may include visual propaganda in the Protestant Reformation, popular motifs in the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, news of war (the Dutch Revolt), representations of women and gender roles, communities on display, art as a tool of Catholic devotion, visual tools in the Scientific Revolution, and the symbolic legitimation of absolutist government. The goal of the module is to equip and guide students in the development of their own research project that takes a body of early modern imagery as its primary basis. The public history component will entail preparing an online exhibition, with explanatory text, of the visual materials used in the student’s long essay.
Moodle page	Not available.

HIST0089: Emotions and the Ancient Greeks

This module is counted as an Ancient History SYRS for BA Ancient History students. 

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Emotions and the Ancient Greeks
Tutor	Dr Julietta Steinhauer
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	Over the past decades, the study of emotions has been a growth area in historical studies. How do we study emotions as a historical subject? More specifically, how do we study ancient emotions? Is ‘emotion’ a pan-cultural category or is it socially constructed? We will discuss what use can be made of models developed by neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists and philosophers. Historians of the ancient Greek world have an extra dimension to cope with: that of translation. Do our terms and theirs cover similar experiences? This has been a preoccupation of those who have written on Aristotle’s discussion of the emotions in the Rhetoric. But studies of ancient emotions should never be reduced to a study of terminology; instead, we should aim to uncover their explanatory potential. After four initial sessions we will identify what evidence lends itself to being analysed. Subjects can range from the use of emotions in the speeches of the Greek orators to their use as an explanatory device in historical writing, the expression of emotions in funerary epigrams or the diplomatic language of decrees and royal letters. Emotions in Greek religion are a challenging field, while visual evidence also has great potential.
Moodle page	Not available.

HIST0089: Migrants and Expats: Old Assyrian Identity Politics 20-17cs C BC

This module is counted as an Ancient History SYRS for BA Ancient History students. 

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Migrants and Expats: Old Assyrian Identity Politics 20-17cs C BC
Tutor	Dr Yağmur Heffron
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	This course will focus on the mixed urban communities of foreign merchants and local populations in Anatolia (central Turkey) during the 20th-17th centuries B.C. Thanks to the business archives the Assyrian merchants kept in their Anatolian homes (the largest corpus of private cuneiform documents in the ancient Near East!) this community of expatriates can be studied at extremely high resolution. The key research theme for this course will be on negotiations of identity within and between foreign and local populations at various levels of contact: business, family, religion, and the law. Questions will beframed by critical approaches to the history of Old Assyrian scholarship itself, particularly in terms of how narratives of Assyrian visibility have been shaped by different agendas over the last 70 years.
Moodle page	2021-22 Moodle page

South Asia and East Asia

HIST0089: Awakening a Generation: China's New Culture Movement

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Awakening a Generation: China's New Culture Movement
Tutor	Dr Lily Chang
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	On 4th May 1919, more than 3,000 students gathered on the streets of Beijing to protest the decision of the Versailles Peace Conference. The collapse of the Qing dynasty and earlier failure of the 1911 Revolution to establish a Republican Government had already sown contempt for traditional Chinese culture amongst students and intellectuals. Known as the May Fourth or New Culture Movement, this period fundamentally reshaped twentieth-century China and ignited a generation of thinkers who inspired a series of intellectual debates on culture, history, and philosophy; most notably the notion that change comes not through political revolution but education. This module considers how literary reform and the vernacularization of language enabled the emergence of new forms of consciousness in literature and the public. Many of these ideas were delivered as speeches or short stories to enable a wider reach, as they ought to challenge gender expectations and societal norms. Primary sources will be provided in English translation, and includes mainly speeches, political and social commentaries, and short stories.
Moodle page	2023-24 Moodle page

HIST0089: The Many Lives of Mahatma Ghandi

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: The Many Lives of Mahatma Ghandi
Tutor	Dr Mark Frost
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	This research seminar explores the history of empire, decolonization and popular protest through the prism of one of Asia’s most iconic political figures: Mohandas Gandhi. We will explore the events and contexts which defined Gandhi’s rise to prominence, the reception of his ideas and his politics in India and beyond, and the afterlives of Gandhi in popular memory following his death. You will be introduced to a range of primary sources through which to better understand Gandhi and his legacy, ranging from his own writings, to representations of Gandhi through visual art, to epic films.
Moodle page	Not available.

 The Americas and Atlantic History

HIST0089: Animals in Latin American History

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Animals in Latin American History
Tutor	Dr Thom Rath
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	This module introduces students to the growing and lively field of “animal history” in Latin America, and prepares students to make their own contribution to it.  Among the questions we will explore: How have colonialism, war, industrialization and revolution changed people’s relations with animals? How have animals shaped the modern world? Are some animals more important to study than others? Is animal history even possible? What kind of sources should animal historians use? Is there anything distinctively Latin American about this history? How did people imagine their futures with animals- and how should we do so today?  We will cover roughly 1500 to the present, with a focus on the postcolonial period. By examining cases from across the region, we will aim to move beyond the Eurocentric (or Anglo-centric) perspectives that have sometimes hampered the field, and consider how Latin American creatures have shaped global understandings and institutions.
Moodle page	Not available.

HIST0089: Black Lives in the South Atlantic: West Africa, Americas, and the Caribbean in the early modern era

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Black Lives in the South Atlantic: West Africa, Americas, and the Caribbean in the early modern era
Tutor	Dr Michael Pope
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	This module explores the histories of Black lives and ideas in the Atlantic world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the roles that Africans and the African Diaspora played in shaping historical trajectories, transatlantic cultures, and intellectual thought. The readings for the seminars introduce students to colonial Latin American, West and Central West African, and Atlantic history in the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the historiographical and methodological stakes involved with tracing the lives of Africans and the African Diaspora in the early Atlantic world. Students in this seminar will develop advanced skills in social history research methods, especially a critical sensitivity for the fragmentary nature of tracing the lives and experiences of free and enslaved Black Africans in the Iberian Atlantic. Students do not need to have any prior knowledge of Colonial Spanish, Portuguese or Anglo American History, African History, or early modern European history, although prior experience in any of these subjects will be helpful. This Research Seminar invites students to develop a historical research project on any topic in West or Central West African History in the Age of the Slave Trade, Atlantic History / empires of the Atlantic world pre 1810 (broadly conceived), and slavery, freedom, race, power, or empire in Colonial Spanish or Portuguese Americas.
Moodle page	2023-24 Moodle page

HIST0089: Crime and Punishment in Modern Latin America

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: Crime and Punishment in Modern Latin America
Tutor	Dr Bill Booth
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	Drug lords, street gangs, crime waves. ‘Zero tolerance,’ balaclava-clad police officers, overcrowded jails. It is often difficult to escape from such images when we think of Latin America today, thanks to the proliferation of feature films, TV dramas, true-crime podcasts and newspaper scare stories that, one way or another, centre around sensational themes of crime and punishment in the region. This research seminar explores the history of crime (of any and all kinds), and responses to crime (from laws and public policy to moral panics, popular vigilantism and everything in between), across Latin America from 1945 to the present. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources – from embassy travel warnings to local journalism to academic policy papers and Hollywood movies – we will look at how and why popular narratives of the region as one ravaged by hitmen, drug cartels, armed robbers and other ‘bad hombres’ have taken shape both within Latin America itself, and in the rest of the world (especially the USA). In so doing, you will learn to use a wide range of investigative and analytical tools in order to better understand subjects that often appear spectacular but are rooted in the everyday. Ultimately, these will help you to tease facts from fiction, reportage from propaganda, and rumours from reality in order to write a  5,000 word research essay, and produce a 10-minute ‘true crime’ podcast (or write a 1000 word podcast script) of your own.
Moodle page	2023-24 Moodle page

THIST0089: The Revolutionary Caribbean

Module Code & Title	HIST0089: The Revolutionary Caribbean
Tutor	Prof. Matt Smith
Term	Terms 1 & 2
Credits	30
Module Description	For centuries the Caribbean has been regarded inside and outside the region as a zone of revolutionary upheaval. This view is in large measure a result of its remarkable history. Globalized since the sixteenth century, it has played a significant part in the transformation of world systems largely through its supply of imperial commerce and the migration of its people, cultures, and ideas. Varied colonial experiences produced a range of competing visions over the Caribbean’s past and future. At the far end of this spectrum have been three major revolutions that, in their own ways, demonstrated the import of the region to the world: The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the Cuban Revolution (1959) and the Grenadian Revolution (1979). This module will examine these three pivotal moments from a global perspective. It will treat with the colonial as well as the intra-Caribbean impulses that shaped the revolutionary movements in the region. Close attention will be paid to temporality in understanding historical change in the Caribbean. The Haitian Revolution occurred in the French colony of Saint-Domingue at the dawn of the age of revolutions. It took ideas from the French Revolution and reimagined them in the colonial space to produce the first independent black state in the world. By contrast, the Grenadian Revolution drew on influences from Marxism, black power, and twentieth-century anti-imperialist movements and in an age when the Caribbean was dominated by US foreign policy. Yet both were guided by similar notions of black freedom and shared with the Cuban Revolution, an unease with the legacies of colonial rule. The material for this module will be an exciting mix and include secondary readings from Caribbean and non-Caribbean scholars, primary documents, films, and public history representations of these three revolutions. It will also consider the enduring memories they have left in the Caribbean. Although these three revolutions will form our case studies, students have the opportunity to explore not only the dynamics that made them, but also the circumstances that produced revolutionary movements in other islands. For the 5,000 word essay, students will choose a theme in the history of one of the revolutions and discuss it drawing on relevant scholarship and primary sources. The theme will be finalized in consultation with the module convener. For the public history component students will write a short 1000 word blog piece on memory, representation, and Caribbean revolutionary history, that considers one example of Caribbean public history—statues, street names, historical sites, works of art, etc.—that commemorates the revolutionary event.
Moodle page	2022-23 Moodle page