About this degree

This MA offers advanced-level teaching by leading historians in a wide range of historical fields. Students on the programme follow one of four pathways: (1) Modern British History (2) Environment, State, and Economy (3) Culture, Ideas, and Identities (4) Empires and Global History. Each pathway has a compulsory core module that introduces you to the theories, methods, and debates specific to your pathway. Optional modules give you the opportunity to explore in-depth particular historical subjects relating directly to your pathway, while you may choose elective modules freely from a wide range of options. Together, the compulsory, optional, and elective modules equip you to pursue your own research interests under expert guidance.

Environment, State and Economy

There has been a reciprocal and dynamic relationship between humans and their environment across history. This relationship has had wide-ranging economic and political implications such as the rise of cities, the Industrial Revolution, the development of technology, and the evolution of colonial institutions and settlements. This pathway encourages students to explore the connections between environmental change, economic change and political change from a long-term perspective. The pathway will explore these connections primarily through three interdisciplinary lines of literature on environmental economic history, historical political economy, and political environmental history by drawing historical examples from any time period, country or region. Besides engaging with the relevant literature and theories, students will be able to reflect on historical methods and sources used within these fields which will help them develop their independent research projects. The weekly topics will explore environmental (such as geography and natural resources), political (such as the formation of states and legal institutions) and economic (such as economic development, inequality and living standards) factors in relation to each other from a macrohistorical perspective. The optional modules will allow students to specialise in particular regions, time periods and themes.

Empires and Global History

On this pathway, students will examine and interrogate a set of overlapping concerns that have not only shaped global history, imperial history, and histories of empire, but also stirred debate about the dividing line between such historiographical approaches. The first is with scale in historical analysis, and the effort to move beyond the nation-state to consider empire, region, continent, the terrestrial or terraqueous globe, and even the planet as a unit of inquiry. The second is with connections between historical agents across and between these units, be they human or non-human (including individuals, families, firms, ideas, objects or things, the natural world, diseases, forms of violence, pollution, etc), not to mention the historical agency of ‘empire’ itself. And the last, which is with comparisons across space and time. Rather than being entirely pacific or underpinning ‘progress’, some connections supported the making or deepening of division and inequality, coercion and violence, while comparison can help us better understand power and power relations. The core module will introduce students to these concerns, as well as associated concepts and categories, the evolution of each of these approaches to historical production, their application to a range of historical sub-fields, and some of the hallmark or canonical works. The elective/optional modules will allow students to study these ideas in depth and apply them to particular historiographies.

Culture, Ideas and Identities

This pathway examines culturally constructed aspects of historical experience. Its subject matter includes the wide variety of meaning-laden objects and practices that were produced in the past or engaged in by different segments of society. Thus it examines the history of what traditionally has been identified as culture with a capital “C”, including the ideas articulated by intellectual elites. However, since the 1980s cultural history has paid at least as much attention to everyday attitudes, values, assumptions and prejudices and the rituals and practices that express them, from magical beliefs to gender roles. The pathway studies these things both in themselves and paying attention to their location and dynamic vis-à-vis the social, political, and other spheres. The pathway also focuses on identity, which has become in recent years a key analytical concept for cultural historians, who investigate how gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religiosity, dis/ability and region have shaped how people have understood themselves and been understood by others. Through the pathway-specific core module, students gain a knowledge of a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches deployed by cultural historians, an ability to evaluate those approaches, and an understanding of how they can be applied to particular subjects. Through its optional modules students explore particular cultural-historical phenomena in depth. The optional modules in this pathway are particularly numerous and diverse, spanning all historical periods.  

Modern British History

This pathway enables students to cultivate a deeper understanding of the complexity, diversity and vibrancy of modern British history as a field of study. Students will learn to identify key areas of historiographical debate, to think critically about where the boundaries of the field lie, and to question what constitutes modern British history in both its temporal and spatial dimensions. The pathway particularly encourages students to problematise the idea of ‘national’ history, providing opportunities to explore the transnational, imperial, global and comparative dimensions of political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual life that fall within a ‘British history’ framework. Pathway options typically include modules looking at histories of Britain as far back as 1750. This broad chronological framework reflects the range of expertise in the department, but also encourages students to consider the ways in which the ‘Britishness’ of British history is (re)constituted in particular historical contexts, changing over time. The core module focuses on three thematic areas of study: nation and empire; race, class and gender; and individualism and subjectivity. Students will examine the theories, concepts, methodologies and source materials that historians use to produce historical knowledge about these integrated themes. By this means, they will learn to identify appropriate archival sources for their own research and develop a theoretical, conceptual and methodological framework for their dissertation.

Please note that, depending on factors such as student demand and staffing capacities, it is possible that the History department will not run all four pathways in some years.