How can your research make a difference to the world? In this module, you will learn to bridge the gap between scholarly research and societal impact, developing the skills to contribute to policy debates and shape public understanding of the past.

Through task-based workshop activities, you will address the many faces of public history, including topics such as:

• Museum exhibitions
• Creative writing and historical fiction
• History podcasting
• Content creation
• Trade publishing
• Video games
• Television and film consultancy
• Policy papers
• Courtroom advocacy

Moreover, you will develop a broader understanding of the place of history in the public sphere, for instance by reflecting on how to identify social problems that can be addressed through historical research, or by learning how to approach policymakers with research-based solutions. You will also develop the skills to reach varied audiences, deploying different styles of writing and diverse forms of communication.

The dissertation module is the culmination of your master's journey – a chance to make your mark as an independent historian. Take a deep dive into a topic of your choice, uncovering stories that time forgot or shedding new light on old controversies.

With one-to-one support from an experienced supervisor, you will hone your ability to work with primary source material, engage with the field, and construct powerful arguments that bring the past to life.

Whatever your area of study, this module gives you the freedom to follow your curiosity wherever it leads. You will develop key skills in critical thinking, problem solving, and persuasive writing – qualities valued far beyond academia. Most importantly, you will experience the thrill of original discovery, piecing together the past like a detective, and – in writing your dissertation – making your own contribution to our understanding of the world.

This module supports your journey as a professional historian by developing the specialist skills you need to interpret primary sources. Choose from one of three historical periods – medieval, early modern, and modern – and be guided by period experts to develop systematic knowledge of sources relevant to your research, exploring their genre, origins, authorship and audience.

You will engage with the methodologies that historians use to choose and interrogate those sources, and in some cases the ethical considerations arising from them. You’ll build towards a comprehensive understanding of the techniques needed to analyse these at an advanced level. Through this module, you will learn how to ask probing questions about historical sources and to draw the greatest possible value from them, developing the confidence to work with the primary sources central to research throughout your master's.

What does it mean to be at the forefront of a discipline? This module takes you inside the world of professional historians. Together, we will ask what it means to make an original contribution to historical knowledge, and how historians contest the significance of their research.

Working collaboratively in a workshop format, you will ask open-ended questions about the discipline of history, exploring the conceptual, methodological, and political reasons for agreement and disagreement in historical research. You will consider the role of such factors as the politics of the archive, contemporary concerns and individual positionality in giving rise to historical arguments.

Our aim, in other words, is to lift the veil on historical practice, giving you the opportunity to engage with other historians and their arguments at a high level. You will develop your understanding of the discipline of history and your potential role within it.

While histories of war have long focused on the causes, course, outcome, and legacies of conflict, ‘new’ military histories also now seek to understand how ordinary people have experienced war ‘from below’.

Structured around four broad themes—medicine, the body, sexuality, and the mind—this module considers the bodily legacies of warfare in a variety of times and places.

Topics typically include:

• The role of the military in the emergence of clinical medicine in the 18th century
• The impact of war disability on society following the American Civil War
• The long history of rape as a ‘weapon of war’
• 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, you will develop a detailed understanding of how people throughout history have experienced conflict and its aftermaths through their bodies.

Explore the complex relationship between people and the environment from the Middle Ages to the present. This module examines how humans have shaped ecosystems and vice versa to offer new perspectives on crucial historical developments, such as:

• Climate change
• Landscape changes
• Animal diplomacy
• Resource depletion
• Industrialization
• Colonization
• Environmentalism

The module is organized around case studies that span Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, and so you will gain an appreciation of the natural world’s historic diversity, as well as the ways that differing peoples across history have understood, exploited, and preserved the environment.

In addition to investigating historical phenomena that have profound contemporary relevance, you will also read deeply in the vibrant field of environmental history. You’ll emerge from this module with a nuanced understanding of how humans have altered the environment, the importance of the environment for shaping world history, and the ways that historians have studied environmental history.

Study a language formally in a way that will support your learning. You can enrol either as a beginner or as a more advanced student where you will build on existing knowledge.

In the seminars and workshops, as well as through a series of optional drop-ins offered later in the module, you’ll get the tools you need to approach materials which are relevant to your own academic and work interests.

You will be given opportunities to practise in your chosen target language, building on materials posted on the learning space (flipped classroom videos, self-study links) as well as other events organised for the community of linguists and language learners in the University, such as our weekly lunch clubs.

On this module you will develop transferable communicative skills and reflect on cultural and linguistic challenges which are relevant to your postgraduate studies and beyond.

You may use these skills to research matters relating to intercultural and/or interlinguistic issues, work with archives, develop an international research network, or simply add them to your CV.

What is ‘modern’ about modern history? What are the social, cultural, and political transformations that brought about ‘modernity’? And how is the experience of living in an age of modernity different from pre-modernity? This module explores some of the most influential theories and approaches that will help you answer these questions.

Through a series of case studies, you will examine how capitalism, colonialism, secularisation, urbanisation, and technology have reshaped people’s identities, remoulded institutions, and fashioned new ideologies. You will investigate the key features of mass society, from advertising and propaganda to cinema-going and commuting. And you will learn how modernity is also about the accommodations made between the old and the new, the personal and the impersonal. Finally, the module asks whether we are now ‘postmodern’ – and if so, what this means – or whether contemporary society is still part of the modern era.

This module challenges you to understand the transnational forces shaping the emergence of racial thinking and racist practices. You’ll learn how these developed around, and resulted from, justifications for the enslavement of millions of women, men, and children of various cultures across the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

You will acquire a global perspective on the history of race and slavery – historical phenomena that have profoundly shaped the modern world from across the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and beyond. You will develop experience of critical engagement with primary sources (including those left by enslavers and the enslaved) and achieve command of a series of longstanding historiographical challenges, including debates around the complex dynamics concerning causative connections between race and slavery.