MA Historical Studies

Research Methods (Core)
This module introduces students to a range of research methods and focuses on active engagement with the processes of gathering, evaluating and analyzing data of various sorts. Students are guided through the process of using archives and gathering oral testimony, and will also have the opportunity to explore a variety of other sources. Students will also gain familiarity with, and be able to evaluate, different approaches to the analysis and interpretation of historical data.

Approaches to Historical Inquiry (core)
This module enables students to engage critically with the development of the discipline of History. A variety of different approaches to the subject are in turn analyzed and contextualized. Their relationships with other approaches are examined through scrutiny of a series of historiographical debates. Having engaged critically with these approaches, students then explore problems and challenges associated with primary source-based research on a practical and ethical level before addressing these issues in the production of their dissertation proposal.

Medieval Women
This module examines the lives of women in medieval Europe between about 1100 and 1530, looking at the roles they played, the images of them that circulated, and the relationships they had with their own and the opposite gender. It attempts to evaluate the, sometimes contradictory, evidence about the positions and power of women in medieval society, and to assess how far this varied over the course of the medieval period, and throughout Europe. The module will also require students to confront the problem of sources and methodology associated with studying a marginalized group at a time when women produced very little in the way of documents themselves.

History and the Public
Recently, public history – the engagement with history now, often outside the academy – has grown in Britain. The module examines how and why the past has permeated culture. It critically examines how the past is represented in a variety of cultural forms and equips students with a critical conceptual framework. Students are given the opportunity to apply these analytical tools to a close scrutiny of the range of ways in which the past is represented and consumed within contemporary society.

Studying Families in Past Society
This module locates the study of the British family in a wide-ranging historiographical and inter-disciplinary context. It traces the changing significance and nature of the family as a social, economic and cultural unit, from the early modern period through until the twentieth century. It explores critically the source materials available to historians in their analysis of the family and assesses the reasons why the family has become such a primary focus of historical inquiry.

The Study of Political History in Britain
This module enables students to engage critically with the writing of British political history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A variety of different approaches to this subject are in turn analyzed and contextualized. Their relationships with other approaches are examined through scrutiny of a series of historiographical debates. In the second half of the module, students examine a number of modern texts and historical writing dealing with the period 1885-1924, in order to test out how these different approaches have influenced political historians.

Land, Labour and Leisure, c. 1830-1939
The study of rural England’s past has, in recent years, been invigorated by social and cultural historians’ approaches to the subject. This module seeks to examine this work and to offer students the opportunity to engage directly with historiographical debates through primary research. Agricultural labourers – both male and female – are placed at the centre of the module’s examination of nineteenth-century rural England. A significantly different approach to the study of rural England is adopted when looking at the twentieth century, where, increasingly, the land is regarded as a locus of consumption.

The Coming of the Third Reich
The module will focus mainly on German history between the end of the First World War and the death of Hindenburg in 1934 – the period during which the Nazis came to office and consolidated their power, after less than auspicious beginnings. The seminar programme will mainly deal with areas that are, or have been, contested in the historiography of the Weimar Republic.

Postgraduate certificate: ‘Research Methods’ and one optional unit from: ‘Medieval Women’, History and the Public’ and ‘Studying Families in Past Society’.

Postgraduate diploma: ‘Approaches to Historical Inquiry’ and one optional unit from: ‘The Study of Political History in Britain’, ‘Land, Labour and Leisure’ and ‘The Coming of the Third Reich’.

MA: 15,000-20,000 word dissertation.

Assessment: a variety of forms of assessment will be used, including research projects, documentary critiques, essays, presentations, book reviews, portfolios and the dissertation.

Careers requiring research and analytical abilities are particularly relevant. Opportunities exist within teaching, the heritage industries, museums, journalism, PR, the media and the civil service.

For further information about fees, scholarships and bursaries please see our Fees & Funding pages.

Fees and Funding