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This module helps postgraduate students recognise the range of careers and opportunities that an Arts and Humanities MA/MRes can provide.

It highlights the skills and abilities present within these programmes and provides examples of the successful application of these skills. Students will explore how subjects within the arts can be ‘applied disciplines’ that serve to be impactful in wider society through research and engagement.

Through ‘live brief’ assessments, students work in groups, utilising their Arts and Humanities skill sets, to present and produce a consultancy report for a range of organisations, including SMEs/Third-sector.

During the summer, you will complete a 60-credit dissertation (12-15,000 words) based on primary sources and supervised by a member of staff with expertise in your chosen field.

You will have regular meetings with your supervisor.

This module teaches you how to construct theoretically-informed arguments and to engage critically with primary material.

You will gain the skills needed for advanced historical research, both in methodology and conceptual approaches. These include:

• bibliographical searching
• locating primary sources
• using archives
• writing research proposals

We will also consider how historians engage with more theoretical and conceptual texts, and how they borrow from other disciplines. This includes exploring a wide range of sub-disciplines, approaches and individual thinkers.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module explores how living under authoritarian régimes affected the daily lives of populations.

Topics that may be addressed, dependent on staff availability, include:

• late Tsarist Russia/USSR
• Nazi Germany and the GDR
• Fascist Italy
• Franco’s Spain
• Communist China
• Imperial India
• Mugabe’s Zimbabwe
• Egypt
• Péron’s Argentina

We may also look at Salazar’s Portugal, Vichy France, the states of the Warsaw Pact beyond Germany and the USSR, Putin’s Russia, North Korea, Marcos’s rule of the Philippines, military rule in Myanmar, the military dictatorship in Brazil, Castro’s Cuba, Pinochet’s Chile, and even the USA during McCarthyism, South Africa under Apartheid, and various incarnations of twentieth-century imperial rule.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Recent debates surrounding Brexit and its aftermath have refocused attention on what it means to be English. But what exactly is ‘Englishness’ and how should we understand it historically?

This module explores questions including:

• What has it meant to feel or be English?
• What has been the relationship of this to ‘Britishness’ and how has that dual relationship played out in practice?
• Is English identity fundamentally rooted in empire and its legacies? If so, how?
• Could English nationalism be a positive, progressive force, or must it be divisive and backward-looking?
• Where historically has Englishness been located? Is it in a language? A monarchy? In a set of ideas? A territory? A set of preferences, or tastes?

Recent historians have been conscious of English identity not as a stable phenomenon ready to be described, but as a historical construct subject to regular change, revision and contestation.

In the course of this module, you will consider ‘English identity’ as a historical phenomenon, exploring the creation of an assumed English national identity that has both developed over time and been imposed retrospectively on an idea of the past.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module gives an overview of Latin grammar and vocabulary.

We will pay special attention to the forms of the language used in different types of medieval documentary text, including legal terms and ways of expressing dates and sums of money.

In each class, you will read sentences from real Latin documents. You may also bring along examples of texts that you are reading for other modules, for guidance on interpretation and translation. No previous study of Latin is required.

This module is worth 20 credits

This module teaches the essential skill of palaeography, which is required for medieval historical research.

It is designed to be taken alongside the introductory ‘Latin for Medievalists’ module, which introduces the kinds of Latin used in medieval documents. This will be supplemented in the manuscripts module by studying typical medieval documents available in an edited format.

The ability to read early manuscripts is a fundamental skill for all those interested in researching the medieval period. On this module, we shall:

• Introduce you to the various types of handwriting used in medieval documents
• Allow you to begin to read these documents in their unedited, manuscript forms
• Encourage you to think about issues relating to codicology, illumination, and transmission

This module is worth 20 credits.

Build your understanding of various conceptual approaches to studying modern history.

Following a broadly chronological approach, we shall use specific case studies to investigate and challenge common themes, including memory, identity, and social change.

You will explore the construction and representation of national, political, local, and ethnic identities which are born of (and continue to shape) social change. These collective identities will be analysed in terms of memory and commemoration, considering how the recent past is remembered and memorialised.

By the end of the module, you will understand how the past has contributed to the construction of contemporary identities in Europe and beyond.

This module is worth 20 credits.

This module aims to introduce students to some of the emerging debates around Global History and related fields (for example, transnational history, indigenous history, etc), as well as the methodologies, concepts and theories that are unique to this field.

Topics that will be addressed may include:

• Migration
• Gender
• Violence and conflict
• Empire
• Decolonisation
• Religion
• Space and environment
• Science and medicine
• Inequalities
• Race