This 18,000-20,000 word dissertation provides the opportunity for you to demonstrate the knowledge, understanding, research skills and techniques of presentation developed in the taught modules of the MA degree scheme. The specialist field of enquiry is chosen by the student in consultation with a supervisor and other members of the department before arrival and in the first half of Michaelmas Term. Individual one-to-one supervisions will be provided throughout the year to support taught modules, define and formulate a research hypothesis, identify relevant qualitative and quantitative sources, offer guidance on presentation and comment on the structure of the dissertation.

Alongside having a passion for the past, researching and writing a quality piece of history requires close engagement with the historian’s craft. What does good history look like? How can we be sure we are at the cutting edge of our discipline? What does it meant to write well?

In this core module, you will be guided through the process of conducting advanced historical research, reflecting upon the skills that you have and how they can be applied to extended pieces of research. Spanning both Michaelmas and Lent term, this module will take you from an introduction to postgraduate study through to laying the foundations for your dissertation, developing your understanding of the discipline of history, and your identity as an historian. The module culminates with a conference, where you will present your work to peers and members of academic staff, receiving feedback to develop your own and the opportunity to help your peers develop their projects.

This module will be assessed by a portfolio of work developed throughout the course, including a feasibility study.

In this module, you will examine historical approaches to a variety of sources, from the visual (or audio visual), to the aural, oral and artefactual. Whatever period you are studying, you will be able to investigate material relevant to your own research: in the past, the module has covered the gamut from ancient Rome to the modern day, and the sources you investigate will be tailored to suit the specialisms of your cohort.

Over the course of the module you will deepen your familiarity with the range of sources available, and be able to analyse how non-traditional sources have been approached by historians. The knowledge and skills you learn will provide insights into how you can approach such sources within your own research; indeed, you will have the opportunity to pursue a coursework topic that relates to your chosen area of historical investigation.

In recent years, the history of the body has emerged as an important framework for re-thinking the relationship between individuals and the state in war. While histories of war have for a long time focused on the political causes, course, outcome, and legacies of wars, ‘new’ military histories now seek to better understand how warfare has been experienced ‘from below’ – both by those mobilised as combatants as well as by civilians who came directly into contact with the apparatus of war.

This module embraces such developments in the history of war, using a focus on the body which will enable you to re-evaluate the impact of conflict on those who participated in it. Structured around four broad themes—medicine, the body, sexuality, and the mind—this module will consider the bodily legacies of warfare in a wide range of times and places. The module thus ranges from topics such as the role of the military in the emergence of clinical medicine in the 18th century to the medical impact of widespread disability on medical and social care practices following the American Civil War; or from the long history of rape as a ‘weapon of war’ to the surprising story of the use of methamphetamines by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War.

Drawing on a large range of sources, including diaries, memoirs, medical texts, engravings, photographs, and wartime propaganda, this module will thus give you the opportunity to explore the changing ways in which people experienced conflict and its aftermaths through their bodies.

This module offers you the opportunity to think about the objects and spaces through which history is presented to the public. You will have the chance to engage with scholarly perspectives about heritage practises and to gain insight into the workings of public institutions.

Its aim is to give you the opportunity to engage with scholarly criticisms of heritage practices and to gain insight into the workings of public institutions. Questions we will explore include: What are the processes through which history becomes heritage? By what means are objects gathered together and arranged in order to present, and preserve, ‘the past’? How are the meanings of these objects controlled and communicated to the public? In thinking through these, and other similar, questions, you will have the chance to consider the means through which ‘the historical temper’ is cultivated in both institutions and public spaces and, in particular, how and why the presentation of the past has changed over time. The module combines seminars with site visits, tours and sessions with heritage professionals.

Despite huge advances in digital technologies, many of the approaches historian use remain rooted in the analogue age. Perhaps the only major change that computers have led to among historians to date is the use of major digitised archives, such as Early English Books Online, Old Bailey Online or the British Newspaper Archive. Even with these, many historians simply use these to search and browse, never making use of their full potential or able to critique the digitised sources effectively.

In the first part of this course you will look at how paper sources are digitised and encoded to create digital historical resources. This will enable you to understand how digital sources are created, and encourage you to think critically about their benefits and limitations. The second part of the course explores how digitised historical sources can be explored and analysed in more sophisticated ways. Corpus linguistics enables us identify and summarise themes of interest from millions or billions of words of text in ways that go far beyond simply keyword searches. It also helps the historian decide which parts of a large body of text require further research and which do not.

You do not need any prior knowledge of computing beyond the basics all history students will have. We will draw on examples from a wide range of topics from the early modern to modern British. You will also have the opportunity to use the techniques and approaches learnt with their own sources.

This module will offer an introduction to the range of theories and methods most commonly used today in Digital Humanities. As primary and secondary sources of information become increasingly available, Humanities scholars have the capacity to study these in ways not traditionally envisioned before, being now able to answer questions such as: What patterns emerge in the discourses from 1,000 volumes of parliamentary data? What changes can we identify at a landscape scale during the formation of the Aztec Empire? Can the Romantic Novel be visualised? Covering the most cutting-edge research at the intersection of computing and the humanities, the module will offer an overarching view of the latest research in the fields of history, archaeology, literature, sociology, linguistics, politics, and religious studies.

Each session will introduce a topic through specific case studies covering a variety of theories from Data Justice, and Digital Inclusion, to Decolonial technology; as well as techniques and methods ranging from Geographic Information Retrieval, Text Mining, Network Analysis, Data Mining, Computational Linguistics, Visualisation and Data Design, to Human Computer Interaction.

The student will learn a wide variety of approaches and will acquire a broad overview of the field as is practiced today.

This module explores the intricate relationship between war and the environment in East Asia, spanning from the ancient period to the modern era. Throughout history, conflicts in East Asia have led to widespread environmental degradation, ranging from deforestation and habitat destruction to pollution and climate change. From the strategic military campaigns of ancient empires to the devastating wars of the 20th century, each conflict has left its mark on the natural world, altering ecosystems and landscapes in profound ways.

From the ancient battles of dynastic China to the modern conflicts of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, this course will trace the evolution of war and its environmental impact across East Asia. More specifically, some of the major themes include climate, forests, landscape, animals, diseases and atomic bombs, while the wars include Mongol invasions, Ming-Qing transition, the East Asian War of 1592–1598, Japanese colonization, the Korean War, and the Cold War.

By exploring the historical context, environmental consequences, and contemporary implications of warfare in the region, you will develop critical insights into the intersection of military history, environmental studies, and East Asian geopolitics.

Ultimately, this module seeks to illuminate the often-overlooked environmental dimensions of East Asian warfare and foster a nuanced understanding of its enduring legacy. More importantly, the methodology you will learn in this module can be applied to other war studies you may be interested in.

This bespoke module is shaped by you and your allocated module supervisor. It enables you to develop a particular research interest if this cannot be accommodated within the dissertation or in other taught modules; alternatively, it can be used to undertake a guided reading programme under supervision. You should only consider this option if you have a clear idea of a particular project you wish to propose that is distinct from your dissertation project. You will be asked to consult the appropriate Director of Graduate Studies to discuss your choice, and the form of assessment will vary depending on the project, it will however be of equivalent weighting to 5,000 words of text.

This is a special intensive course for students who have little or no previous knowledge of Latin. The course concentrates on the basics of Latin Grammar and vocabulary as used in the Medieval period, though it will also be very useful for students of the Roman and Renaissance periods. By the end of the course students should be able to read sources such as title deeds, court rolls, government records, wills, and inscriptions. Help will be given to individual students on Latin texts relevant to their dissertation or thesis.

Preliminary/Core Reading:

J. Thorley, Documents in Medieval Latin.

E. A. Gooder, Latin for Local Historians.

R. Latham (ed.), Medieval Latin Word-List.

Any standard Latin-English dictionary.

Assessment: Two course work exercises (40%) and a final examination (60%).

Designed for students taking the medieval pathway, this module examines both manuscript studies and the decoding of medieval sources in their original and printed forms. Using relatively straightforward examples, the palaeographical strand provides an introduction to the principles involved in deciphering scripts while the ‘genre-focused’ strand considers a range of types of source—some that you will almost inevitably encounter in your research (e.g. charters, letters and chronicles) and some that you might not have considered, but which offer much for the medieval historian (e.g. poems and miscellanies). Indeed, one of the main aims of the course is to alert students to the significance of book history and manuscript studies—to the importance of attending to manuscript evidence and what it can tell us about the production, transmission and reception of a medieval source.

The course is taught by means of a weekly two-hour seminar, which will include both substantive discussion of a topic or genre of source and a workshop element, for which some preparation, partly in the form of a weekly ‘palaeography exercise’, is expected.

This module offers you the chance to benefit from the Department’s established and expanding network of heritage partners by completing a professional placement. Our previous placement partners have included a number of notable organisations, such as the Duchy of Lancaster, Hoghton Tower, the Museum of Lancashire, the National Trust, the North Craven Trust, and the Senhouse Museum Trust.

The placement is centred on a specific project, which is agreed between the Department and the partner organisation, and completed under the supervision of that organisation. The work undertaken as part of the placement project can take a variety of different forms, ranging from cataloguing objects to assisting in arrangement for exhibitions to undertaking research work on a corpus of visual, audio or textual sources. You will need to take part in an application process with each heritage partner deciding on the best match of student for their placement.

The assessment for the module comprises a portfolio of work relating the placement and a reflective essay.

Place names, latitude/longitude coordinates, qualitative relations (“next to”), spatial forms (lake, county, road): these are all different examples of spatial information that humanities researchers regularly encounter in sources from the past.

In this module, you will learn to use such information to think spatially with a critical mindset. Doing so will allow you to answer “where?” questions that can shed light on intellectual, cultural, political, social, economic, environmental, literary histories, the history of science and technology, as well as other historical humanities fields (archaeology, historical geography, classics, media studies).

The module provides a grounding in the foundational and current literature in the spatial humanities and opportunities to practice working with digital methods for spatial data creation, exploration, and analysis, including traditional Geographic Information System software (ArcGIS), pythonic geographic data science, network analysis, and browser-based tools for data annotation/visualisation/mapping.

Hands-on tutorials will focus on case studies from eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century French and British history and will highlight how Enlightenment and Victorian ideas and technologies are at the root of many basic spatial concepts and tools still in use today.

You will develop your own spatial analysis of a set of historical sources chosen from your previous research experience.

Here is what our students have said about the module

“The sessions... feel more inclusive and collaborative than I had imagined. It feels like a shared space, with the openness to express ideas or queries.”

"The large amount of theory in the class is really surprising - in a good way. Initially I thought this class would be mostly practical-based and workshop style, but the inclusion of readings has made it far more engaging.”

The traditional historiography of the Cold War focused predominantly on the two superpowers, i.e. the United States and the Soviet Union, and the European theatre of the conflict. In this module, in contrast, you will gain a different, less Euro- or Western-centric view of the Cold War. Studying the impact of the East-West struggle in the Third World – Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America – you will explore how the course of the Cold War was affected by wars, conflicts, and crises in the Global South. You will learn that the Global Cold War was not only dominated by the two superpowers, but was also heavily influenced by Third World actors and lesser Cold War powers such as the People’s Republic of China.

The study of the Global Cold War is currently the most dynamic field in Cold War History and, probably, even in International and Military History more generally. As a result, you will be able to engage with a vast body of international literature, which is based on multi-lingual and multi-archival research around the world. Meanwhile, you will have the opportunity to analyse a vast array of documents, and carry out primary sources-based research. This is rendered possible by the availability of specific Cold War History document collections, national collections of diplomatic documents, as well as digital archives and document collections.

This module is designed to provide PGT level students interested in any aspect of historical research which appertains to the period c.1450 to c.1750 with the essential 'tool-kit' of skills, particularisms and themes which will underpin their study. Its syllabus will be varied across each student year-cohort, given the availability of teaching staff and their areas of expertise, but perhaps, more importantly, will be tailored to support and foster the research interests of individual students within any year. The notion of periodisation remains controversial within itself, and so part of the module will involve identifying what it is that distinguishes 1450-1750 from the eras earlier and later in time, to question the terminology of 'early-modern' and 'pre-modern' (and thus 'modern' and 'modernism'), and the Renaissance. We will also discuss the themes and issues which characterise early-modern history and through these, explore the types of evidence produced and how historians can access, use, interpret and analyse them.

Indicative topics may include:

Mobility and settlement;Adventurism, exploration and global links;Demographic change;The crisis of faith;The Scientific Revolution;The climatic crisis and its implications;Gender and power;Material Culture;Personal testimony, archives and manuscript;The dissemination of print.

In this module you will gain a foundation in the history of warfare from the medieval world to the present day, allowing you to understand and gain specific insights into the evolution of and ‘revolutions’ in military affairs. Within this longue durée approach, you will be equipped to question how warfare has been affected by political, economic, social, technological, and cultural factors, as well as influential military figures, thinkers, and powers. Each session will deal with a specific historical period and a theme or issue of major relevance, and the module will typically cover the following topics and themes:

• early medieval forms of warfare such as that of the Vikings;
• knights and soldiers in the High Middle Ages;
• the series of conflicts that constituted the Hundred Years’ War in the Late Middle Ages;
• the rise of the fiscal military state in the early modern period;
• the concept of a nation in arms through the Napoleonic Wars and such 19th century conflicts as the Franco-Prussian War;
• the idea of total war through the lenses of the First and Second World Wars;
• the Cold War and nuclear strategy;
• the ‘hot’ decolonisation wars of the Cold War, and more recent counterinsurgency campaigns like that in Afghanistan.

In this module you will explore a crucial period in the history of warfare, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, when episodic conflicts gave way to near continual war. In Europe, ‘chivalric’ ideals were first established, in order to limit noble bloodshed and protect non-combatants, and then overturned, as the killing of nobles on the battlefield and the systematic terrorizing of civilian populations became standard strategy. Western crusaders conquered swathes of the Holy Land and led expeditions to North Africa, before the revanche of the Abode of Islam under the Ayyubids and then the Mamluks, while the Mongol Empire emerged to confront the powers of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Military technology was transformed, with the invention of the trebuchet and then the gun, and new and potent battle tactics were developed, most famously the arrowstorm of the Hundred Years War. In this module, you will encounter a range of topics, perspectives and approaches to warfare across the medieval world, and be able to develop skills in identifying and assessing both new interpretations and primary sources, such as participant accounts, government records, and battlefield archaeology.