English Literature and History (Placement Year)

This module aims to provide you with a solid introduction to the discipline of history at the beginning of your Part-II studies. The module, accordingly, explores the discipline at large, including: its characteristic practices, methods, and traditions; its use of different source materials; and its relation not just to the past, but also to the present and the future. The module includes three thematic blocks. The first section (Contexts of History) provides an overview of different types of historical scholarship, focusing on the methods, theories and intellectual tendencies that characterise them. The second section (Sources and Evidence) examines the use and application of different types of sources as evidence in historical research. The third section (History in Public) considers the public role and function of the discipline, as well as the challenges that historians have faced in the public spotlight, and, finally, the role that the study of history can play in your future.

This year-long module enables you to explore both what literary criticism currently is and what it may yet become. You will have the opportunity to consider a whole range of major theoretical and philosophical concepts, such as the body, race, gender, violence, ecology, God, time, death, war, self, and the animal, etc. We currently look at a range of fascinating modern thinkers, ranging from Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, through to more recent figures such as Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Fred Moten, Cornel West, and Sara Ahmed. You will have the opportunity to write in both short and long form, to present orally alongside fellow students, and to explore, if you wish, radically experimental modes of theoretical writing.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

HIST251 is designed to make you more aware of the processes you have to follow to define a research topic for yourself, whether an essay question or a dissertation; locate it in its field; test its viability; and scope available sources. To help you prepare for your dissertation, you will construct detailed research proposals; conduct a feasibility study; present your preliminary findings; and respond to feedback from professional historians. It is taught through lectures in the Lent Term; a Dissertation Conference early in the Summer Term; consultation sessions in the Lent and Summer Terms; and Moodle-supported independent learning. The lectures introduce you to the variety of geographical and temporal possibilities for your dissertation; support your engagement with primary and secondary sources; emphasise the significance of titles; and discuss how to hone your research proposals and prepare for the months of independent research ahead. The Dissertation Conference (held over two days) enhances the relevant skills you will need to conduct independent research. Staff offer a range of skills sessions and Third Year students share their experiences of writing a dissertation.

This course invites you to explore the history of an object that is of crucial importance to our ideas about both human health, and human identity – the mind. A Global History of the Mind will give you the opportunity to explore how societies across a wide range of time and places have sought to understand, cure, and control the mind. Drawing on materials and case studies from around from world, whether modern-day Polynesia or the medieval Middle East, this offers a truly global perspective on the history of the mind.

At the same time, the course encourages you to explore the connections between changing ideas about mental health and sickness to broader questions about human identity – most notably those concerning race, gender, and the potential loss of human distinctiveness in a world where artificial intelligence is possible. Unlike traditional courses on mental health, which almost invariably focus on the emergence and spread of western psychiatry, this course offers a decentered perspective. We will examine the mind from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, bringing together philosophy, medicine, religion, race, gender, and social control. In so doing, we will explore questions of urgent relevance to our own society – most notably the ways in which ideas about the mind have featured in the racialization and gendering of people through systems of patriarchy and colonialism. In addition, this course will use case studies from history to give you the resources to consider and question modern ideas about the mind and its role in society.

Finally, this course draws on an innovative series of podcasts entitled Metaphors of the Mind (https://cargocollective.com/mind-metaphors). As well as writing and a research project, this course will help you develop the skills to put together your own podcast on the history of the mind.

This course explores how American Literature has evolved from its colonial origins to the dynamic voices of the nineteenth century. What we call ‘American Literature’ and how we define America and ‘the American experience’ depends on who is writing and to whom. We shall encounter many different voices, many conflicting and contrasting views, a diversity of complex experience and a great range of writing in form and style. The module will be broadly thematic in its approach, aiming to build up through recurring themes, images, questions and stylistic features, an increasingly complex picture of the literature created mostly by English-speaking Americans. We will explore America’s twin fascinations with empire and liberty and think, in particular, about writers who have written with dissenting voices against a variety of forms of oppression. The module engages with the emergence of distinctively American forms of Romanticism and the Gothic.

The seminar programme has been designed to make use of the tremendous range of material offered by the Norton as well as focusing on certain important authors and texts. So sometimes we shall be reading a number of shorter selections on a particular theme, and at other times we’ll spend one or two whole seminars on a single text or writer. The early seminars on the course are meant to introduce a number of important issues that will give you a framework for later texts (their relevance will become increasingly clear), but the texts are also important in their own right though they may seem strange to you. You’re encouraged to use your Norton and read beyond the texts selected for the seminars, especially when writing your essays. Read the headnotes for every author whose work you're asked to read for a seminar.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

The module gives a broad thematic overview of the history of Britain in the twentieth century. Twentieth-century British history is largely a story of change. The impact of democratisation, war, economic decline, the loss of empire, and internal fragmentation has resulted in a nation seemingly in constant flux, often unsure of its identity and its values.

In this module you will explore the patterns of social, economic, cultural and political change which have most affected the lives of the British since 1900. The overarching themes are the formation and reformation of identities based on class, gender, race, empire, nation, and the dual process by which the British were integrated into the state as citizens, and into the market as consumers. Throughout the module, as well as being introduced to the key historiographical debates, you will be encouraged to explore the subject through an eclectic mix of primary sources, including film, television, cartoons, posters, press reports, and advertisements.

This module is divided into key areas across the two terms: Revolution; The Self; Politics and Poetics; and the Gothic.

We will begin by examining revolutionary writing of the Romantic period, including the poetry of such writers as Anna Barbauld, William Blake, and William Wordsworth, and the prose of such writers as Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. We will then consider ideas of the self in the poetry of such writers as Charlotte Smith and Letitia Landon, Lord Byron’s Manfred, and the labouring-class writing of John Clare.

We also examine the relationship between politics and poetics for the second-generation poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and then, the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and the orientalism of S. T. Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey. Finally, the module will turn its attention to the popular literary movement of ‘Gothic’ which emerges during the Romantic period, exploring its manifestation in a range of texts that may include Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Joanna Baillie’s play De Montfort, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The module aims to give students a sense of the diverse range of writers in this period. We will use the close knowledge of key texts to tackle some of the wider, more abstract ideas such as: nature, the imagination, and the sublime. We will also consider literary ideas within a broader social, historical and philosophical context.

This course offers a new introduction to a formative and exciting period in Mediterranean history after the fall of Rome and the rise of the Arabs. The main focus is on the central Mediterranean, especially Sicily and southern Italy, which was the rich prize for competing empires of the region: the contracting Byzantine empire and the expanding Muslim empire in North Africa. The course covers about 500 years of history through the medium of a range of sources, including archaeological finds, and rare documentary sources, which will be studied in translation.

Are you interested in environmental history? Are you curious about the forces that have shaped and continue to shape the perception and management of protected landscapes around the world? Then this 15-credit module is for you. Over the 10 weeks of this module, we’ll explore the long history of human interactions with the natural world, from the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to the Environmental Revolution. For the most part, though, we’ll focus on examining the forces that have influenced human perceptions of the environment from later seventeenth century onwards. In this context, we’ll trace the histories of iconic protected landscapes in different parts of the world, including national parks and world heritage sites, such as Yosemite, the English Lake District and Uluru-Kata Tjuta. In tracing the histories of these and other landscapes, we’ll delve into a range of important questions. Addressing these questions may involve: examining the role of colonialism and conquest in shaping such landscapes; interrogating the relation of protected landscapes to the emergence of ideas about national memory and identity; considering issues of access, responsibility and ownership, as well as the threats climate change poses for protected landscapes that are at risk. No prior knowledge of environmental history is assumed or required. Specific case studies may change from year to year. The module may involve field trips.

The period from around 1500 to 1750 saw enormous change. The population of England and Wales nearly doubled, leading to inflation and poverty as well as commercial expansion. Urbanization increased, spectacularly so in the case of London, which grew to become by 1700 the largest capital in Europe. At the same time literacy and education developed and a print culture rapidly expanded. This was a period of religious reformation, which affected not only the lives of individuals but the culture of governance and the fabric of local communities.

By the end of the period, England had emerged from being a backwater state to a rising world power, which brought about a new set of cultural and social challenges. Hierarchies of gender and status, however, remained pervasive throughout, and in some ways became even more pronounced. The module examines these central themes during a very important and formative period in English history.

During the 16th century, Europe witnessed some of the most important developments in the shaping of the modern world. Although you will learn about these events, the module will focus on the broader historical processes through which you can understand them. At the same time, you will engage with the methodologies and debates that historians of the present-day find most interesting, critically appraising their strategies for assessing patterns of historical change and continuity.

You will therefore examine the work of environmental historians, asking whether transformations in society and the economy can be explained by changes in climate. The module will also ask whether colonial expansion led people to develop new ideas about racial and cultural difference, while at the same time trying to understand how newly colonized people tried to navigate their way through new hierarchies and relationships.

In addition, it will ask whether long-standing questions about transformations in religious life, popular culture, and the centralization of government can be enriched by approaching them through the prism of new approaches. When you study the body, health, and disease, for instance, you’ll discuss the unexpected role of medical expertise in the development of a renewed form of Catholicism at the end of the 16th century. Meanwhile, focusing on the history of printed news may enable you to understand why rumours and religious bigotry spread so rapidly during the Reformation and Wars of Religion.

This module explores US foreign policy from the end of the Second World War through to the end of the Cold War, focusing particularly on role played by the presidents who held office during this period. The decades following the Second World War saw the United States emerge as the single most powerful and influential state in modern history. The core aim of the module is to understand how the individuals who held the office of president in this era sought to project US economic, military and ideational power. This will entail considering how the personal backgrounds, political beliefs, and other personal characteristics of the presidents in power during this period affected the application of US foreign policy, allowing students to engage with innovative approaches to the study of history that take into account factors such as emotions, friendship and health on broader historical processes. In order to analyse US foreign policy from the perspective of individual presidents we will use a variety of academic sources by historians and political scientists, as well as primary sources.

By what means was Indian independence seized from the British Empire in 1947? This module explores opposition to British rule in India from the end of the nineteenth century until 1947 when colonial India was divided to create the nation states of India and Pakistan. In particular, we will explore the modes of resistance that emerged from the Indian freedom struggle and in particular, the role of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Gandhi transformed the Indian National Congress, an organization that had been founded in 1885 as a loyal and moderate organization. Gandhi created a mass movement that challenged the colonial state in extraordinary ways. British rule in India gradually lost credibility and struggled to find the means of maintaining control in the face of massive resistance to its right to govern India.

You will explore Gandhi’s philosophies of personal restraint and political resistance to the injustices of the colonial state. You will also trace the emergence of religious politics in India during this period and the increasing pace of communal conflict, in particular Hindu-Muslim antagonism. What was the role of the colonial state in firing communal anxiety? Did Gandhi’s political ideas allay or encourage the conflation of political action and religious identity? The course ends with the partition of India, the largest migration in history and a process in which over one million people lost their lives, and the event that led, in 1948, to Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu fundamentalist.

HIST215: Introduction to Latin Translation for Undergraduates

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. However, 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.

Of all intellectual and ideological concepts in the modern world, few are as contested and powerful as human rights. At their most influential, concerns for the protection of human rights have been used to justify international conflict and widespread military intervention in order to save the lives of thousands of people. Yet human rights critics argue that they are a form of cultural imperialism that limits the sovereignty of local populations. How has an ethical and moral concern for individual lives come to be so divisive? Why after years of supporting the establishment of international human rights law do many governments now pledge to scrap their own human rights acts?

This module will examine the history of human rights, putting their development into a broad historical context. It will chart the development of rights discourses from the pre-modern era through to the present, assessing the influence that the enlightenment, imperialism and war have had on their construction. It will offer students the opportunity to explore differing aspects of the history of human rights. Indicative topics include:

• Codifying and Quantifying Rights: 1776, 1789, 1948
• The Universality of Human Rights
• Human Rights and Humanitarianism, 1807-2001
• Decolonisation and Self-Determination, 1945-1991
• Gendered rights
• Capital punishment in the nineteenth and twentieth century
• Responding to Genocide: The Holocaust, Bangladesh, Srebrenica
• Amnesty International, 1961-2001
• Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch, 1975-2001

This year-long module currently works on and around the themes of: ‘Love, Sex and Death’; ‘Court, Country, City’; ‘Power and Politics’; and ‘Heaven and Hell.’ It will take you from the late-Medieval interest in spiritual and earthly travel to the episodes of power, revolution and restitution that characterised Stuart rule in the seventeenth century. The module will explore a vast range of writing – everything from John Mandeville’s and Margery Kempe’s marvellous journeys through Europe, Northern Africa, Asia and the Holy Land, through the edgy theatre of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, to the writings of revolutionaries such as John Milton and monarchist libertines like Aphra Behn.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This year-long module explores the adaption of literature to film and other media. We currently focus on how Austen’s so-called ‘classic’ Pride and Prejudice is adapted to classical Hollywood cinema, and how Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been adapted to both postmodern Hollywood and Bollywood cinema. We also explore the trajectories between Carroll’s Alice books and film animation, and how Dante’s Inferno has been adapted to a videogame. We study a range of other literary texts and media, ranging from children’s fiction to horror, social realism to science fiction, poetry to graphic novels, and reverential adaptations to outright parodies. The module includes a creative project that enables you to produce your own work of adaptation. This may take many forms – written, (audio)visual, digital, or three-dimensional -- and/or take the form of a game, or production, or performance, etc.

The details of this module (for example, the materials studied) vary from year to year.

The social and cultural consequences of the Norman Conquest of England were deep and enduring. A foreign, Francophone regime displaced the native élites: many of the former rulers, women as well as men, fled the kingdom. Enlisting in the Varangian Guard, some Englishmen even went as far as Byzantium and the Crimea. The new regime was inclusive in so far as it was eager to recruit foreigners of all kinds - Frenchmen, Bretons, Lotharingians, Italians, Spaniards, and even Jews - as long as they were serviceable and loyal; but racist in so far as it strove to deny persons of English descent access to high office. The English were denigrated as barbarians and peasants, but because the Conquest was not followed by sustained settlement from the Continent, many natives clung on in sub-altern positions, just below the foreigners who held the highest offices and the best estates. The English were also far from being the only victims: the regime also continued the later Anglo-Saxon state’s efforts to subjugate Wales and northern Britain. A wide-ranging introduction to the history of Norman England and the debates that it has inspired, this course allows you to consider the history and effects of this transformative event.

What does it mean to be Roman on the edge of the Roman Empire? How can we write the history of people who have left very little written trace of themselves? This module explores these questions through an in-depth look at the history from the 1st century BCE to the 5th century CE of a single Roman province: Britain. You will learn to use a wide range of evidence, including not only Roman historians like Tacitus, but also archaeological evidence, stone inscriptions, and wooden documents like the Vindolanda Tablets, to reconstruct the nature of Romano-British society. How can we use pottery evidence to reconstruct Britain’s economic connections to the continent? How can Iron Age coins give us insight into the political machinations that led to Britain’s 1st century CE conquest by the Romans? Broader topics will include the effects of Roman imperialism on conquered peoples, the place of migration and ethnic diversity in Roman Britain, and the role historical trends such as post-colonialism and globalization have played in our understanding of life in the Roman provinces. The module may also include field trips to Roman sites and museum collections.

After a brief survey of the main events leading to the declaration of war and the invasion of Poland, this module allows you to explore resistance and collaboration in countries that were first occupied in 1940, namely, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and the Netherlands. The transition between active collaboration to increasing resistance is next traced through Vichy France. The module then moves to the Eastern and Mediterranean fronts where the resistance was more effectively organized. The countries studied in this segment include Yugoslavia, Greece, and the USSR (Belarus, Russia, Baltics and Ukraine).

Lastly, you’ll examine countries that were first part of the Axis and eventually switched sides from 1943 onwards (Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania). Special attention will be given to the treatment of Jews, the Holocaust and the difficulties of coming to terms with what remains a contested past. Besides political documents, you will engage with photography, posters, films, documentaries and personal memoirs.

This module gives a broad thematic overview of the history of Germany in the twentieth century. Few country’s histories have been more tumultuous over the past two centuries than that of Germany. Rapid industrialisation, varied federal traditions, revolutions, the launching of and defeat in two world wars, responsibility for war crimes and genocide on an unparalleled scale, foreign occupation and re-education, and political division for four decades have made German history, and the ways in which Germans have remembered it, contentious and of broad public concern. In few countries have visions of the nation's history been so varied and contested, and few peoples have created and faced such challenges when confronting their 'transient' or 'shattered' past.

In order to provide a thematic focus, this module will examine in particular the reasons for the rise of National Socialism, the character of National Socialism, and the difficulties of the Federal Republic of Germany to deal with its difficult and contentious past, that is the attempt at 'coming to terms with the past' (Vergangenheitsbewltigung).

This module examines the role of satire in British culture between the Restoration and the Victoria era. Satire is a rich and varied mode of cultural representation. It has an ancient pedigree, and it can be found cross-culturally and trans-historically. In this module we’ll consider this broader context, including ancient satirical art and literature, but we’ll mainly focus on the different sorts of satires that characterised British culture between the reigns of Charles II and Queen Victoria. In tackling this nearly 250-year period, our aim will be to explore how satirical materials functioned as media for expressing social, cultural and political ideas, and we’ll consider the light these materials shed on their historical contexts. Topics considered will likely include courtly culture, imperial expansion, urbanisation and industrial change. We shall also pay particular attention to how satire was used to establish and reinforce ideas about class, race and sexual identity and about normative and appropriate behaviour, and we’ll reflect on the degree to which attitudes towards humour and obscenity changed over time.

In this module, you will explore the simultaneous rise of slavery and freedom in North America between 1620 and 1800. You will first examine the colonization of Massachusetts by Puritan migrants, and see how their liberty was constrained by gender relations, market dependency, and religious orthodoxy. Viewing the southern colonies in comparative perspective, you will explore the reasons why tobacco and rice planters transitioned from employing white indentured servants to enslaving Africans, and the racial codes that they developed to justify their decisions. You will understand how slave-holding American colonists could espouse discourses of liberty during the American Revolution, and the differing outcomes of the Revolution for Patriots, Loyalists, enslaved people, and Native Americans. You will conclude by studying the rapid expansion of slavery into the Deep South and the settlement of the trans-Appalachian frontier by free settlers after the Revolution. You will thus see how the United States—the “Empire of Liberty”—was forged in both slavery and freedom, creating a divided nation at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The course will allow you to study the Cold War in Europe, from its emergence in the immediate post-war period to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. You will be encouraged to question the rapid breakdown of the alliance between the victorious powers of the Second World War and how this could lead to the division of Europe into two blocs; to understand and put the role of the superpowers into perspective by studying also the role of medium and small European powers, and thereby show the room for manoeuvre that existed within the blocs; to analyse how the nuclearisation of the Cold War eventually led to a ‘long peace’ in Europe; and to assess how the East-West struggle was eventually overcome. During the lectures and seminars, you will have the opportunity to engage with the vast and diverse historiography of the Cold War in Europe; study the conflict at the political, diplomatic, military, economic, and cultural levels; and focus on themes ranging from the Origins of the East-West struggle in Europe to the challenges to authority in the Eastern bloc and the end of the Cold War.

This course explores the period known colloquially as the English Civil War and the Interregnum, bounded by the traditionally-accepted dates that allow for a discussion of the causes of war and the final collapse of constitutional experimentation. It will look at the controversies which have whipped up successive generations of historians; at the birth of a republic in England; the role of Scotland and Ireland, the rise of the gutter press, and the birth of modern political campaigning; (in)famous characters such as ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne and the radical preacher Praise-God Barebones; ask if Oliver Cromwell was a dictator, a king or a saviour; and explore the trial and execution of a king whom many believed was the Lord’s anointed and the fount of all justice.

HIST282: The Historian in the Digital Age

This course will provide an introduction to the rapidly developing field of Digital History. It starts from the assumption that the student has only basic IT skills. It introduces them to a range of software tools and approaches, and the issues and challenges of using them properly in historical research. These will be applied to a wide range of historical sources and topics. The course is taught using a combination of lectures and workshop sessions held in an IT lab. By the end of the course the students will have a range of practical skills in topics such as spreadsheets, databases, and managing texts. As well as providing the student with an understanding of new ways in which historians are researching their discipline, these skills can be applied to other courses taken by the student, such as their dissertation, and provide transferrable skills that will help with their employability.

This module combines a lecture series that offers an overview of the history of the United States in the 19th century with a closely linked set of seminars that focus on the construction of race, class and gender difference over the same period. This combination allows students to explore an important thematic aspect of world history (the construction of race, class and gender difference) while simultaneously providing grounding for further study and research into the history of the United States in the 19th and/or 20th centuries.

The module builds upon skills that you gained in Part I and, in particular, will explore the history of the United States, from the passage and implementation of the US Constitution (1789) to the conclusion of the Civil War (1865). The module is particularly focused on the culture and politics of race, class and gender in the rapidly industrialising and expanding nation.

Seminars meet fortnightly and are structured around primary readings and recommended secondary texts that offer critical and historical insight into the topics under consideration.

This module combines a lecture series that offers an overview of the history of the United States in the 20th century with a closely linked set of seminars that focus on the construction of race, class and gender difference in over the same period. This combination allows students to explore an important thematic aspect of world history (the construction of race, class and gender difference) while simultaneously providing grounding for further study and research into the history of the United States.

The module builds upon skills that you gained in Part I and, in particular, will explore the history of the United States from the end of the Civil War (1865) to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). The module is particularly focused on the culture and politics of race, class and gender.

This module allows you to explore the story of the German Kingdom from the mid-ninth century until the early twelfth. Formed amid the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, it came close to collapse in the early tenth century, yet it was saved by the Magyar crisis, emerging triumphant under the leadership of a new and charismatic dynasty, the Liudolfings. They refounded the kingdom, turning it into the most dynamic state in tenth-century Europe. The vast empire they created - the so-called ‘Holy Roman Empire’ - would endure until 1804 when it was finally suppressed by Napoleon Buonaparte; but in the mid-eleventh century the power of its monarchs was hollowed out by a savage crisis from which the realm would never entirely recover - a devastating civil war that lasted five decades, from the mid-1070s until 1122. This stunning narrative raises many questions. Why did it all go ‘right’? Why did it then go so ‘wrong’? This dramatic story provides fundamental insights into the nature of the medieval kingdom, its capacities and its limitations.

Islam is deeply set in world history and the roots of many debates and issues in the modern Middle East can be traced back over a long period. This module provides an introduction to many such questions by offering an overview of the political, cultural, religious and social history of the main Islamic lands of the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Syria and Iraq/Iran covering roughly the first five centuries from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to the Crusades.

You’ll develop an understanding of the diversity and fluidity of both Muslim identity and the nature and priorities of the early and developing Islamic community, and you’ll also engage with key debate regarding the source material on the period, both literary and artistic.

In particular you’ll explore Islam's place in Late Antiquity; the rise and fall of the caliphal dynasties of the Umayyads and Abbasids; the evolution of political and religious authority; the cultural and political position of non-Arab converts to Islam; the impact of non-Muslim influence on politico-religious debate in Islam, as well as sectarianism and the rise and fall of key dynasties in North Africa, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

The Vietnam War remains the only war that the United States has definitively lost in its 240-year history. This course explores the political, social, and cultural effects that the fighting in Southeast Asia triggered back home on American soil, specifically between the years 1964 and 1975. Utilising a range of sources from memoirs to music, films to television coverage, you will gain a greater understanding of the forces that shaped ‘the Sixties’ and why the Vietnam War deeply affected American society for decades to come. We will engage with the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, while exploring the anti-war movement, female and Black American involvement in the war, and how veterans fared when they came home to the United States. The module, of course, will not eschew the war itself, and the first lectures will ground you in the key figures, decisions, battles, and massacres that led to a conflict which killed an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians, and 58,000 American soldiers.

The Roman Empire stretched from Britain to modern-day Syria, from Morocco to Romania. How did Rome control an empire which ranged from the societies of the Mediterranean basin to those of Arabia and temperate northern Europe? How did the peoples of these regions adapt to, or indeed resist, ‘becoming Roman’? This module will give you a thorough foundation in the history of the Roman Empire from the first emperor Augustus in the first century BCE to late antiquity and the rise of Christianity in the 4th century CE. You will study the immense social, economic, and religious changes that occurred across Europe and the Near East in this period, as well as the political and military history of the Empire. You will confront the challenges of writing Roman history from textual sources that are often fragmentary, or have political and rhetorical agenda which are alien to us today. You will also learn to integrate material evidence, from coins and inscriptions to archaeology, into your understanding of the Roman Empire.

Between 1500 and 1865, Europeans embarked twelve and a half million captive Africans on slave ships for transportation to the Americas, the largest forced trans-oceanic migration in human history. In this module, you will study the slave trade in the context of broader trends in Atlantic history. You will first see how slavery diminished in Europe during the late Middle Ages, just as Europeans began to systematically explore the Atlantic basin. You will then study the rapid expansion of the trade after Columbus’ voyages, as Europeans enslaved increasing numbers of Africans to work in the fields, mines, and ports of the Americas. Focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, you will look closely at how the trade operated, and how Africans experienced their enslavement. You will also study north-west England’s connections to the slave trade by investigating how Liverpool and Lancaster merchants outfitted slave ships and profited by the trade, and the slave trade’ influence on industrialization in Lancashire. In the concluding section of the module, you will see how the slave trade was abolished in the early nineteenth century, and the persistence of a clandestine trade until the end of the American Civil War.

Who were the Victorians? Sometimes they are credited with inventing modern Britain, with the industrial revolution, urbanisation, democratisation, the transport network, and the law and order system listed among their achievements. Yet at the same time, they exhibited attitudes to gender, sexuality, race, politics, and poverty which would be considered shocking and disgraceful by modern standards.

This module introduces you to a fascinating and contradictory period in British history. You will discover nineteenth-century Britain by exploring its most important and contentious spaces, such as the factory, the workhouse, the prison, the city, the railway carriage, and the home. You will find out what life was really like in the long nineteenth century by studying a range of primary sources, including novels, press reports, paintings, cartoons, and autobiographies.

Why can't women pull the trigger? Why are men who refuse to fight labelled cowards? The experience of total war in the twentieth century has had major implications for understandings of both masculinity and femininity in war and in peace. In this module you’ll examine the experience of war on both the home and the battlefronts in Britain and learn how war both confirmed and challenged existing gender constructions.

Through an examination of gender roles in war and the representations of these in cartoons, films and posters, you’ll explore how war impacted on understandings of gender identities in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the First and Second World Wars. Themes include industrial and military contributions to the war effort, the relationship between the Home Front and the Battle Front, social change, as well as the combat taboo. In seminars you’ll contrast the expectations of men and women at war with actual practices by those conforming to or transgressing conventional gender roles.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) saw great social, political, and cultural change, as new technologies radically altered the ways in which many people thought about themselves and the world. Examining a wide range of Victorian texts, this module is structured around four major themes: ‘Socio-Political Change’; ‘Realism, Idealism, and Fantasy’; ‘Falls and Losses’; and ‘Personal Experience and Perspective.’ This year-long module will explore the role literature plays in debates about progress, science, revolution, Englishness, empire, class, death, and sexuality; and will examine a wide range of Victorian authors including, for example, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This course explores the problems of founding a new society in the Americas during the earliest years of English adventurism. Virginia was the founding point of the presence of English people in North America; and the first Africans in English-speaking America. The course begins, chronologically, with the earliest voyages to the North American mainland, the adventurism of Sir Walter Raleigh and the settlements on Roanoke Island and Chesapeake, the relationship with the Powhatan Confederacy, and the Lost Colony. It then moves its attention to the Virginia Company and the settlement of Jamestown, and explores the different experiments by successive governors - John Smith and Sir Thomas Dale in particular - to build a stable and workable community. It looks at the introduction of tobacco, the switch towards a plantation economy and society using slave labour, and the fall of the Company. Finally, it explores the problems of proprietary government, and ends with the governorship of Sir William Berkeley and the rebellion for ‘liberty’ under Nathaniel Bacon, which marked the enslavement of indigenes and Africans.

You will spend your third year working in a graduate-level placement role. This is an opportunity to gain experience in an industry or sector that you might be considering working in once you graduate.

Our Careers and Placements Team will support you during your placement with online contact and learning resources.

You will undertake a work-based learning module during your placement year which will enable you to reflect on the value of the placement experience and to consider what impact it has on your future career plans.

In 21st Century Theory, we will build upon the general introduction to critical and cultural theory given on ENGL201 by focusing on one specific theme in contemporary theory: biopolitics. To explore biopolitics – or the politics of life itself – we will examine a selection of classic theoretical works by Michel Foucault, Georgio Agamben and others and then read them alongside some key literary and filmic texts from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the Batman Trilogy. This course will seek to address the following questions. What exactly is biopolitics? How have theorists, novelists and film-makers imagined such concepts as sovereign power, bare life, the state of exception and so on? To what extent might it be possible to resist the biopolitical hold over our political imaginary?

The gods are encountered at every turn in the Roman Empire, but seldom in the same way or in the same places. This module explores the immense diversity of religious experience, practice, and belief in the Roman world in order to understand religion’s role in the shaping of society and identity across the Empire. You will learn to use a broad range of archaeological, epigraphic, iconographic and literary evidence to reconstruct the lived experience of religion in the Roman Empire, from gods worshiped by German soldiers on the rain-swept Romano-British frontier, to domestic shrines in the kitchens of Pompeii, to the great Greco-Roman pilgrimage sanctuaries of Asia Minor. How can we use site plans to think about the experience of moving through a sanctuary? How do animal bones and pottery assemblages allow us to reconstruct the dynamics of religious sacrifice and ritual feasting? What insights do first-person accounts of encountering gods through dreams and visions by authors such as Aelius Aristides or Cicero give into personal relationships with the divine? Through detailed analysis of primary material and in-depth engagement with modern scholarship on Roman religion, we will explore the complex role played by divine cults, sacred spaces, and religious identities in the construction of society across the vast geographic and chronological span of the Empire. You will also have the opportunity to take part in a field trip to sites and museums on Hadrian's Wall, to experience a range of temple locations and material evidence for Roman religion in person.

This module explores the origins of modern ‘consumer society’ in Britain, introducing you to an exciting and innovative field of historical research.

In the hundred years from the abolition of advertising tax in 1853 to the birth of commercial television in the 1950s, advertising became a ubiquitous feature of modern capitalism. You will examine the causes and consequences of this process of commercialisation using a variety of primary sources, from press reports and cartoons, to business archives, social surveys, and, of course, the advertisements themselves.

You will explore the changing relationship between people and their possessions, the impact of new retail environments like the department store and the supermarket, how advertising shaped modern gender identities, and how the Co-operative movement pioneered ethical consumerism. Advertising is political, and you will also see how it helped Britain win two world wars and market the Empire to its own people. You will learn how advertisements work by designing your own advertising campaign in a particular historical context. You’ll never look at shops or advertisements in the same way again.

On 6 January 2021, the US Congress was attacked in a chaotic offensive of fire and fury that led to five deaths and countless injuries. After decades of gradual polarisation, the United States – the preeminent world power and self-proclaimed beacon of democracy – was coming apart in dramatic fashion as the world looked on. Three weeks later, the US Capitol witnessed the arrival of a new president and heard an inaugural address which focused on the need for unity and warned of democracy’s fragility.

This course will examine the reasons why, and the extent to which, American society, culture, and politics polarised in the years since 1960. To do so, it will examine a wide range of issues, such as: race relations, gender and sexuality, socioeconomic policy, media, the ‘culture wars’, the modern American presidency, and political polarisation between Democrats and Republicans.

This module presents an unprecedentedly vivid picture of the lived experience of Europeans, Africans and indigenous Americans over a three-million square mile area (Carolina to the Equator; central America to Bermuda) in which Britons settled an area smaller than Yorkshire.

Though you are unlikely to have much knowledge of the place or period when you start the module, though students who have taken The English Civil War and Virginia will have encountered some of the issues. The course is popular with History Majors and also has resonances with Politics and with English Literature. The interests of each year’s students can be accommodated. You will also have access to a unique collection of (digital) facsimiles of printed and archive sources. You will study the roots of the colonial process but can adopt modern techniques of analysis and presentation such as web-authorship, databases, palaeography (handwriting). You will write traditional essays but also create an individual project tailored in consultation with the tutor to fit your research interests, way of working, opportunity to showcase or learn new skills, and ways of presentation. You will be plunging into a fascinating period and place, asking challenging questions of the human experience and learning valuable transferable skills.

This module investigates the development of World War II into a ‘civil conflict’ during Europe’s occupation by Axis forces. We will engage with a broad range of primary sources to investigate individual and collective attitudes, taking into consideration political and religious beliefs, as well as Europe’s fraught relationship with the plight of its Jews. The module will elucidate the motifs for the conflicting memorialization of resistance and collaboration especially in France, Poland and the USSR.

The module starts with an investigation into the relationship between history and photojournalism, followed by film and propaganda in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and its subsequent deployment in the UK and the USA. We then explore the trajectories of these sources, as well as letters written by civilians about to be executed, in constructing the ‘foundational narrative’ of Gaullist France as a ‘nation of resisters’, eventually leading to its counter-image as a ‘nation of collaborators’, or what Rousso calls ‘Vichy Syndrome’. Next, we research Soviet sources made available after Khrushchev’s Thaw or during Glasnost, including Baltermants’ photographs and the testimonies of Soviet Jews collected by Grossman and Ehrenburg. The last segment of the module charts the Holocaust ‘boom’, and the subsequent focus on Jewish victimization, Gentile rescuers, survival and resistance. This segment uses Levi’s ‘grey zone’ to read testimonies, such as those in Lanzmann’s Shoah, which follows Hilberg’s division into ‘perpetrators, victims and bystanders’. The module deploys theoretical tools from collective memory, post-memory, bio-politics and cultural history.

The course will begin with writing that looks back to the First World War, and end with writing that anticipates the Second World War. In between, you will explore and interrogate the inter-war ‘moment’ through close attention to texts by such as D.H. Lawrence,Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and W H Auden. The course will focus on many of the great themes of the period such as exile, unemployment, Englishness, eugenics, militarisation, and political commitment, as well as many of the great cultural motifs of the period such as borders, radios, planes, cars, trains, cameras, and telephones. Close attention will also be paid to many of the great intellectual debates of the period such as the nature of history, the role of the State in everyday life, and the place of literary experimentation in time of war.

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

In this module we will look at a selection of biblical texts alongside literary works that appropriate, rewrite, and subvert them. We will be thinking about the Bible as literature; the reciprocal relationship between the Bible and literature; what the Bible does to a literary text. We will explore questions such as: in what ways does awareness of the Bible provoke more profound readings of a literary text? and does rewriting refine or subvert the Bible? We currently study work by such as Margaret Attwood, William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Angela Carter, John Donne, and Sylvia Plath, as well as Terence Mallick’s film The Tree of Life.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module will focus upon the motif of ‘the child’ within 20th and 21st century horror fiction and film, and aims to explore the cultural significance of this motif through analysis of themes such as innocence and evil, psychic powers, child abuse, parenting, technology and grief. The module will develop in students a sophisticated ability to think critically and analytically about how an exploration of popular fiction and film can reveal deep cultural anxieties and fixations at both historical and psychological levels. We currently explore literary texts such as Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now (1973), and Stephen King, The Shining (1977), and films such as The Bad Seed (1956), dir. Mervyn LeRoy, The Exorcist (1973), dir. William Friedkin, and Hereditary (2018), dir. Ari Aster.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module explores different kinds of contemporary literature: postmodern, Gothic, postcolonial/world, post-9/11, feminist/queer, experimental, etc. Beginning in the 1950s, we consider the explosion of new literatures from the decolonising/newly postcolonial world and the rise of new literary forms in the post-war period. Recurrent themes include borders, margins, haunting, apocalypse, rewriting, migration, and metamorphosis. Texts currently studied include Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), Alan Moore,?& D. Gibbons, Watchmen (1987), Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places (2000), Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000), Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003), Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2008), Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes (2012), and Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018).

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of Middle Eastern literature in English and translation as one of the most exciting new areas of world literature. The region has experienced, so far this century, the ‘war on terror’, revolutions and wintery aftermaths, civil wars, sectarian violence, the rise and fall of ‘Islamic State’, and an ongoing refugee crisis. On this course, we will explore some of the shapes and styles of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, the concerns and aspirations that drive it, and its growing international visibility. We will study novels, short stories, and new genres from the region, in English and in translation. No prior knowledge is needed.

Course Outline:

This module is run by the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, with the support of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Engagement team and the central Careers Team. It aims to enhance students’ employability by providing an assessed work placement opportunity as an optional module It will also encourage students actively to think about the transferability of skills gained through the study of English Literature and/or Creative Writing.

The Department, via the FASS Engagement team, will set up a number of work placements in the (broadly defined) culture, heritage and creative sectors: with, for example, publishers, museums, newspapers, heritage sites, and arts venues. Students may alternatively source their own work placements, subject to prior discussion with the FASS Placements provider. Information on how to source a placement will be circulated to all enrolled students during summer.

Recent placements include: Copywriter at Copify; Publishing and Editorial Intern at Saraband; Project Assistant at Lancaster City Council; Communications Assistant at Three Left Feet Theatre Company.

Students must be prepared to pay their own transport/accommodation costs, though a small Departmental contribution toward travel can be applied for. It is expected that placements will be either close to Lancaster University or to the student’s home; many placements occur remotely. Students typically work for 30-40 hours with their host organization (not all of which will necessarily be on-site) in the Lent term.

They maintain contact with both the departmental course convenor and FASS placements team throughout the placement period. Placement providers are required to complete risk assessment and health and safety forms and to ensure an induction process. Both students and placement providers are required to sign a Learning Agreement.

Please note that you cannot take both this module and ENGL 376 Schools Volunteering.

Please also note that the maximum number of students on this course is fixed, and that in fairness to students, and in dialogue with the FASS Placements Officer, we have chosen to set up a selection process. If you choose this course, you will be sent an online form to complete as an application. The criteria will be enthusiasm, commitment, and having aspirations which can be realistically met on this module. You do not have to have prior placement experience, but it is fine if you do.

Soviet history is often told through the prism of totalitarian oppression, but beneath layers of state control a vibrant dissident movement was active. Whilst they were far from an homogenous group, their presence and sustained activism in the later decades of Soviet history raises broader questions about the communist superpower. What influence could political dissidents have on the world around them? How did they exert influence in a regime that wanted them silenced? What role did they, or could they play in the Cold War?

In this module, you will explore the breadth, depth, and complexity of the Soviet dissident movement and analyse the impact that they had on the wider world. You will explore the nature of political life in the Soviet Union, ranging from the punishment of the labour camp system under Joseph Stalin, the use and abuse of psychiatry under Nikita Khrushchev, and the silencing of the shestidesiatniki under Leonid Brezhnev. This module will also consider the role dissidents played in the collapse of the Soviet regime under Mikhail Gorbachev, and the contemporary parallels with dissidents such as Anna Politkovskaya and Pussy Riot in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. By focusing on the domestic enemies of the Soviet state, this module will allow you to explore in detail how totalitarian governments function, what activists and intellectuals can do to change this, and the role played by the international community in supporting these dissidents. Alongside this, it will address broader issues such as political dissent, human rights and international relations amongst others.

Indicative topics include:

Samizdat, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and the Chronicle of Current Events

Psikhushki and psychiatric abuse

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the ‘Slavophiles’

Andrei Sakharov and the ‘Westernisers’

Vladimir Bukovsky and the ‘non-conformists’

The KGB and state intimidation

The Refuseniks and Soviet Jewry movements

Religious Persecution and Keston College

The Helsinki Accords and the move towards human rights

Amnesty International and the Soviet Union

Pussy Riot and Pyotr Pavlensky

The Dissertation is a module that progresses from the methodological understandings acquired in Second-Year courses.

You will write a 10,000-word dissertation exploring a challenging historical problem. While, in many cases, we expect that the topic chosen will arise from courses you are studying, it should also be possible to accommodate topics which do not have a direct bearing on your taught courses. The aim is to give you the opportunity to work in depth on a topic of your choice, and to gain the satisfaction of working independently and of making a subject your own. Research for dissertations will usually combine work on secondary literature with the use of primary sources (in translation where necessary). You are expected to demonstrate knowledge of the wider historical context of the subject being explored by including a critical review of relevant published work and to show an awareness of the limitations of primary sources used.

Course Aims and Objectives:

The final-year Dissertation is your opportunity to devise, research, and explore a topic of your own choice through a programme of directed independent study. You will be helped to begin your thinking at the end of your second year and then, through your third year, you will develop your research, thinking, and writing, as you build toward a maximum of 10,000 words. You will be supported throughout by your appointed supervisor, with whom you will have four 40-minite one-to-one tutorials. In addition, there are two overview lectures (one in the Michaelmas Term and one in the Lent Term) as well as four research skills seminars.

Almost anything is possible: some students explore famous literary names or themes, whilst others explore obscure figures and unusual topics; some draw on the University Library’s special collections or those housed within The Ruskin Library, whilst others go way beyond Lancaster to develop their research; some are inspired by the medievalism of historic Lancaster or the Romanticism of nearby Lake District, whilst others are drawn to the far textual shores of the digital world; some build towards MA study, whilst others build toward the world of work; and, finally, some write in classic literary critical styles, whilst others push the boundaries of literary studies in all sorts of new and startling ways.

Recent topics have included:

• Living in Liminality, Finding Yourself: Muslim Women's Boundary Negotiation and

Identity Formation

• How is the Value of Sacrifice Presented in Post-War Japanese Literature?
• A Storm in Five Acts: King Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walter Benjamin
• Academia and Ecclesia: Following the Academy After the Church
• Playing with Time: Queer Temporality in Video Games
• “Out of the ash / I rise” : An Exploration of the Editing of Sylvia Plath’s Posthumous

Publications and Legacy

• A Divine Being and a Fallen World: Milton's Justification of God's Ways to 17th Century

England

• Virginia Woolf’s Paintings: Visual Arts and the Figure of the Artist in the Writings of

Virginia Woolf

• Understanding the Effects of War on Children through World War Two Literature
• Green Romanticism: An Ecocritical Reading of William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley
• Kaleidoscopic Epistemology in the world of Anna Kavan
• “You'll be hungry all the time”: Food and Hunger in Jim Crace and Samuel Beckett
• RS Thomas: Post-Romanticism and Spirituality

The details of this module may vary from year to year.

On the 17 July 1936, a group of Spanish generals launched a military coup against Spain’s democratically elected Second Republic. The following three years would witness a bitter struggle to determine the future of the Spanish nation. Ending just months before Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Spanish Civil War has since been dubbed a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Second World War. On the rebel side, General Francisco Franco enlisted the help of Hitler and Mussolini to defeat his domestic opponents. Meanwhile, the Republic was supported by Soviet Russia. Yet the Civil War was also a Spanish conflict with important local dimensions. Republican Spain enjoyed a rich culture of mass politics, and Spanish socialists, communists, anarchists, liberals and feminists fought to the last against Franco’s reactionary coalition of ‘Nationalists’. Following his victory in April 1939, Franco would outlive his international fascist allies by several decades, and the difficult legacies of the war remain keenly present within modern-day Spanish politics and society. Drawing on a large range of sources, including autobiographies, oral histories, novels, films, songs, and political speeches, students taking this module will gain an in-depth knowledge on the domestic and international origins, outcomes, and legacies of the Spanish Civil War.

Indicative topics will typically include:

• The origins of the Civil War: The Second Spanish Republic, 1931-1936
• Republican militias, including anarchist and communist factions
• The Army of Africa: Legionnaires and Moroccan Regulars
• Militiawomen, the Sección Femenina and gender on both sides
• Diplomacy, non-intervention, and the International Brigades
• Fascists abroad: Hitler and Mussolini
• The aftermath of war: victors, vanquished, and repression in Franco’s New State
• Legacies and historical memory of the Civil War

This module explores British foreign policy and the country's broader engagement with the wider world throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Framed against broad debates concerning the decline of British power during this period, the module will explore the central themes that defined Britain's overseas policy in this era, including the impact of the World Wars, the loss of Empire, the 'special relationship' with the United States, and European integration. In exploring these themes, the module will consider how people from a variety of different perspectives (British and foreign, politicians, journalists, novelists, activists) conceived of Britain's world-role since the First World War. In order to incorporate this variety of perspectives, students will draw on a large range of sources, including newspaper articles, novels, poetry and films, as well as traditional archival sources like official government documents, diaries and memoirs.

The thirteenth century began with a rebellion that sought to cast a tyrant from the throne of England, followed after fifty years by a revolution, in which a party of barons and bishops backed by a vast popular following seized power from the king and set up a council to govern in his stead: a move that was utterly radical. This period has been hailed as the foundation of the enlightened democracy we enjoy today – but the reality is far darker. This was a world in which religious leaders had the power to punish kings, where rebels fought as sworn crusaders, and where people willingly went to their deaths for a political cause believing themselves martyrs. This world was not democratic, but theocratic.

In this module you will explore the major events of the period, in England and across Christendom, from the making of Magna Carta and the Fourth Lateran Council, to the Albigensian Crusade, the seizure of power in 1258, and the bloody Battle of Evesham that brought the end of England's First Revolution. You will meet the people who shaped this world – from powerful queens like Blanche of Castile and Eleanor of Provence, to leading knight William Marshal and the masterful pope Innocent III, from tyrannical and hapless kings to the churchmen who defied them and were recognised as saints, and from Simon de Montfort, the revolution's charismatic and brutal leader, to the low-born men and women who flocked to his banner. You will be able to uncover their stories through their letters, testimonies, and eye-witness accounts, and a wealth of other primary sources.

Through a range of topics, you will be able to explore your particular interests – whether in the religious, military, political or social aspects of this period – and consider the big questions arising from this course: what can move women and men, poor and rich, to risk their livelihoods, to take life and give their own to decide who ruled the realm?

The labelling of the Second World War as the People’s War in Britain draws attention to the importance of the men and women who waged it. With the blurring of the Home and Battle Fronts, the conventional gender contract in which men fight to protect the vulnerable at home and women keep the home fires burning was challenged, not least by the revolutionary act of conscripting women to the war effort.

In this module you will examine how the Second World War was experienced by a wide spectrum of British men and women, some of whom identified with the war effort, some of whom were deliberately excluded, or chose to challenge gender conventions in their choice of role. You’ll consider different categorisations of experience (military/civilian; home front/ battle front; male/female) and explore whether there was a hierarchy of service and subsequently of remembrance. Were gender roles in Britain really transformed by the exigencies of war? Through a wide range of written and visual sources, including autobiographical materials, poems, photographs, films, parliamentary minutes, newspapers, posters and cartoons, we will seek to understand individual and collective experiences of the war, and their gendered dimensions.

Today the claim that God designed everything in the universe has given way to the theory of evolution. The usual story of this change is one of conflict between science and religion. This module, however, will challenge the popular narrative.

Focusing on the period 1450-1800, we will reconsider the rise and fall of the idea that nature was the work of a divine intelligent designer. As well as trying to understand why the design argument became so important in the early modern period, we will seek to understand why it fell out of favour during the 18th century – long before the theory of evolution.

But we will not simply be studying the history of ideas. To understand the role of design in early modern science, we will study a wide range of disciplines and practices – from intellectual disciplines like philosophy, rhetoric and theology, to material practices including chemistry, architectural design, archaeology, and art.

This module will give students the opportunity to study all the major works of one of the most celebrated novelists in English literary history. It will combine close attention to the stylistic textures and narrative strategies of Jane Austen’s fiction with broader consideration of key themes and preoccupations such as friendship, desire, matchmaking, snobbery, illness, resistance, transgression and secrecy.

Film historians consider 1939 to be ‘the greatest year in the history of Hollywood,’ a year in which 365 films were released and 80 million tickets sold. This module considers how literature and film interact and conflict in that year to construct mythologies of the American past and present in the context of the Great Depression and on the eve of the Second World War. The module also considers the context of Hollywood, the functions of motion picture palaces, American film’s relationship to British literature, and more. Texts currently studied include John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937), Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1846), and Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and films such as Mr Smith Goes to Washington, dir. Frank Capra, Gunga Din, dir. George Stevens, and Gone with the Wind, dir. Victor Fleming.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Friedrich Nietzsche was far from alone in suggesting that God had died by the end of the nineteenth century; however, the literature of the fin de siècle (c. 1880-1914) paints a very different picture from the one offered by those who suggest that religion simply disappeared. A number of prominent writers in the period converted to Catholicism, whilst others explored the permeable boundaries between orthodox belief and esoteric spirituality. Those who turned to literature to think about religion did so in a wide variety of ways: experimenting with form, narrating religious experience, exploring the relationship between spirit and matter, and thinking about religious practice in ways both conventional and bizarre. Texts currently studied include: Oscar Wilde, Salome, G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown, and poetry produced by the Decadent movement.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

Is it possible to ‘read’ a painting? Can an artist interpret a poem in paint? This module addresses the complex relationship between literature and the visual arts, tracing key debates in aesthetic theory from Romanticism to the twenty-first century. Literature and the Visual Arts will begin with an introduction to key critical terms and an examination of the painting-inspired poetry of, for example, John Keats and W. H. Auden. Subsequent seminars will explore the work of figures such as William Blake, John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who blur the distinction between literature and art; the revival of the Pop Art tradition and postmodern narrative practices; the advent of photography; and, finally, the fusion of word and image in graphic novels including texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The module will draw on the unique resources of the University’s Ruskin Library and rare book archive.

What did theatre look like before Shakespeare? How were devils and vices, divinity and virtue, coronations and carnivals staged during the Medieval period? This module will introduce you to a range of medieval drama, including mystery cycles, civic pageantry, morality plays and interludes, as we explore the weird and wonderful drama of towns, cities, and courts, and look at some of the earliest professional companies to identify the distinctive features of medieval English theatre. As well as reading texts, you will watch recordings of modern performances of medieval theatre. NB No prior knowledge of Middle English is required --the use of modern translations is encouraged to aid understanding.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This course will trace the evolution of English (including American) literature in a period of social and political change stretching from the Boer War to the Cold War, from the Edwardian era to the Space Age. It will explore the dynamics of literary history, focusing on the strain of radical experimentation that characterizes so much twentieth-century writing. We will examine the ways in which modernist writers from Eliot to Woolf renewed and re-shaped the language of literature; we shall consider how some representative post-modernist writers (Beckett and Pynchon) addressed the problem of how to follow their formidable literary predecessors. The first term’s work considers writers working in, and sometimes against, the British context (including New Zealand and Ireland); the second term considers those working in, and sometimes against, the American context. Given the transnational nature of Modernism, this in turn begs the question of whether primary allegiance was owed to nation, or to art.

How are acts of desire, murder, fake and ‘real’ deaths represented on stage in early modern drama and how are these experiences gendered? This module will explore both the construction and deconstruction of death, desire, and genders, by focusing on performance. The performativity of gender, on stage and beyond, was materialised in the theatres of early modern England where boys played female roles, thus often representing both female desire and same-sex desire at the same time. We will study texts by Marlowe, Middleton, Heywood, Webster, Wroth as well as some contemporary productions and film adaptations. We will also engage in some short practical explorations -- such as getting the text ‘on its feet’; and the module will culminate in a series of short presentations and performances by the group. No previous experience of (or expertise in) acting is necessary.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

It’s an illuminating fact that the very phrase ‘climate change’ was first deployed by colonising thinkers who wanted to transform local environments to serve their purposes. Today, it is clearer than ever that the catastrophic effects of global climate change will be most keenly felt by the global poor, especially in colonised or postcolonial spaces. This module explores how postcolonial writing, from a variety of locations, grapples with environmental change, crisis and collapse, especially the looming spectres of the so-called ‘Anthropocene.’ We’ll read established and emerging voices from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Texts currently studied include: Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, J M Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K, and V S Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

It has been argued that the Gothic, and the rise of the Gothic novel, is part of a history that goes back to long before the eighteenth century. This module therefore coins the term ‘Premodern Gothic’ to consider some of the ways in which a range of generically diverse texts produced in England between c.1450 and 1600 engage with Gothic tropes and sensibilities (ghosts, vampires, castles, darkness, magic, terror, and wonder etc.) long before the rise of the Gothic novel. Texts currently studied include: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module is run as a partnership between the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing and the University’s Schools Outreach Office, and normally involves a 10-week placement in a local school. This will usually include classroom observation, teacher assistance, and the opportunity to design and develop a teaching-related ‘special project’ to be conducted with a designated group of students or the class as a whole. This will enable you to develop confidence in communicating your subject, as well as an increased awareness of the roles of schools and universities in educational processes and structures.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

This module will trace the development of science fiction (or SF) in literature and film, providing an insight into the conventions of the genre and, in particular, how the key themes of the science fiction genre have been successfully adapted for the screen. It will encompass narratives of time travel, evolution, and temporal dislocation, and consider journeys, encounters, and species, as well as questions of human subjectivity, gender, race, transcendence, love, and loss. Work currently studied include texts such as: H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979), and Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (2019); and films such as: La Jetée (1962) 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), and Arrival (2016).

The details of this module (for example the texts or authors studied) may vary from year to year.

Ben Jonson claimed of Shakespeare ‘he was not of an age but for all time.’ This course examines Shakespearean drama and poetry in its own time: as a platform in which early modern debates about agency and government, family, national identity, were put into play, and in relation to how we perceive these issues now. The stage was and is a place in which questions of gender, class, race, gain immediacy through the bodies and voices of actors. By examining texts from across Shakespeare’s career, we will explore their power to shape thoughts and feelings in their own age and in ours. We will consider Shakespeare’s manipulation of genre (poetry, comedy, history, tragedy and romance) and the ways the texts make active use of language (verse, prose, rhyme, rhythm) and theatrical languages (costume, stage positions) to generate meaning. The course will consider how, in the past and in the present, Shakespeare’s texts exploit the emotional and political possibilities of poetry and drama.

As part of their assessment for this course, students may opt to take part in a full-scale public performance of one of the plays we have studied; this is usually staged at Lancaster Castle.

The English East India Company (founded 1600) was the most famous corporation in world history: its business connecting the British Isles across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. It was a protagonist of globalisation. Its longevity - from Elizabeth to Victoria - provides a common thread with which to illuminate the broader English/British story and the separate histories of the territories with which the Company engaged. Historians have debated what the Company represented. It did much to stimulate global trade, but was it a private business in the modern sense? It ruled British territory on behalf of the British state, but was it a state in its own right? This course encourages you to engage with these (and other) large and important questions and digest the high-quality literature that the Company has rightly attracted. But the core of this class will be the challenge and joy of digesting the remarkable corpus of documents and writings that the Company issued or provoked from well-known political economists like Karl Marx and Adam Smith, to managers like Elizabeth Dalyson and non-European writers such as Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. You will be introduced to translated Persian documents, the correspondence of Company factors in Japan, charters, board room minutes, pamphlets, and histories and will explore art and architecture in the cities it did so much to develop. You will gain a broad understanding of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century British, Indian, and global history; and develop expertise in cultural, art, political, parliamentary, global, economic, constitutional, gender, and business history.

The Norman conquests in the central Mediterranean ended Muslim political power in Sicily, formed a single kingdom in 1130, and divided Christian Europe from Muslim Africa. The Norman Sicilian kingship that emerged was like no other in Europe: an absolutist, sacral monarchy that conspicuously made use of the Byzantine, Islamic and Latinate arts as well as the kingdom’s three languages – Latin, Greek and Arabic –in inscriptions and chancery documents. In this unique Special Subject module you will gain a detailed knowledge of the history of Sicily and the south Italian peninsula through the medium of Arabic, Latin and Greek narrative sources and charters. These will be studied in translation. Many have never been published. You will trace the region's complex transition to a unified kingdom after the Norman Conquest, focusing in particular on the subsequent development of authority and society on the island of Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. You will be engaging with the formative history of the Latin West, as well as the political, religious, economic and social dynamics of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. The course will provide a detailed introduction to the Norman kingdom for those wishing to delve deeper into one of the most spectacular and unusual kingdoms of pre-modern Europe.

Many writers have described the years of unprecedented historical change that surrounded the turn of the twentieth century as a time of 'cultural crisis'. This interdisciplinary module in US cultural history explores that so-called crisis through the close reading and analysis of a variety of important written and visual texts, including fiction and non-fiction, architecture and urban design, painting, photography and cinema. Course themes include: technology and culture, labour and capital, imperialism and the 'myth of the west', immigration and urbanisation, celebrity and consumer culture, reform politics, the Great War, and cultural modernism.

This course explores twentieth and twenty-first century texts about the city that use Gothic generic conventions and modalities. The built environments of the Gothic are often plastic and mutable, the setting for animate, changeable, and malevolent forces. We will explore the ‘architectural uncanny’ and the ‘urban sublime,’ and consider how traditional elements of Gothic fiction are pressed to new ends in response to changing sensory, social and political contexts of urban space and place. While most sources will be textual (currently: Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (1985), N. K. Jemisin, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month (2018), Caitlín R. Kiernan, 'Goggles (c.1910)' (2012), and Patrick McGrath, Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (2005)) these will be complemented with reference to screen media, fine art, graphic novel and UrbEx photography.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

In the Victorian period, the decaying castles, corrupt priests and ancestral curses that were so prominent in the first phase of the Gothic novel gave way to an increased emphasis on spectral and monstrous others: ghosts, witches, werewolves, vampires, mummies and other creatures of the night. The module will explore these phenomena in their historical, cultural and literary contexts, with particular focus on emerging discourses of gender, sexuality, colonialism and class. The module will pay special attention to visual aspects of the Gothic, examining book illustration, painting and photography from the period and their relationship with Gothic texts. Students will be asked to consider the relationship between newly emergent forms of modernity (from medical discourses to photography) and the preoccupation with history and the past that is a generic feature of the Gothic. Texts will comprise a selection of novels and short fiction, with additional images and extracts from contextual works provided online and in class.

This module is centred upon three new genres which emerge in the mid-late Victorian period: Detective Fiction; The Adventure Story; and Children’s Fiction. Why do these new forms appear when they do? What determines them? We will spend three weeks on each, focussing on key texts and writers within the emerging genre, and looking at how certain conventions, principles, and core concerns develop for new genres as well as considering issues of literary status and canonicity. Within each session we will explore texts in terms of overlapping themes within a genre and the issues they raise for how we interpret the subject; these themes include: Colonialism, Imperialism, Gender, and Education. Texts currently studied include: R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island, J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, F.H. Burnett, The Secret Garden, and E.E. Nesbit, Five Children and It.

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.

The Vikings inspired both fear and fascination in medieval times, and they continue to exercise a powerful hold on the modern imagination. In this Special Subject you will explore the Viking Age in the Irish Sea region and the Isles. The course ranges from the first Viking raids to the creation of the kingdom of Man and the Isles, a ‘sea-kingdom’ that encompassed numerous islands. The course offers you the chance to develop a sophisticated understanding of textual sources as well as non-textual material. You will gain a grasp of political history, and you will also have the opportunity to study the economy, culture, ethnicity and gender. The field is flourishing, and exciting new finds such as the Galloway Hoard continue to refresh our understanding of the period. You will have access to plenty of secondary literature, and there is scope for developing original interpretations by studying the primary material.

There will be some focus on the prolific evidence from north-west England, including artefacts in local museums and impressive stone monuments. You may have the chance to participate in a field trip to a site or museum (you should set aside approximately £35.00 for local transport). The local evidence will be set in the broader context of Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the North Atlantic.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously asks, ‘what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister?’ This module follows Woolf’s lead by seeking to redress the historical marginalisation of women writers in the English literary canon through an exploration of: how women have come to writing at different historical moments; and what they have chosen to write, and how. A selection of texts from the 17th century through to the 21st, encompassing autobiographical forms, the novel, poetry, and drama, are used to examine relationships between gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and literary production, and to explore continuities, connections, and disparities between different representations of female experience. Texts currently studied include: Pat Barker, Regeneration (1990), Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (1991), Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), Sarah Waters, The Night Watch (2006), and Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journals (1800-3).

The details of this module (for example, materials studied) may vary from year to year.