51±¬ÁÏÍø

Module Overview

Humanities in Action: Enterprise Projects tasks students with directing their skills towards solving a real-world business, policy, or organizational problem. Set a contemporary challenge by a current organizational leader, students will independently manage a group project and draw on their distinct and specific skills to propose a feasible solution grounded in the humanities.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of authoritarian regimes, fascist movements, and dictatorships in the 20th century, providing students with a critical understanding of how these regimes emerged, functioned, and shaped global history. By examining case studies from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, students will gain insight into the political, social, and ideological dynamics that enabled authoritarian rule.

Module Overview

This module provides students with the opportunity to resurrect and understand the ordinary lives of people like themselves and their forebears from the sources available to us. The course picks up on both well-established and recent trends in historical research that have sought to give voice to ordinary people and promote from the historical records the lives of marginalised people such as homosexuals, women, children, the working classes, ethnic minorities alongside more familiar narratives of the great and the good.

Module Overview

This module looks to provide an introduction to the preventive conservation skills needed to set out as a practicing conservator. Students have the chance to develop an understanding of practical preventive conservation and collections management procedures, and can gain experience in environmental monitoring and surveying. Topics such as integrated pest management and emergency planning are also discussed.

Module Overview

Beginning with the Royal Historical Society’s “Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report” (published in 2018), which raises urgent questions on the diversity of staff, students and curricula at History departments in UK universities, the module analyses live debates on “Decolonising the Curriculum” in higher education. We critique how histories of Empire, colonialism and slavery have been taught in Anglo-American settings, and introduce postcolonial analysis on archives, as well as the “Global South” and “indigenous knowledge” that have often been marginalised in Eurocentric historiographies.

Turning towards the University as a key apparatus of power in the contemporary world, the module then reveals the complex legacies of slavery in the making of a number of UK and US institutions including Liverpool, Bristol, Oxford (#RhodesMustFall), SOAS, University of Virginia and others. Introducing the new field of “Critical University Studies” (CUS), students will learn about the emergence of universities in former colonies including India and South Africa, as well as the phenomenon of “transnational education” that entails the establishment, by prestigious European and American institutions, of satellite campuses around the world. The module then unpacks public understandings of colonial history via recent scholarship on nationalism, patriotism, museums and memories, and ends with a hopeful reflection on pedagogies that will be more inclusive and intersectional in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This module will be particularly suited to students who intend to develop careers in education.

Module Overview

The cultural heritage sector increasingly offers opportunities for the application of digital technologies as communication, research and recording tools. This module enables students to become familiar with some of these advanced recording techniques for the study and recording of objects.

Module Overview

This module explores fundamental questions about humanity's relationship with the natural world through the lens of philosophical inquiry. Drawing on both classical and contemporary thinkers, we examine key debates in environmental ethics, from the intrinsic value of nature to questions of ecological justice and sustainability. Students will critically assess different philosophical approaches to pressing environmental challenges, including climate change and biodiversity loss, while developing sophisticated arguments about environmental responsibility and stewardship. The module combines careful philosophical analysis with practical application, making it relevant for students interested in environmental issues, public policy, or fundamental questions about human-nature relationships. Through thoughtful discussion and analysis, students will be able to develop valuable critical thinking skills while engaging with one of the most significant intellectual challenges of our time.

Module Overview

The modern period has often been understood as a time when peace was considered the natural state of societies, where states and non-governmental groups have been concerned with achieving a lasting peace and avoiding repetitions of bloody conflict. Wars, however, have not become a thing of the past, and today we live in a condition of seemingly permanent war where civilians are often the primary targets. This module will look at how ideas and practices of war have altered in the last few hundred years, and how these notions have been contested and challenged. The module asks where these ideas came from, and how concepts of war and peace, and violence and non-violence have been reframed in various ways. The course is focussed on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and moves chronologically from the Napoleonic wars, to contemporary conflicts through a series of case studies that cover wars, diplomacy, the aftermath of wars, and peace movements. Each case study will draw on key themes which run throughout the module, including pacifism, militarism, imperialism, culture, race, gender and nationalism.

Module Overview

This module investigates portraiture as a cultural practice and artistic genre from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, examining how modernity has shaped representations of identity. It explores how portraits, across painting, photography, film and digital media, have been used to negotiate questions of likeness, individuality and social status, and to respond to shifting ideas of selfhood in relation to politics, psychology and consumer culture.

Module Overview

In this module, you will examine how empire functioned not just as a geopolitical map, but as varied systems of racialised and gendered control, enforced through institutions ranging from the classroom and the prison cell to the railway lines that carved up landscapes. By investigating the flows of settlers, migrants, and intermediaries, including the porters behind famous explorers and the labourers sustaining global trade, you will reappraise the myth of ‘blank spaces’ and uncover the complex human networks that linked metropoles to colonies and colonies to one another. Through diverse case studies extending from the Caribbean and East Africa to East and Southeast Asia, you will interrogate the changing dynamics of power, from the ‘benign neglect’ of the nineteenth century to the ends of empire in the twentieth century, violent or otherwise. The module encourages you to look beyond traditional archives to recover the voices of the silenced, analysing sources such as memoirs, newspapers, and oral histories to reconstruct ‘colonial lives’. Whether examining the legacy of imperial heroes or the messy transition to independence, you will develop the digital and research skills to produce work that brings these hidden histories to light, critically reflecting on how the echoes of empire continue to shape our world today.

Module Overview

The University has a strong commitment to providing academic programmes with high vocational relevance, which is maintained through working links with local, national and international organisations and, in particular, through student work placements.

The Placement Year aims to give students a continuous experience of full-time work within an organisation. It should be a three-way co-operative activity between employer, student and University from which all parties benefit. It is more than simply obtaining work during a gap in study – work placements should enable students to experience at first hand the daily workings of an organisation while setting that experience in the broader context of their studies.

The Placement Year constitutes a work placement during an academic year, funded by full-time paid employment* taking place between Level 2 and Level 3. The minimum duration of placement is 39 weeks.

Students wishing to undertake the work placement year must successfully complete the Level 2 of their programme.

All students on the Placement Year as part of their full-time undergraduate study will remain enrolled with the University during the period of placement and receive support. Students originally enrolled on 3-year programmes wishing to transfer to the 4-year programme must do so before the start of their placement, should gain the consent of their funders, where appropriate, and advise the University of their intention before the September enrolment.

Module Overview

This module encourages students to connect making with how we understand and interpret historical objects. Through physically engaging with materials and craft processes, students learn experientially and gain insights into how material properties and making processes provide evidence for the past.

Module Overview

This module will give students a unique opportunity to develop their practical skills for studying objects while developing their understanding of the relationship between history and material culture. Students can explore how object-based study can enhance their practice as conservators and historians and how material culture studies can lead to insights that cannot be reached through other approaches.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to some of the central concepts, issues, theories, and debates in an area of moral philosophy called "normative ethics", thereby providing them with a framework for thinking seriously about moral matters, and to assist them in developing their philosophical and analytical skills. We will distinguish and evaluate the leading positions on these issues through a range of more specific topics in normative ethics.

Module Overview

People have migrated as long as the human race has existed and this module places this fundamental aspect of human experience at its heart. Issues surrounding migration and the movement of peoples are central to contemporary politics and society, as the management of people seeking refuge and better prospects preoccupies governments around the world. This situation makes ever more urgent our need to understand the history of migration and how it has shaped cultures across time and space. People on the move focuses upon the movement of people at particular points in modern history, considering the forces that propel people to risk their own lives and possibly those of their families, uproot from home and enter the potentially perilous and peripatetic life of a migrant. We will discuss the prospects and challenges of migration, and subsequently how diasporic cultures develop and the benefits and tensions surrounding integration. We will consider what happens when communities come into contact due to migration and the subsequent influences upon culture, religion, politics and identity. Through a series of in-depth case studies from the modern period, from the forced movement of the colonial era to twentieth century migration across the Atlantic, we will encounter a variety of geographical regions and processes of migration. A variety of historical sources will be interrogated to access the stories of migrants and about migrants, including texts (such legal and government documents, letters, memoirs and oral histories), images, objects and architecture. Addressing themes such as empire, economics, identity and religion in different contexts allows us to make meaningful comparisons between migrations across time and space.

Module Overview

This modules addresses the phenomenon of love through the lens of some of the greatest works in the Western philosophical tradition. We shall mostly consider reciprocal romantic love and investigate, among other things, its seeming capacity, despite the possibility of loss that is intrinsic to love, to confer meaning and purpose upon life. The module explores the Freudian view that love is essentially a search for security and asks if this search can ever be stably fulfilled or if, like Sartre, we must conclude that it is impossible. Can love be defined, or does it belong to the realm of the ineffable? Is love inherently rational or irrational? Is it reducible to the reproductive or sexual drive? Do we, in essence, love the other for their own sake, or is love always self-serving? Is possessiveness really the enemy of successful love? Does all love stem from need or lack? What, if anything, is the difference between love and infatuation? And is, as Plato held, erotic attachment a form of enslavement? In addition, we will reflect upon a range of other topics, such as sexual objectification, polyamory or ethical non-monogamy, the ethics of causal sex, pornography, sexual desire, sadomasochism, and perversion.

Module Overview

This module focuses on a range of philosophical questions relating to mental illness and its treatment. What makes a person mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What makes a conscious state psychotic or delusional? How might mental disorders be distinguished from non-disordered mental states and conditions? Would certain putative mental illnesses be better characterized as “problems with living” rather than as specifically medical conditions? Should, as per the prevailing tendency in contemporary psychiatry, the subjective experience of individuals suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia, be understood chiefly in terms of a chemical imbalance, and accordingly treated by an adjustment to brain chemistry? Or should, as per the traditional psychoanalytic view, such conditions be understood as irreducibly tied to internal symbolic content to be decoded by the analyst and patient? We will also consider questions raised by particular psychopathologies. Is psychopathy best understood as a mental illness, and if so, is it appropriate to hold psychopaths responsible for their attitudes and actions? Are certain forms of cognition currently seen as neurological/ neuro-developmental disorders (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) better understood as representing diverse or statistically atypical ways in which humans are capable of seeing and interacting with the world? These and other questions will be explored through the lens of recent literature in the analytic tradition as well as seminal texts in the history of the philosophy of mental illness (e.g., Freud, Foucault, R.D. Laing).

Module Overview

Videogames are one of the most common ways of encountering history in the twenty-first century, but they offer a different way of engaging with history than films or other popular culture. Uniquely, videogames invite the player into the past and imbue them with incredible power to re-make the in-game future through their choices and the actions of the characters they control. This module will examine the relationship between history and videogames from a number of angles.

Module Overview

From immigration raids and street-level protests to contested foreign interventions and the global rise of far-right populism, the United States is currently living through a period of overlapping political crises. Federal immigration enforcement in cities like Minneapolis has provoked widespread public protest and legal challenges, raising urgent questions about state violence, civil liberties, and the reach of executive power. At the same time, instability in places such as Venezuela, and the role of the United States within it, has reignited debates about presidential authority in foreign policy and the legacy of American interventionism. These moments are not isolated events, but flashpoints in a much longer struggle over power, legitimacy, and democracy. This course helps you make sense of the crises of the present by placing them in historical context.

Rather than treating contemporary politics as unprecedented chaos, the module traces how modern presidential power was built, expanded, and repeatedly contested across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing especially how we got to the Trump era, the course explores how populism, media ecosystems, racial politics, national security, and economic inequality have reshaped both the presidency and public expectations of leadership.

Module Overview

How can history and heritage be more inclusive of LGBTIQ+ lives and experiences? And how can queer perspectives help us to better understand the complexities of the past? This module responds to these questions by examining queer histories from the Ancient World to the present day. Taking a global view, the module investigates how concepts such as sex, sexuality, gender, the body, friendship and family have been organised in diverse ways across different times and places. In addition to considering how particular sexual and gender identities have emerged, the module also engages with ideas of queer history as a method for historical enquiry: one that is sceptical about binary analyses and linear narratives of progress.

Module Overview

Examining a period marked by shifting power dynamics, from the strict state censorship of the 1920s to the borderless fandoms of the digital age, this module challenges the idea that entertainment is merely a diversion from serious history. Instead, students explore how the screen has been a central battleground for state intervention, the democratisation of production, and personal self-fashioning, revealing how we have watched the world and how the world has watched us.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of sport in the modern world from the eighteenth century to the present. Sport both shapes and is shaped by modern society and the global expansion of sports across the world and professionalization have led to certain sports becoming the economic powerhouses of today. Sport has played an important role in nation-building in the last two hundred years, and sports teams continue to be significant markers of identity at local, regional and national levels. This module will also explore the impact of global phenomena, such as imperialism which spread certain sports to particular areas of the world. Topics will range from the local to the global, drawing on the colleagues' specialisms, including examples from modern Britain and Europe, the Caribbean, South Asia and East Asia. Sports discussed will include major global sports such as association football, cricket and rugby, but also hockey, racing, athletics and gymnastics.

Major events such as the Olympics will be considered alongside more focused examples to allow us to explore themes including class, gender, nation, identity and race, and their intersection.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for History students to spend a term studying at one of the University’s partner institutions in North America or Europe. Students will be expected to cover their own transport, accommodation and living costs.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

The Cold War shaped foreign policy as well as domestic politics and culture for much of the second half of the 20th century. But how all-encompassing was the Cold War? How did non-state actors react to and influence the course of its development? And how “cold” was the Cold War? This module will examine the Cold War from a Global perspective, exploring how the Cold War play manifested in different places and spaces across the world, from military confrontations to street protests, and everyday activities in civilian and domestic settings.

Module Overview

Explore a world transformed by 16th-century voyages of discovery and imperial expansion. This module offers a fascinating introduction to how the Renaissance was a truly global phenomenon, challenging traditional Eurocentric views. Students will delve into the impact of major historical shifts across Renaissance England, Europe and also the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The module is highly interdisciplinary and examines political, social, religious, cultural, and artistic topics through the lens of global scholarship. This module challenges assumptions and approaches the period from new perspectives, focusing on both elite and Indigenous, African, and non-elite experiences often hidden from older scholarship. Students will learn practical skills by engaging directly with primary sources in seminars to build confidence in historical research and analysis. This module is designed for students eager to understand a pivotal era and master the methods historians use to recover diverse stories.

Module Overview

This module will examine the ways in which Victorian Britons deviated from an apparently strict moral code. The context of an urbanising society with increasing wealth, mobility and advances in communications, alongside persistent poverty, class divisions and exploitation, created new opportunities for pornography, gay subcultures and recreational drug use, while existing vices such as drinking and prostitution evolved in new ways. Commentary on such practices, meanwhile, was shaped by new ideas about respectability and class and created an increasing division between virtue and vice. The module will also consider the problems of researching such topics, engaging students with the way illegality and marginalisation impacted the production of source material.

Module Overview

This module explores texts of the long Victorian era (1830-1914), a period of enormous social and cultural upheaval in which we find the roots of our modern selves. ‘Victorian worlds’ explores texts of a variety of forms (e.g. novel, short story, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose) and genres (e.g. realism, Gothic, travel writing, life writing, fantasy) focused on different locations and social experiences, in recognition of a multiplicity of perspectives on ‘the Victorian world’. As we study these works in their historical contexts, we ask how these writers used literature to forge understandings of themselves in relation to their changing, and often challenging, environments.

Module Overview

In their final year, every student on the BA (Hons) History degree programme at the 51±¬ÁÏÍø must produce an independent study. This is an extended piece of work which gives them the opportunity to demonstrate they have acquired the skills to undertake detailed and substantial subject-specific research and writing founded on critical inquiry and analysis.

Module Overview

In the Twentieth Century new aviation technologies transformed understandings of war, peace, civilian and military. The module considers how ideas about air power developed, what informed this understanding of war, and what the consequences were. This is not a traditional military history concerned with narrative accounts of battles or armies, but one that asks questions about the relationship between military and civilian in society and culture in the twentieth century.

Module Overview

The module will examine consumption in many of its forms in early modern Western Europe. Focusing on a number of areas, such as food, clothing, furnishings, houses and other goods increasingly accessible to people at all levels of society, the module will encourage students to consider how and why these were available.

Module Overview

This module explores fundamental questions about humanity's relationship with the natural world through the lens of philosophical inquiry. Drawing on both classical and contemporary thinkers, we examine key debates in environmental ethics, from the intrinsic value of nature to questions of ecological justice and sustainability. Students will critically assess different philosophical approaches to pressing environmental challenges, including climate change and biodiversity loss, while developing sophisticated arguments about environmental responsibility and stewardship. The module combines careful philosophical analysis with practical application, making it relevant for students interested in environmental issues, public policy, or fundamental questions about human-nature relationships. Through thoughtful discussion and analysis, students will be able to develop valuable critical thinking skills while engaging with one of the most significant intellectual challenges of our time.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of science, sexuality and politics in the UK, Continental Europe, the US and Latin America from 1850 to 2000. It will give students an excellent grounding in modern and contemporary history that will complement further modules at level 3 that deal with sexuality, gender, race, science and medicine. It module examines the controversial rise of eugenics movements as a global phenomenon. The purpose of this module is to sustain a balanced and informed discussion about how race, reproduction, and the improvement of human heredity have acquired great political relevance in the modern period. It explores how scientists and different governments became preoccupied with hereditary theories, race, reproduction and sexual behaviour. It examines how societies across the Atlantic developed government policies around areas such as family planning, pronatalism, sterilisation, and race, which culminated in the implementation of euthanasia programmes in Nazi Germany. This module looks at eugenics programmes and politics in a transnational context, exploring how, for example, Nazi Germany’s sterilisation programmes were inspired by those already implemented in the US and how a number of Latin American countries adapted and transformed eugenics policies from Southern Europe and developed whitening policies.

Module Overview

This module explores the various ways in which the world was put on display in the nineteenth century, and with what aims and effects. The nineteenth century was a period during which museums, galleries, exhibitions, zoos and circuses all expanded in numbers and took on distinctive modern forms; it was also one where the ‘freak show’ became both popular but also frowned upon, while optical toys and attractions reformed ‘ways of seeing’.

Module Overview

This module guides students through one of the most significant scientific, political, and environmental stories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in U.S. history. Students will engage with debates over the decision to use atomic weapons, the expansion of atmospheric testing, the growth of nuclear power, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the emergence of anti-nuclear activism within the United States.

Module Overview

Hong Kong’s history lies at the intersection of Chinese, British imperial, and transnational histories. This module explores the history of Hong Kong from its colonisation by Britain in 1841 up to the present day.

The module seeks to introduce the city’s history to students, explore the ways historians have engaged with and approached this history, and to help students develop skills of historical analysis and debate. Through engaging with the rich historical debates and with English-language and translated primary materials, students on this module may study issues and themes including, but not limited to: imperialism; colonialism; transnational networks; international and diplomatic history; economic and business history; social history; urban history; migration and diaspora history.

Module Overview

The module will give students practical experience of the workplace. Students will normally define, plan and undertake a specific project. In addition students will gain experience of a range of tasks appropriate to sector-specific professional skills.

Module Overview

This module will analyse how the medicalised body has been represented, exploited, challenged and reclaimed in art and visual culture. The themes, ideas, priorities and objects of medicine – such as death, health, sexuality, taboo, trauma, bodily functions, and viscera – have taken centre stage in art and visual culture since the end of the nineteenth century. This module will explore the manifold ways in which artists have engaged with subjects including medical technologies, anatomies, contagion, disease, disability, psychiatry, blood, and pain, and we will do so in relation to constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class and disability. What significance do pathology, disease, illness narratives and patient experience take on in art and visual culture? To what effects have artists portrayed and perhaps questioned modern therapies and medical technologies, and their subjects, practices and theories? We will focus on a range of media including painting, prints, sculpture, performance art, conceptual art, film, and photography.

Module Overview

This module will investigate the history of imperial Britain through material culture. The objects of study will range from trophies looted in battle and a drum transported with enslaved Africans to Virginia, to African sculpture depicting Europeans. Historians increasingly recognise the fresh insights that objects offer to major themes in imperial history such as gender, race and class. This module responds to these new academic developments and will use objects and their biographies to study key phases and themes in the history of the British Empire. Tracing the long history of such objects can enable us to explore how objects change meanings as they move through various colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Module Overview

This module explores a range of philosophical questions that arise in relation to love and sexual desire. Can love be defined, or does it belong to the realm of the ineffable? Is love inherently irrational? Is it reducible to the reproductive or sexual drive? Do we love the other for his/her own sake, or is love always self-serving? Are jealousy and possessiveness really the enemy of successful love? Does all love stem from need or lack? What, if anything, is the difference between love and infatuation? And is, as Plato held, love a form of enslavement?

In this module, students can address such questions through the lens of some of the greatest works in the Western philosophical tradition. We shall mostly consider reciprocal romantic love and investigate, among other things, its capacity to confer meaning and purpose upon life. We shall also explore the Freudian view that love involves regression to a situation in childhood in which we were perfectly safe, the search for love essentially being an attempt to recover this earlier form of security or wholeness. Can this need for wholeness ever be fully and stably fulfilled, or is, as Sartre argued, the project of love impossible? In addition, we shall reflect upon the nature of pornography, sadomasochism, and sexual perversion.

Module Overview

This module focuses on a range of philosophical questions relating to mental illness and its treatment. What makes a person mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What makes a conscious state psychotic or delusional? How might mental disorders be distinguished from non-disordered mental states and conditions? Would certain putative mental illnesses be better characterized as “problems with living” rather than as specifically medical conditions? Should, as per the prevailing tendency in contemporary psychiatry, the subjective experience of individuals suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia, be understood chiefly in terms of a chemical imbalance, and accordingly treated by an adjustment to brain chemistry? Or should, as per the traditional psychoanalytic view, such conditions be understood as irreducibly tied to internal symbolic content to be decoded by the analyst and patient? We will also consider questions raised by particular psychopathologies. Is psychopathy best understood as a mental illness, and if so, is it appropriate to hold psychopaths responsible for their attitudes and actions? Are certain forms of cognition currently seen as neurological/ neuro-developmental disorders (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) better understood as representing diverse or statistically atypical ways in which humans are capable of seeing and interacting with the world? These and other questions will be explored through the lens of recent literature in the analytic tradition as well as seminal texts in the history of the philosophy of mental illness (e.g., Freud, Foucault, R.D. Laing).

Module Overview

Portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives on screen are under increasing scrutiny from audiences, activists and media scholars. But, for much of the history of film and television, non-normative sexual and gender identities have been marginalised or hidden. This module examines the history of queer representations in screen culture from the era of silent films to the present day. Students will have the opportunity to work with examples from a range of national contexts, including (but not limited to) Britain and America, as well as engaging with influential scholarship in queer theory and the history of gender and sexuality.

Module Overview

How can history and heritage be more inclusive of LGBTIQ+ lives and experiences? And how can queer perspectives help us to better understand the complexities of the past? This module responds to these questions by examining queer histories from the Ancient World to the present day. Taking a global view, the module investigates how concepts such as sex, sexuality, gender, the body, friendship, and family have been organised in diverse ways across different times and places. In addition to considering how particular sexual and gender identities have emerged, the module also engages with ideas of queer history as a method for historical enquiry: one that is sceptical about binary analyses and linear narratives of progress.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice in History. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

This module aims to examine how living in cities shaped the ways our lives and society have developed since the 19th Century. In the early 19th Century the population of Europe largely lived in rural settlements, yet 100 years later the populations of Western Europe's cities had exploded. Cities produced new forms of social organisation: for the first time drag queens and prostitutes rubbed shoulders with housewives, the rich discovered the poor on their very doorsteps and the unregulated spaces of cities became havens for counter-cultures, deviant sexualities and radical politics.

Module Overview

This module, ‘The Internet: A Social and Cultural History,’ examines how ordinary people experienced the internet in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Using a social and cultural history approach, we will move beyond histories of technological innovators to instead examine how a range of people embraced the internet within their daily lives, navigated multiplying ‘search’ platforms, made decisions around associated hardware like the iphone, and also grappled with new understandings of surveillance in the early 21st century. Central to the module will be a consideration of the methodologies historians can use to provide histories of internet spaces, activities, and events.

Module Overview

This module examines how African Americans tried to cast off the economic, political, cultural and social ties that bound them to second-class citizenship within the United States. We primarily focus on the Southern version of the black freedom struggle before casting our attention to a wider American political, social, and racial context — particularly as we challenge “the master narrative” of the civil rights movement that was once presented and represented as the singular history of the movement for African American freedom.

In charting the course of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century and beyond, we analyse the most venerated events and personalities of the era and aim to understand the movement on its own terms. We will explore its richness and its internal complexities, especially when reviewing the varying tactics and ideological differences of the movement’s leaders. The module asks us to question the presumed victories of the civil rights movement, to stretch our chronological understanding beyond traditional beginnings and endings, to acknowledge the complexity of American racial identity, and reveal what it tells us about the wider political and social dimensions of modern US history.

Module Overview

This module interrogates what it meant to be free and unfree in British Caribbean Colonial Societies. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, it focuses on how African Caribbean people sought freedom during and after slavery. This exploration involves a review of freedom struggles that began in Africa, stretched across the ocean in the form of uprisings and refusals to comply on slave ships, and extended to the towns, plantations, and forests/mountains of the countries in which they were initially enslaved. This module also explores the experiences of indentured labourers (Asian and European), convicts and other coerced labourers. Social constraints found in colonial societies more generally will also be considered.

Module Overview

Humanities in Action: Enterprise Projects tasks students with directing their skills towards solving a real-world business, policy, or organizational problem. Set a contemporary challenge by a current organizational leader, students will independently manage a group project and draw on their distinct and specific skills to propose a feasible solution grounded in the humanities.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of authoritarian regimes, fascist movements, and dictatorships in the 20th century, providing students with a critical understanding of how these regimes emerged, functioned, and shaped global history. By examining case studies from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, students will gain insight into the political, social, and ideological dynamics that enabled authoritarian rule.

Module Overview

This module provides students with the opportunity to resurrect and understand the ordinary lives of people like themselves and their forebears from the sources available to us. The course picks up on both well-established and recent trends in historical research that have sought to give voice to ordinary people and promote from the historical records the lives of marginalised people such as homosexuals, women, children, the working classes, ethnic minorities alongside more familiar narratives of the great and the good.

Module Overview

This module looks to provide an introduction to the preventive conservation skills needed to set out as a practicing conservator. Students have the chance to develop an understanding of practical preventive conservation and collections management procedures, and can gain experience in environmental monitoring and surveying. Topics such as integrated pest management and emergency planning are also discussed.

Module Overview

Beginning with the Royal Historical Society’s “Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report” (published in 2018), which raises urgent questions on the diversity of staff, students and curricula at History departments in UK universities, the module analyses live debates on “Decolonising the Curriculum” in higher education. We critique how histories of Empire, colonialism and slavery have been taught in Anglo-American settings, and introduce postcolonial analysis on archives, as well as the “Global South” and “indigenous knowledge” that have often been marginalised in Eurocentric historiographies.

Turning towards the University as a key apparatus of power in the contemporary world, the module then reveals the complex legacies of slavery in the making of a number of UK and US institutions including Liverpool, Bristol, Oxford (#RhodesMustFall), SOAS, University of Virginia and others. Introducing the new field of “Critical University Studies” (CUS), students will learn about the emergence of universities in former colonies including India and South Africa, as well as the phenomenon of “transnational education” that entails the establishment, by prestigious European and American institutions, of satellite campuses around the world. The module then unpacks public understandings of colonial history via recent scholarship on nationalism, patriotism, museums and memories, and ends with a hopeful reflection on pedagogies that will be more inclusive and intersectional in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This module will be particularly suited to students who intend to develop careers in education.

Module Overview

The cultural heritage sector increasingly offers opportunities for the application of digital technologies as communication, research and recording tools. This module enables students to become familiar with some of these advanced recording techniques for the study and recording of objects.

Module Overview

This module explores fundamental questions about humanity's relationship with the natural world through the lens of philosophical inquiry. Drawing on both classical and contemporary thinkers, we examine key debates in environmental ethics, from the intrinsic value of nature to questions of ecological justice and sustainability. Students will critically assess different philosophical approaches to pressing environmental challenges, including climate change and biodiversity loss, while developing sophisticated arguments about environmental responsibility and stewardship. The module combines careful philosophical analysis with practical application, making it relevant for students interested in environmental issues, public policy, or fundamental questions about human-nature relationships. Through thoughtful discussion and analysis, students will be able to develop valuable critical thinking skills while engaging with one of the most significant intellectual challenges of our time.

Module Overview

The modern period has often been understood as a time when peace was considered the natural state of societies, where states and non-governmental groups have been concerned with achieving a lasting peace and avoiding repetitions of bloody conflict. Wars, however, have not become a thing of the past, and today we live in a condition of seemingly permanent war where civilians are often the primary targets. This module will look at how ideas and practices of war have altered in the last few hundred years, and how these notions have been contested and challenged. The module asks where these ideas came from, and how concepts of war and peace, and violence and non-violence have been reframed in various ways. The course is focussed on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and moves chronologically from the Napoleonic wars, to contemporary conflicts through a series of case studies that cover wars, diplomacy, the aftermath of wars, and peace movements. Each case study will draw on key themes which run throughout the module, including pacifism, militarism, imperialism, culture, race, gender and nationalism.

Module Overview

This module investigates portraiture as a cultural practice and artistic genre from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, examining how modernity has shaped representations of identity. It explores how portraits, across painting, photography, film and digital media, have been used to negotiate questions of likeness, individuality and social status, and to respond to shifting ideas of selfhood in relation to politics, psychology and consumer culture.

Module Overview

In this module, you will examine how empire functioned not just as a geopolitical map, but as varied systems of racialised and gendered control, enforced through institutions ranging from the classroom and the prison cell to the railway lines that carved up landscapes. By investigating the flows of settlers, migrants, and intermediaries, including the porters behind famous explorers and the labourers sustaining global trade, you will reappraise the myth of ‘blank spaces’ and uncover the complex human networks that linked metropoles to colonies and colonies to one another. Through diverse case studies extending from the Caribbean and East Africa to East and Southeast Asia, you will interrogate the changing dynamics of power, from the ‘benign neglect’ of the nineteenth century to the ends of empire in the twentieth century, violent or otherwise. The module encourages you to look beyond traditional archives to recover the voices of the silenced, analysing sources such as memoirs, newspapers, and oral histories to reconstruct ‘colonial lives’. Whether examining the legacy of imperial heroes or the messy transition to independence, you will develop the digital and research skills to produce work that brings these hidden histories to light, critically reflecting on how the echoes of empire continue to shape our world today.

Module Overview

The University has a strong commitment to providing academic programmes with high vocational relevance, which is maintained through working links with local, national and international organisations and, in particular, through student work placements.

The Placement Year aims to give students a continuous experience of full-time work within an organisation. It should be a three-way co-operative activity between employer, student and University from which all parties benefit. It is more than simply obtaining work during a gap in study – work placements should enable students to experience at first hand the daily workings of an organisation while setting that experience in the broader context of their studies.

The Placement Year constitutes a work placement during an academic year, funded by full-time paid employment* taking place between Level 2 and Level 3. The minimum duration of placement is 39 weeks.

Students wishing to undertake the work placement year must successfully complete the Level 2 of their programme.

All students on the Placement Year as part of their full-time undergraduate study will remain enrolled with the University during the period of placement and receive support. Students originally enrolled on 3-year programmes wishing to transfer to the 4-year programme must do so before the start of their placement, should gain the consent of their funders, where appropriate, and advise the University of their intention before the September enrolment.

Module Overview

This module encourages students to connect making with how we understand and interpret historical objects. Through physically engaging with materials and craft processes, students learn experientially and gain insights into how material properties and making processes provide evidence for the past.

Module Overview

This module will give students a unique opportunity to develop their practical skills for studying objects while developing their understanding of the relationship between history and material culture. Students can explore how object-based study can enhance their practice as conservators and historians and how material culture studies can lead to insights that cannot be reached through other approaches.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to some of the central concepts, issues, theories, and debates in an area of moral philosophy called "normative ethics", thereby providing them with a framework for thinking seriously about moral matters, and to assist them in developing their philosophical and analytical skills. We will distinguish and evaluate the leading positions on these issues through a range of more specific topics in normative ethics.

Module Overview

People have migrated as long as the human race has existed and this module places this fundamental aspect of human experience at its heart. Issues surrounding migration and the movement of peoples are central to contemporary politics and society, as the management of people seeking refuge and better prospects preoccupies governments around the world. This situation makes ever more urgent our need to understand the history of migration and how it has shaped cultures across time and space. People on the move focuses upon the movement of people at particular points in modern history, considering the forces that propel people to risk their own lives and possibly those of their families, uproot from home and enter the potentially perilous and peripatetic life of a migrant. We will discuss the prospects and challenges of migration, and subsequently how diasporic cultures develop and the benefits and tensions surrounding integration. We will consider what happens when communities come into contact due to migration and the subsequent influences upon culture, religion, politics and identity. Through a series of in-depth case studies from the modern period, from the forced movement of the colonial era to twentieth century migration across the Atlantic, we will encounter a variety of geographical regions and processes of migration. A variety of historical sources will be interrogated to access the stories of migrants and about migrants, including texts (such legal and government documents, letters, memoirs and oral histories), images, objects and architecture. Addressing themes such as empire, economics, identity and religion in different contexts allows us to make meaningful comparisons between migrations across time and space.

Module Overview

This modules addresses the phenomenon of love through the lens of some of the greatest works in the Western philosophical tradition. We shall mostly consider reciprocal romantic love and investigate, among other things, its seeming capacity, despite the possibility of loss that is intrinsic to love, to confer meaning and purpose upon life. The module explores the Freudian view that love is essentially a search for security and asks if this search can ever be stably fulfilled or if, like Sartre, we must conclude that it is impossible. Can love be defined, or does it belong to the realm of the ineffable? Is love inherently rational or irrational? Is it reducible to the reproductive or sexual drive? Do we, in essence, love the other for their own sake, or is love always self-serving? Is possessiveness really the enemy of successful love? Does all love stem from need or lack? What, if anything, is the difference between love and infatuation? And is, as Plato held, erotic attachment a form of enslavement? In addition, we will reflect upon a range of other topics, such as sexual objectification, polyamory or ethical non-monogamy, the ethics of causal sex, pornography, sexual desire, sadomasochism, and perversion.

Module Overview

This module focuses on a range of philosophical questions relating to mental illness and its treatment. What makes a person mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What makes a conscious state psychotic or delusional? How might mental disorders be distinguished from non-disordered mental states and conditions? Would certain putative mental illnesses be better characterized as “problems with living” rather than as specifically medical conditions? Should, as per the prevailing tendency in contemporary psychiatry, the subjective experience of individuals suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia, be understood chiefly in terms of a chemical imbalance, and accordingly treated by an adjustment to brain chemistry? Or should, as per the traditional psychoanalytic view, such conditions be understood as irreducibly tied to internal symbolic content to be decoded by the analyst and patient? We will also consider questions raised by particular psychopathologies. Is psychopathy best understood as a mental illness, and if so, is it appropriate to hold psychopaths responsible for their attitudes and actions? Are certain forms of cognition currently seen as neurological/ neuro-developmental disorders (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) better understood as representing diverse or statistically atypical ways in which humans are capable of seeing and interacting with the world? These and other questions will be explored through the lens of recent literature in the analytic tradition as well as seminal texts in the history of the philosophy of mental illness (e.g., Freud, Foucault, R.D. Laing).

Module Overview

Videogames are one of the most common ways of encountering history in the twenty-first century, but they offer a different way of engaging with history than films or other popular culture. Uniquely, videogames invite the player into the past and imbue them with incredible power to re-make the in-game future through their choices and the actions of the characters they control. This module will examine the relationship between history and videogames from a number of angles.

Module Overview

From immigration raids and street-level protests to contested foreign interventions and the global rise of far-right populism, the United States is currently living through a period of overlapping political crises. Federal immigration enforcement in cities like Minneapolis has provoked widespread public protest and legal challenges, raising urgent questions about state violence, civil liberties, and the reach of executive power. At the same time, instability in places such as Venezuela, and the role of the United States within it, has reignited debates about presidential authority in foreign policy and the legacy of American interventionism. These moments are not isolated events, but flashpoints in a much longer struggle over power, legitimacy, and democracy. This course helps you make sense of the crises of the present by placing them in historical context.

Rather than treating contemporary politics as unprecedented chaos, the module traces how modern presidential power was built, expanded, and repeatedly contested across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing especially how we got to the Trump era, the course explores how populism, media ecosystems, racial politics, national security, and economic inequality have reshaped both the presidency and public expectations of leadership.

Module Overview

How can history and heritage be more inclusive of LGBTIQ+ lives and experiences? And how can queer perspectives help us to better understand the complexities of the past? This module responds to these questions by examining queer histories from the Ancient World to the present day. Taking a global view, the module investigates how concepts such as sex, sexuality, gender, the body, friendship and family have been organised in diverse ways across different times and places. In addition to considering how particular sexual and gender identities have emerged, the module also engages with ideas of queer history as a method for historical enquiry: one that is sceptical about binary analyses and linear narratives of progress.

Module Overview

Examining a period marked by shifting power dynamics, from the strict state censorship of the 1920s to the borderless fandoms of the digital age, this module challenges the idea that entertainment is merely a diversion from serious history. Instead, students explore how the screen has been a central battleground for state intervention, the democratisation of production, and personal self-fashioning, revealing how we have watched the world and how the world has watched us.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of sport in the modern world from the eighteenth century to the present. Sport both shapes and is shaped by modern society and the global expansion of sports across the world and professionalization have led to certain sports becoming the economic powerhouses of today. Sport has played an important role in nation-building in the last two hundred years, and sports teams continue to be significant markers of identity at local, regional and national levels. This module will also explore the impact of global phenomena, such as imperialism which spread certain sports to particular areas of the world. Topics will range from the local to the global, drawing on the colleagues' specialisms, including examples from modern Britain and Europe, the Caribbean, South Asia and East Asia. Sports discussed will include major global sports such as association football, cricket and rugby, but also hockey, racing, athletics and gymnastics.

Major events such as the Olympics will be considered alongside more focused examples to allow us to explore themes including class, gender, nation, identity and race, and their intersection.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for History students to spend a term studying at one of the University’s partner institutions in North America or Europe. Students will be expected to cover their own transport, accommodation and living costs.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

The Cold War shaped foreign policy as well as domestic politics and culture for much of the second half of the 20th century. But how all-encompassing was the Cold War? How did non-state actors react to and influence the course of its development? And how “cold” was the Cold War? This module will examine the Cold War from a Global perspective, exploring how the Cold War play manifested in different places and spaces across the world, from military confrontations to street protests, and everyday activities in civilian and domestic settings.

Module Overview

Explore a world transformed by 16th-century voyages of discovery and imperial expansion. This module offers a fascinating introduction to how the Renaissance was a truly global phenomenon, challenging traditional Eurocentric views. Students will delve into the impact of major historical shifts across Renaissance England, Europe and also the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The module is highly interdisciplinary and examines political, social, religious, cultural, and artistic topics through the lens of global scholarship. This module challenges assumptions and approaches the period from new perspectives, focusing on both elite and Indigenous, African, and non-elite experiences often hidden from older scholarship. Students will learn practical skills by engaging directly with primary sources in seminars to build confidence in historical research and analysis. This module is designed for students eager to understand a pivotal era and master the methods historians use to recover diverse stories.

Module Overview

This module will examine the ways in which Victorian Britons deviated from an apparently strict moral code. The context of an urbanising society with increasing wealth, mobility and advances in communications, alongside persistent poverty, class divisions and exploitation, created new opportunities for pornography, gay subcultures and recreational drug use, while existing vices such as drinking and prostitution evolved in new ways. Commentary on such practices, meanwhile, was shaped by new ideas about respectability and class and created an increasing division between virtue and vice. The module will also consider the problems of researching such topics, engaging students with the way illegality and marginalisation impacted the production of source material.

Module Overview

This module explores texts of the long Victorian era (1830-1914), a period of enormous social and cultural upheaval in which we find the roots of our modern selves. ‘Victorian worlds’ explores texts of a variety of forms (e.g. novel, short story, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose) and genres (e.g. realism, Gothic, travel writing, life writing, fantasy) focused on different locations and social experiences, in recognition of a multiplicity of perspectives on ‘the Victorian world’. As we study these works in their historical contexts, we ask how these writers used literature to forge understandings of themselves in relation to their changing, and often challenging, environments.

Module Overview

In their final year, every student on the BA (Hons) History degree programme at the 51±¬ÁÏÍø must produce an independent study. This is an extended piece of work which gives them the opportunity to demonstrate they have acquired the skills to undertake detailed and substantial subject-specific research and writing founded on critical inquiry and analysis.

Module Overview

In the Twentieth Century new aviation technologies transformed understandings of war, peace, civilian and military. The module considers how ideas about air power developed, what informed this understanding of war, and what the consequences were. This is not a traditional military history concerned with narrative accounts of battles or armies, but one that asks questions about the relationship between military and civilian in society and culture in the twentieth century.

Module Overview

The module will examine consumption in many of its forms in early modern Western Europe. Focusing on a number of areas, such as food, clothing, furnishings, houses and other goods increasingly accessible to people at all levels of society, the module will encourage students to consider how and why these were available.

Module Overview

This module explores fundamental questions about humanity's relationship with the natural world through the lens of philosophical inquiry. Drawing on both classical and contemporary thinkers, we examine key debates in environmental ethics, from the intrinsic value of nature to questions of ecological justice and sustainability. Students will critically assess different philosophical approaches to pressing environmental challenges, including climate change and biodiversity loss, while developing sophisticated arguments about environmental responsibility and stewardship. The module combines careful philosophical analysis with practical application, making it relevant for students interested in environmental issues, public policy, or fundamental questions about human-nature relationships. Through thoughtful discussion and analysis, students will be able to develop valuable critical thinking skills while engaging with one of the most significant intellectual challenges of our time.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of science, sexuality and politics in the UK, Continental Europe, the US and Latin America from 1850 to 2000. It will give students an excellent grounding in modern and contemporary history that will complement further modules at level 3 that deal with sexuality, gender, race, science and medicine. It module examines the controversial rise of eugenics movements as a global phenomenon. The purpose of this module is to sustain a balanced and informed discussion about how race, reproduction, and the improvement of human heredity have acquired great political relevance in the modern period. It explores how scientists and different governments became preoccupied with hereditary theories, race, reproduction and sexual behaviour. It examines how societies across the Atlantic developed government policies around areas such as family planning, pronatalism, sterilisation, and race, which culminated in the implementation of euthanasia programmes in Nazi Germany. This module looks at eugenics programmes and politics in a transnational context, exploring how, for example, Nazi Germany’s sterilisation programmes were inspired by those already implemented in the US and how a number of Latin American countries adapted and transformed eugenics policies from Southern Europe and developed whitening policies.

Module Overview

This module explores the various ways in which the world was put on display in the nineteenth century, and with what aims and effects. The nineteenth century was a period during which museums, galleries, exhibitions, zoos and circuses all expanded in numbers and took on distinctive modern forms; it was also one where the ‘freak show’ became both popular but also frowned upon, while optical toys and attractions reformed ‘ways of seeing’.

Module Overview

This module guides students through one of the most significant scientific, political, and environmental stories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in U.S. history. Students will engage with debates over the decision to use atomic weapons, the expansion of atmospheric testing, the growth of nuclear power, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the emergence of anti-nuclear activism within the United States.

Module Overview

Hong Kong’s history lies at the intersection of Chinese, British imperial, and transnational histories. This module explores the history of Hong Kong from its colonisation by Britain in 1841 up to the present day.

The module seeks to introduce the city’s history to students, explore the ways historians have engaged with and approached this history, and to help students develop skills of historical analysis and debate. Through engaging with the rich historical debates and with English-language and translated primary materials, students on this module may study issues and themes including, but not limited to: imperialism; colonialism; transnational networks; international and diplomatic history; economic and business history; social history; urban history; migration and diaspora history.

Module Overview

The module will give students practical experience of the workplace. Students will normally define, plan and undertake a specific project. In addition students will gain experience of a range of tasks appropriate to sector-specific professional skills.

Module Overview

This module will analyse how the medicalised body has been represented, exploited, challenged and reclaimed in art and visual culture. The themes, ideas, priorities and objects of medicine – such as death, health, sexuality, taboo, trauma, bodily functions, and viscera – have taken centre stage in art and visual culture since the end of the nineteenth century. This module will explore the manifold ways in which artists have engaged with subjects including medical technologies, anatomies, contagion, disease, disability, psychiatry, blood, and pain, and we will do so in relation to constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class and disability. What significance do pathology, disease, illness narratives and patient experience take on in art and visual culture? To what effects have artists portrayed and perhaps questioned modern therapies and medical technologies, and their subjects, practices and theories? We will focus on a range of media including painting, prints, sculpture, performance art, conceptual art, film, and photography.

Module Overview

This module will investigate the history of imperial Britain through material culture. The objects of study will range from trophies looted in battle and a drum transported with enslaved Africans to Virginia, to African sculpture depicting Europeans. Historians increasingly recognise the fresh insights that objects offer to major themes in imperial history such as gender, race and class. This module responds to these new academic developments and will use objects and their biographies to study key phases and themes in the history of the British Empire. Tracing the long history of such objects can enable us to explore how objects change meanings as they move through various colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Module Overview

This module explores a range of philosophical questions that arise in relation to love and sexual desire. Can love be defined, or does it belong to the realm of the ineffable? Is love inherently irrational? Is it reducible to the reproductive or sexual drive? Do we love the other for his/her own sake, or is love always self-serving? Are jealousy and possessiveness really the enemy of successful love? Does all love stem from need or lack? What, if anything, is the difference between love and infatuation? And is, as Plato held, love a form of enslavement?

In this module, students can address such questions through the lens of some of the greatest works in the Western philosophical tradition. We shall mostly consider reciprocal romantic love and investigate, among other things, its capacity to confer meaning and purpose upon life. We shall also explore the Freudian view that love involves regression to a situation in childhood in which we were perfectly safe, the search for love essentially being an attempt to recover this earlier form of security or wholeness. Can this need for wholeness ever be fully and stably fulfilled, or is, as Sartre argued, the project of love impossible? In addition, we shall reflect upon the nature of pornography, sadomasochism, and sexual perversion.

Module Overview

This module focuses on a range of philosophical questions relating to mental illness and its treatment. What makes a person mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What makes a conscious state psychotic or delusional? How might mental disorders be distinguished from non-disordered mental states and conditions? Would certain putative mental illnesses be better characterized as “problems with living” rather than as specifically medical conditions? Should, as per the prevailing tendency in contemporary psychiatry, the subjective experience of individuals suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia, be understood chiefly in terms of a chemical imbalance, and accordingly treated by an adjustment to brain chemistry? Or should, as per the traditional psychoanalytic view, such conditions be understood as irreducibly tied to internal symbolic content to be decoded by the analyst and patient? We will also consider questions raised by particular psychopathologies. Is psychopathy best understood as a mental illness, and if so, is it appropriate to hold psychopaths responsible for their attitudes and actions? Are certain forms of cognition currently seen as neurological/ neuro-developmental disorders (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) better understood as representing diverse or statistically atypical ways in which humans are capable of seeing and interacting with the world? These and other questions will be explored through the lens of recent literature in the analytic tradition as well as seminal texts in the history of the philosophy of mental illness (e.g., Freud, Foucault, R.D. Laing).

Module Overview

Portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives on screen are under increasing scrutiny from audiences, activists and media scholars. But, for much of the history of film and television, non-normative sexual and gender identities have been marginalised or hidden. This module examines the history of queer representations in screen culture from the era of silent films to the present day. Students will have the opportunity to work with examples from a range of national contexts, including (but not limited to) Britain and America, as well as engaging with influential scholarship in queer theory and the history of gender and sexuality.

Module Overview

How can history and heritage be more inclusive of LGBTIQ+ lives and experiences? And how can queer perspectives help us to better understand the complexities of the past? This module responds to these questions by examining queer histories from the Ancient World to the present day. Taking a global view, the module investigates how concepts such as sex, sexuality, gender, the body, friendship, and family have been organised in diverse ways across different times and places. In addition to considering how particular sexual and gender identities have emerged, the module also engages with ideas of queer history as a method for historical enquiry: one that is sceptical about binary analyses and linear narratives of progress.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice in History. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

This module aims to examine how living in cities shaped the ways our lives and society have developed since the 19th Century. In the early 19th Century the population of Europe largely lived in rural settlements, yet 100 years later the populations of Western Europe's cities had exploded. Cities produced new forms of social organisation: for the first time drag queens and prostitutes rubbed shoulders with housewives, the rich discovered the poor on their very doorsteps and the unregulated spaces of cities became havens for counter-cultures, deviant sexualities and radical politics.

Module Overview

This module, ‘The Internet: A Social and Cultural History,’ examines how ordinary people experienced the internet in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Using a social and cultural history approach, we will move beyond histories of technological innovators to instead examine how a range of people embraced the internet within their daily lives, navigated multiplying ‘search’ platforms, made decisions around associated hardware like the iphone, and also grappled with new understandings of surveillance in the early 21st century. Central to the module will be a consideration of the methodologies historians can use to provide histories of internet spaces, activities, and events.

Module Overview

This module examines how African Americans tried to cast off the economic, political, cultural and social ties that bound them to second-class citizenship within the United States. We primarily focus on the Southern version of the black freedom struggle before casting our attention to a wider American political, social, and racial context — particularly as we challenge “the master narrative” of the civil rights movement that was once presented and represented as the singular history of the movement for African American freedom.

In charting the course of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century and beyond, we analyse the most venerated events and personalities of the era and aim to understand the movement on its own terms. We will explore its richness and its internal complexities, especially when reviewing the varying tactics and ideological differences of the movement’s leaders. The module asks us to question the presumed victories of the civil rights movement, to stretch our chronological understanding beyond traditional beginnings and endings, to acknowledge the complexity of American racial identity, and reveal what it tells us about the wider political and social dimensions of modern US history.

Module Overview

This module interrogates what it meant to be free and unfree in British Caribbean Colonial Societies. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, it focuses on how African Caribbean people sought freedom during and after slavery. This exploration involves a review of freedom struggles that began in Africa, stretched across the ocean in the form of uprisings and refusals to comply on slave ships, and extended to the towns, plantations, and forests/mountains of the countries in which they were initially enslaved. This module also explores the experiences of indentured labourers (Asian and European), convicts and other coerced labourers. Social constraints found in colonial societies more generally will also be considered.