English Literature and History BA (Hons)

Focusing on North and South America, this module examines the interaction between humans and the environment throughout history. We will discuss the ways in which various peoples experienced their environment: how they attempted to change it, how they were limited by it, and how they thought about nature. In doing so, we will consider historical change at several levels:

1. Material and ecological: the physical changes that humans in the American have wrought over the past 10,000 years.

2. Social and political: the connection between peoples’ use of the environment and the way in which American societies developed.

3. Intellectual and ideological: how individuals and societies have understood nature at various points throughout history and how this understanding has shaped their actions.

You will find out about the relationship between humans and nature in the period before European expansion in the Americas and, following on from this, you will consider the ecological impact of European colonialism. The module content covers human activities such as farming and mining, but also the impact of floods, hurricanes and climate change. You will consider the spread of cities, the role of their hinterlands and the creation of national parks. In the final sections of the module, you will examine the manifold impacts of consumer culture (including waste and pollution) as well as the rise of environmentalist movements that were critical of humans’ ecological footprint.

From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel (1816) to Alan Ball’s True Blood (2008-), this module invites you to explore the dark, shadowy world of the Gothic in relation to a diverse range of literary texts and modern media. Combining the study of familiar canonical fictions with new and challenging material, we will train our focus on the enigmatic figure of the vampire, examining its various transitions and developments through the lens of critical and cultural theory.

Through an analysis of the Gothic, the module aims to develop your critical thinking, as well as your existing knowledge of literature, film, and television dating from 1816 to the present day. In doing so, it will encourage you to reflect on and interrogate the complex ways in which Gothic texts engage with, and intervene in, broader cultural debates about gender and sexuality.

This module will enhance your awareness and appreciation of one of the most controversial and stimulating authors of the early modern period (and beyond!), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Marlowe wrote plays and poems that expose our darkest hearts, showing characters lusting for power, and each other. Building on your brief contact with Marlowe at Level 5, this module will offer a chronological survey of his short but staggering career, situating each of his works in relation to the tumultuous contexts of their production and reception, including later appropriations. This will involve looking at Marlowe in relation to discussions of early modern politics, religious conflict, sexuality, urbanisation, imperialism, science and magic, ethnicity, geography, and historiography. The module therefore offers a unique opportunity to see how one writer’s remarkable career developed.

This module will introduce you to a range of texts which have been created out of, or about, the experience of African peoples in the diaspora from the seventeenth century to the present. It will encourage you to relate your understanding of the texts to the cultural and historical background from which they developed. Following on from level four core modules this module will develop your understanding of the concept of the ‘Atlantic World’ and theories of local, national and global cultures as well as theories of race and postcolonial theory. You will be encouraged to recognise the activity of the slave trade as the beginning point of the Atlantic World as an imagined space that challenges national and chronological boundaries and speaks of the powerful and enduring legacies of slavery.

This module will enhance your understanding of postwar American literary culture in its broader social, political, and
economic contexts. Mid-century America was a time of profound contradictions: while US citizens lived under the shadow the bomb, many experienced unprecedented economic prosperity and access to new material comforts. We will explore how national paranoia
about the spread of communism and the nuclear arms race sat alongside – and fed into – the postwar image of the American ‘good life’, an image of suburban conformity underpinned by the growth of advertising and consumer culture. We will consider how postwar fiction and poetry challenges this demand for conformity in both content and form: through its complex representations of the American cold war experience and its innovative narrative and poetic strategies. The texts on this module offer insights into postwar attitudes towards a diverse range of topics, including national and international politics, work, leisure, and domesticity, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity.

From Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and its popular television adaptation (2017) to Yorgos Lanthimos’ film The Lobster (2015), this module invites you to explore a wide and diverse range of novels, short stories and other media in order to promote and analyse the study of contemporary theoretical debates on gender, love, the body and sexuality.

Through the theoretical lens of feminism, psychoanalysis, queer theory and postmodernism, the module aims to develop your critical thinking and your existing knowledge of literature, film and television, from 1985 to the present day. It will encourage you to explore the complex issues raised by diverse critical theory and close analysis of a range of late twentieth and twenty-first century literature, film and television adaptation. By doing so, you will reflect on the ways that twenty-first literature and other media engages with, interrogates and often offers alternative narratives on present debates about gender, love, the body and sexuality.

The Regency (1810-1820) is condensed and complex period of contrasts; whilst precipitating significant and lasting changes in literature, art, theatre, fashion, and architecture, it was also a period that was beset by war, ruthless suppression of popular protest, sexual scandal, and the Regent himself was an object of contempt and ridicule. However, the Regency has come to be represented in popular culture as the lost and last age of romance and elegance, partly the result of enhanced connections being made between Austen and the heritage industries in modern adaptations. This module examines representations of the Regency in literature and film, beginning with the works of Jane Austen, all of which were published during this period.

We will begin with an introduction to the social, cultural and political issues of the period, and we will consider Austen as a writer of the Regency. We will move on to consider the significance of twentieth-century adaptations, imitations and appropriations of Austen and representations of the Regency in the works of historical novelists such as Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland, and more contemporary works such as Shannon Hale’s ‘Austenland’. We will also consider the proliferation of Austen and the Regency-based texts in the American market in relation to thinking about both as a form of heritage tourism and escapism. Overall, we will be exploring the impact of Austen upon popular culture, how popular culture fosters a reconsideration of Austen and how we engage with both in relation how we envision our cultural past.

The eighteenth-century was a profoundly innovative moment in terms of the invention and development of the novel and the rapid expansion of the early book trade. But so often we read eighteenth-century fiction in modern, digitally-produced editions. How were eighteenth-century books first made? How are they made today? On this module, you will study individual literary texts alongside printing practices which have shaped and continue to contribute to the book trade. By studying literature through practical demonstrations and history of book production, you will build on previous knowledge gained in second and third year core modules in understanding how the book trade of today builds on the print cultures of the past. You will learn how to interpret as well as how to present and edit eighteenth-century literature, through being introduced to bibliographical and digital research methods. This module will enhance your knowledge and appreciation of eighteenth-century literature and build on your awareness of the print cultural contexts of book production in this period, including form, format, typography and editorial apparatus.

This module explores the writings of the first professional woman writer in England, Aphra Behn (d. 1689). Biographically, Behn remains something of an enigma. We know little about her personal life, and some of our earliest records of her relate to her work as a Continental spy for Charles II. Yet Behn is one of the most important writers of the late seventeenth century. She contributed to many genres of literature (poetry, drama, translation and prose), she was the second most prolific dramatist of her age, and she authored the first English novel. Behn was a transformative and innovative author, deeply engaged with questions of gender and self-aware, in her writings, of her status as a female author in a male profession.
On this module we will read a selection of Behn’s writings, exploring their relationship to her contemporary writers, Behn’s historical moment and the broader development of literature. We will also explore the complex reception history of Behn’s work, thinking about why she disappeared from the literary canon within decades of her death, only to be rediscovered by feminist and postcolonial scholars from the 1970s and 80s. In studying Behn’s changing status as a literary author, and by reading her work, students will learn about a key moment (the 1670s-80s) in the development of the literary marketplace, whilst developing an appreciation of the ways in which gender concerns have affected access to Behn’s literature, as well as shaped (and, at times, limited) our understanding of its wider importance.
Today, Behn is much-studied and there are numerous scholarly editions of her writings. Yet there is still much we have yet to properly understand about her writings, and Behn studies are as vibrant and diverse as ever. Recent years have seen a renewed energy in Behn scholarship that seeks to understand her writings beyond their significance to gender studies, with scholars showing how Behn’s writings engage with the burning issues of the day: marital law; monarchy; philosophy; politics; science; sexuality; slavery.

You will study a selection of texts, written from the eighteenth century to the present day, that engage with the natural environment in various ways. These include natural histories and popular science, pastoral and environmental poems, environmental protest literature, apocalyptic novels, and the ‘new nature writing’. You will learn how literary writers describe the world around them and how they use the natural world to articulate their own personal needs, feelings, and desires. You will study texts that draw attention both to natural beauty and to environmental catastrophe. You will learn how writers as diverse as Gilbert White, William Wordsworth, Charles Darwin, Rachel Carson, and Robert Macfarlane have changed the ways in which readers engage with the world around them. As part of your studies, you will learn to produce your own literary engagement with the natural world in a ‘creative field journal’, inspired by the writings of Charles Darwin, Robert Macfarlane, Amy Liptrott, and others. By the end of the module, you will have gained a sophisticated understanding not only of the ways that writers can change the world, but also how they can save it.

The eighteenth century is often considered the ‘age of politeness’, a new enlightened age of material wealth, refinement, global trade and luxury, urban order and civility, and polished manners. However, the major changes that brought such refinement and wealth to British society also brought with them disruption, poverty, violence, and crime and a period of adjustment to modern commercial realities and pressures. This module will introduce students to eighteenth-century Britain’s underbelly of crime, through the lives of criminals who, reviled and celebrated in news, popular culture, and literature, were always the focus of public fasincation.

On this module, we will use a variety of media, including criminal biographies, novels, plays, poems, newspaper reports, pamphlets, legal records, art and visual culture, and film/TV adaptations, in order to explore the social, political, and cultural meanings encoded in the lives of criminals in eighteenth-century Britain and the countries to which its global trade reached. We will consider the ways in which criminal figures were represented and continue to be represented today, as well as the implications of these representations in terms of ideas about crime, social class, gender, regional and national identity, race, and culture.

In this module you will learn how different scholars have conceptualised and written about women, crime and subversion from 1400 to 1800. You will assess and analyse why and how tensions in the early modern period meant that authorities across Europe directed their attention upon women in specific ways. The influence of the Protestant reformation is examined in terms of its impact upon female behaviour. Female criminality and subversive behaviour will be examined through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, including feminist and gender theories. Key concepts at the fore of this module include witchcraft, petty treason, infanticide, female piracy, prostitution, adultery and fornication, lesbianism, the crime of cross-dressing, and women’s strategies in European court systems. You will move beyond areas classified as criminal to behaviour considered as subversive and deviant, such as domestic disorder. You will utilize a wide range of primary sources including court records, the Old Bailey legal records, assize court records and female testimonies from across Europe which will equip you to think critically about academic literature, primary sources and historical interpretation.

The dissertation gives you the opportunity to work on a sustained piece of research of your own (guided) choice and to present that research in an organised and coherent form in a major piece of writing. The module will teach you how to function as an independent researcher, learner and writer. The dissertation represents the culmination of your studies as a Joint Honours student. You will apply the skills developed in your earlier studies to a discrete body of primary sources, working upon a clearly defined topic. In designing and implementing your research project, you will draw on insights and approaches from both of the disciplines that from part of your degree. The dissertation will develop your research skills and allow you to work independently, drawing on the advice and guidance of a designated supervisor.

You will learn about the origins, evolution and dynamics of one of Europe’s most recent – and deadly – intra-state conflicts. The ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, 1968-98, was marked by their persistence and seeming intractability. With the paramilitary ceasefires in the 1990s, a new era opened; but difficulties remain in moving from a mere absence of violence to a genuine peace. You will examine the dynamics of violence and its impact on the politics and culture of Northern Ireland over a fifty year period, and the significant challenges posed to peace since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

In this module you will learn about the ‘Urban Renaissance’ in Britain during the long eighteenth century, the period 1660-1830, focusing on Edinburgh, York and London, as well as several smaller urban centres. You will learn why urban populations expanded in this period, and you will be invited to consider the social, economic, cultural, environmental and intellectual consequences of urbanisation. You will learn about how and why town planning, sanitation and urban governance changed in this period, as many cities underwent dramatic physical improvements and alterations to their infrastructure, layout and environment. You will learn how all of these changes reshaped urban inhabitants’ daily lives, their social interactions, the gendering of urban life, and their sensory experiences (i.e. taste, smell, touch and sound as well as sight). You will be invited to consider key changes over time, such as the rise of the middle class, the treatment of social ‘problems’ such as crime and poverty, changes to the meaning and experience of neighbourliness, and improvements to water supply, waste disposal and street cleaning. The module will place a strong emphasis on the environmental governance of the townscape, exploring the complex negotiations between the top-down methods used by urban councils (bylaws, street inspections and court fines) and the bottom-up self-governance of neighbours (such as petitions). Using an environmental history approach, the module will explore in depth how townspeople interacted with the bio-physical flows of water, blood, manure, urine, livestock, beer, foodstuffs and each other.

In this final year module you will gain familiarity with the ideas of the ostracised, the disenfranchised, the heterodox, the rebels, the heretics, and, in general, those women and men who, often defiantly, thought outside the boxes of dogma, doctrine, and the socially, politically, and morally acceptable within the strictures of a very specific context: the Inquisition-dominated early decades of a global empire led by Catholic Spain.

In this course you will be able to explore the relevance of marginality, innovation, and challenging established ideas in the constant flux of changing tensions that determine the evolution of human civilisations. With a focus on the spiritually and socially scandalous, you will learn how groundbreaking and “dangerous” ideals and behaviours contributed to reshaping the canon of values that constitute and consolidate Western Civilisations during the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. This will be illustrated by Spain’s example of coexistence, conflict and intersection between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as by its attempt to build a coherent new Christian Empire made of diverse peoples.

With the invaluable help of fascinating resources such as translated archives of the Spanish Inquisition, treatises, chronicles, diaries, sermons, admonitions and “forbidden” books, you will be able to explore how women and men of very diverse backgrounds conspired against the official. They often sacrificed their own life in the process of proposing alternative ways of thinking and being in an unforgiving context of rampant orthodoxy and brutal repression and punishment of those who strived to be different.

This module will explore the history of ‘law and order’ politics (broadly defined) in the United States since 1900. You will learn about the creation of the law enforcement and judicial state at the federal, state, and local level (including, for instance, the establishment of the FBI and the rise of the carceral state), and the social movements that resisted and challenged that state. The module will cover such diverse topics as Prohibition, the Stonewall riot and the early LGBTQ movement, the prison reform and prisoners’ rights movements, the War on Drugs, anti-death penalty activism, and Black Lives Matter. This module will deal with fundamental questions of order and justice, how they have been contested in American society, and how they have intersected with issues of race, class, and gender.

In this module you will take an interdisciplinary approach to Tudor history, investigating how and why courtly arts were important to the construction and projection of political power in Tudor England.

You will learn about the distinctive political and religious context of each monarch’s reign from Henry VII to Elizabeth I and explore a range of courtly arts such as portraiture, drama and spectacle, poetry and literary, and music and dance. You will analyse the influence of arts and entertainments that were grand and public, and also those that were private and intimate. You will consider questions such as: why was artistic patronage important for the Tudor monarchy? What influence did age and gender have on royal image-making? How could the arts become tools of governance or play a role in diplomatic manoeuvres? To what extent were monarchs in control of their royal image? How could courtiers and noblemen manipulate courtly arts for their own ends?

Throughout the module you will engage with current research in a range of disciplines including political history, Reformation history, art history, English literature, gender studies and music. Moreover you will develop skills in interpreting and evaluating visual, textual and musical sources in light of their historical context. (No musical literacy is required).

Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman have claimed that the twentieth century was an ‘era of testimony’. This module addresses the ways survivors have attempted to bear witness to the Holocaust, the catastrophe at that century’s centre, and the cultural responses to that witness. We will consider how the tools and concepts of cultural analysis both speak to and are challenged by testimony, and how culture continues to work on the problem of representing the Holocaust. The course aims to enable students to consider the continuing impact of the Holocaust on the lives of its surviving witnesses and their children and how literature and films bear witness to it. To this end, the module draws on a variety of sources: video testimony, courtroom testimony, memoirs, diaries, different literary genres (novels, short stories, poems and graphic novels) and films.

Sometimes it can seem that concern about climate change and the broader environmental crisis is a recent phenomenon whose effects are largely felt in other parts of the world. This module challenges these assumptions. You will learn about the origins of these concerns in their British context through five environmental disasters that shaped Britain after the Second World War. They are the devastating east coast floods of 1953, the collapse of the spoil heap onto a school at Aberfan in Wales in 1966, the wrecking of the Torrey Canyon, an oil tanker, off the Cornish coast in 1967, the near-extinction of birds of prey as a consequence chemical pesticides in the 1950s and 60s, and the hurricane that caused widespread destruction to woods and forests in 1987. You will spend two weeks on each of these case studies. The first week will focus on the event itself and its human and non-human causes and costs. The second week will focus on the event’s long-term political, social, and cultural consequences. Among the questions you’ll consider are: How did public opinion and the media respond to these disasters? What short and long-term effects did they have on government policy? In what ways did these disasters catalyse the development of the modern environmental movement? How has our understanding of what constitutes a natural disaster changed over time? You will learn about the historical development of theories of climate change and you will be able to contextualise historically the environmental crisis that is shaping political culture today and develop a greater understanding of why it is so difficult to agree on possible solutions.

This course will examine the history of antisemitism, prejudice against Jews. This particular form of bigotry has a long and complex history and unfortunately is still alive and well in nations around the world to including the UK and the US. Hatred of Jews originates from a diverse combination of ideologies, historical moments and, likewise, takes a variety of forms in different times and places. This course will introduce the concept from its earliest times and follow both the theoretical/philosophical thought and the very real displays and repercussions of antisemitism through history with a focus on Europe. We will also closely examine the phenomenon of Holocaust Denial and the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe. The driving objective behind each lesson will be to relate the history of antisemitism to its modern repercussions and continuing impacts.

Amongst other things, the Representation of the People Act of 1918 gave women over the age 30, who lived in houses or on land with a rateable value of £5 or more, the vote. This was the culmination of decades of activism and campaigning by different individuals, groups, and organisations and 2018 saw a wide range of events commemorating the centenary of the Bill’s passing. Yet the Representation of the People Act did not give women the vote on an equal basis to men, and it only enfranchised approximately 2/3rd of adult women. Over the course of the module you will identify the key actors of the suffrage movement and analyse the sometimes radically different motivations and methods they employed in securing partial female enfranchisement. You will also consider how these actors and their campaigns have been remembered and memorialised – or indeed, how they have been forgotten. This module draws on a wide variety of sources including film, photographs, newspapers, documentaries, memoirs, poetry, plays, exhibition guides, novels, biographies and posters, to understand whose story has been remember, whose has been forgotten and how the narrative of female enfranchisement has been shaped.

In July 1979 a broad-based opposition movement led by a small group of young guerrillas - the ‘Sandinistas’ - overthrew the Somoza dictatorship which had ruled Nicaragua for 43 years. The euphoria of triumph quickly soured, as the new Sandinista government faced division at home and aggression from overseas, in the form of a US-funded proxy conflict, known as the ‘Contra War’. In this module, you will learn how ordinary Nicaraguans experienced the revolutionary decade by working with a wide range of sources, including memoirs, poetry, and murals. You will draw on testimonios and oral histories to critically evaluate the impact of the revolution’s programmes in education, agrarian reform, and women’s rights; and you will explore the Contra War in the context of the wider Cold War struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. Finally, you will use your detailed knowledge of the period to assess the relative importance of a number of factors, including US aggression and Sandinista failings, which together caused the eventual defeat of the revolution.

This module explores a tumultuous period in Russian history when the pendulum swung from dictatorship towards increasing democracy and back again. Relatively freer politics and loosening of controls over the media were accompanied by economic dislocation and social instability under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, while conversely, the Putin era saw improved economic performance, stability and some restoration of order alongside the return of a creeping authoritarianism in politics and tighter censorship. Students will investigate why the Soviet regime, which ten years previously had seemed destined to last indefinitely, was so rapidly undermined. We will examine the political struggle that accompanied perestroika, as well as how official Soviet ideology unravelled under the impact of glasnost’ and the opening of public debate. The module considers Gorbachev’s government’s attempt to find economic solutions to stagnation and the disastrous effects of the collapse of faith in the command economy. Also, particular attention is paid to the role that nationalist movements in the Baltic, Ukraine, Transcaucasia and Central Asia played in tearing the Soviet system apart. The module then turns to Russia’s turbulent post-Soviet transition, the ‘Wild Years’, a dangerous and exciting period where, after the USSR legally ceased to exist on 31 December 1991, the new state, the Russian Federation, set off on the road to democracy and a market economy without any clear conception of how to complete such a transformation in the world’s largest country. As well as looking at Russia’s new political system, we will examine the economic reforms introduced as the country underwent ‘shock therapy’ to create a market economy, involving mass privatization, financial crisis, the rise of oligarchs. We will consider the devastating social impact of these policies, as life expectancy plummeted, birth rates collapsed and crime exploded. Students will assess how in these conditions Vladimir Putin, assumed power and explore how his presidency saw economic upswing and improvement in living standards but also a creeping authoritarianism in politics and media controls. Finally, we will investigate Putin’s cultivation of an aggressive, socially conservative Russian nationalism which grew from the shame and international humiliation derived from the catastrophic transition of the former superpower.

Being an early modern king could be dangerous. Over the course of the period, monarchs were executed, assassinated, and deposed. While Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I lost their heads, boy-king Louis XIV pretended to be asleep as the angry Parisian mob entered his bedroom during the Fronde and James I narrowly escaped being blown up by the Gunpowder Plot. Even if not resolved in loss of life or deposition, monarchical crises that gripped early modern Europe posed a significant challenge to royal authority and legitimacy. These moments of crisis were connected to the changing nature of royal power, redefined in clashes between monarchs and their subjects exacerbated by the Reformation, dynastic politics, the changing relationship between monarchs and nobles, the emerging concept of the state and new ideas about how it should be governed. Over the course of this module you will examine monarchical crises through case studies including the executions of Jane Grey and Mary Stuart, assassinations of Henri III and Henri IV, the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, the Fronde, and the Defenestration of Prague and deposition of the Winter King, Frederick V. We will consider the causes, outcomes, and representations of these crises through a variety of sources, including pamphlets, chronicles, letters, and images. We will also consider the representation of these events in the modern media such as film, television, and fiction writing.

In every empire, including the British case, non-human animals have been a crucial presence. Domesticated creatures, such as cows, pigs and sheep, accompanied European colonisers and assisted in the – often violent – processes that led to land clearances, changed environments, indigenous dispossession, and the spread of European settlement. This module seeks to give you a sense of the complicated and contested place of animals in empire. For some human colonisers, the hunting, killing, stuffing and exhibition of wild animals symbolised the European’s command of nature, and helped justify the whole imperial endeavour. But animals could also make trouble for empires: efforts to reproduce prized species and breeds did not always work; many animals spread disease; the growth of pest populations was a constant source of anxiety; and imported species could bring environmental changes that endangered both indigenous and European settlement.

This module considers this complicated interweaving of human and non-human histories in the British empire story, from the early modern settlements of seventeenth-century New England to the colonies of indirect rule in twentieth-century Africa. The first week will introduce you to the methodologies of animal history, and what an animal history of empire requires and might reveal. Thereafter, each week considers a species and a regional case study (e.g., rabbits/Australia; cows/southern Africa; tigers/British India). This simple structure introduces learners to themes as various as imperial masculinity and violence (hunting), ecological and social crises (epizootics), colonial community and family life (pet ownership), colonial urban history (pest control), imperial cultures in the metropole (taxidermy) and colonial national identity (animals as symbols). Importantly, the module is not exclusively structured around British and European viewpoints and actions: episodes such as the Xhosa cattle killing in 1850s southern Africa, to take one example, allows for a consideration of the differences and similarities in European and indigenous human-animal relationships.

You will learn about the relationship between empire, ecological degradation, and conservation through key themes such as ‘ecological imperialism’, ‘green imperialism’ and ‘animal agency’. Finally, this module will help you to historically contextualise current debates about human-animal relationships and the imperial roots of our ecological crisis; you may also recognise that the British empire experience provides examples and lessons that might help us rethink contemporary anthropocentric attitudes, and to develop healthier alternatives.

The British Army’s long running military operation in Northern Ireland during the Troubles is well known. But the army’s influence on Ireland and vice versa is part of a much older and fascinating story. While the army was regarded by many Irish nationalists before 1922 as part of the state apparatus that held Ireland in subjection, at its highpoint in the 1840s, 50 per cent of the British Army was Irish born. As well as considering their participation in global and imperial conflicts from the Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars through to World War Two, you will explore in this module how the presence of army veterans in Ireland had a significant impact on the island at key moments during the turbulent history of the Anglo-Irish union. That even when independent Ireland remained neutral during the Second World War, more than 50,000 men and women from southern Ireland volunteered for the British Army demonstrates the institution’s on-going importance. In this module you will learn about the personal, economic, and political motivations of Irish soldiers, as well the experiences of Irish people who served in the army and how their service shaped their family’s lives. You will also gain an understanding of the different ways that Irish soldiers were viewed as ‘good’ and ‘brave’ soldiers from perspectives shaped by contemporary thinking about race, identity, and nationalism. This module is organised in a chronological way, but you will also explore themes that span decades, such as martial race discourses, the ‘Stage Irishman’, and the British monarchy.

Capitalism is one of the most controversial subjects discussed by historians – or by anyone else. Some see the rise of a worldwide capitalist economy as, for better or worse, the central, unavoidable narrative of modern history. Yet capitalism has always coexisted with radically different ways of organising human and non-human life. This module will address the question of capitalism’s role in world history by looking at how capitalism has confronted these other modes of existence, from around 1500 to the present.

The module falls into two parts. In the first, you will first be introduced to different theoretical approaches to capitalism and its ‘others’, and to overarching stories about how capitalism has shaped the world. Should we see capitalism as only an economic system, or a wider way of life? How has it been contrasted with alternative systems, such as feudalism or gift exchange – and how have these contrasts shaped the opposing views of thinkers like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or Karl Polanyi? We will then tackle historians’ differing accounts of capitalism’s ‘rise’ and expansion – from notions of industrial or financial revolution to the use of fossil fuels and the ‘great divergence’ between Europe and East Asia.

In the second part of the module, you will study in more detail how capitalism displaced, clashed with, or coopted its ‘others’, as a capitalist-dominated world was forged and revolutionised. Our case-studies will be grouped around a number of themes including commodities, the household, empire, ecology, and labour.

This module considers the sources and approaches that historians have used to study Africa. It explores the relationships between the kinds of people who have studied Africa’s past, the political contexts in which they worked, the historical sources they used, and the knowledge about Africa they produced.

The module considers these issues by focusing on five key moments in the history of African history. You will consider, first, precolonial and indigenous knowledge about Africa’s past; second, Western histories of Africa during the age of imperialism; third, nationalist and radical approaches to African history during the decolonisation decades from the 1950s to the 1970s; fourth, the rise of the United States as a centre of African studies from the 1950s to the 1990s, including innovative work on gender and labour history; and fifth, recent approaches to African history emphasising the search for Africans’ voices in sources such as newspapers and ‘secret’ colonial archives.

You will explore these key moments in African historiography by studying important works of history and historical sources from both West Africa (including Nigeria and Senegal) and East Africa (including Kenya and Tanzania).

By the end of the module you will be able to analyse in detail how and why the sources and approaches for African history have changed over time. The module will offer you an overview of the history of African history, from before the time it was studied at universities, to contemporary debates about decolonisation.

Academic skills when studying away from your home country can differ due to cultural and language differences in teaching and assessment practices. This module is designed to support your transition in the use and practice of technical language and subject specific skills around assessments and teaching provision in your chosen subject. The overall aim of this module is to develop your abilities to read and study effectively for academic purposes; to develop your skills in analysing and using source material in seminars and academic writing and to develop your use and application of language and communications skills to a higher level.

The topics you will cover on the module include:

• Understanding assignment briefs and exam questions.
• Developing academic writing skills, including citation, paraphrasing, and summarising.
• Practising ‘critical reading’ and ‘critical writing’
• Planning and structuring academic assignments (e.g. essays, reports and presentations).
• Avoiding academic misconduct and gaining credit by using academic sources and referencing effectively.
• Listening skills for lectures.
• Speaking in seminar presentations.
• Presenting your ideas
• Giving discipline-related academic presentations, experiencing peer observation, and receiving formative feedback.
• Speed reading techniques.
• Developing self-reflection skills.