BA (Hons)
English and History BA (Hons)
English and History

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to the different approaches to the study of history which have developed, with a particular focus on twentieth-century ideas and innovations, such as ‘history from below’, women’s and gender history, history of sexuality, cultural history, post-colonial approaches, and recent developments in the field. Students will be encouraged to think critically and creatively about how history has developed within the academy, as a particular branch of knowledge and as a discipline with its own rules and procedures.

Module Overview

This module considers the range of theories that we can use when we read and think about literature. Students will have the opportunity to study psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism and postmodernism, among others, to think about why and how we structure meaning and interpretation in certain ways. We consider questions such as ‘what is an author?’, ‘what is gender?’ and ‘why do certain things frighten us?’ through theorists such as Roland Barthes, Judith Butler and Sigmund Freud.

Module Overview

This module will explore the development and cultural impact of the first 100 years of photography. Initially driven by the commercial viability of portraiture, photography soon inspired a range of professional, artistic and amateur practitioners in the nineteenth century. Photographic innovation in the early twentieth century exerted a significant influence on the way that modernists sought to represent the world. Street photography emerged as a new insistent type of realism and represented urban experience in new ways. The social power of photography was spread through increasingly affordable cameras and propagated through print media.

Students will learn to analyse images and explore how photographs functioned to produce and exert power.

Module Overview

This module provides students with the opportunity to resurrect and understand the ordinary lives of people like themselves and their forebears from the sources available to us. The course picks up on both well-established and recent trends in historical research that have sought to give voice to ordinary people and promote from the historical records the lives of marginalised people such as homosexuals, women, children, the working classes, ethnic minorities alongside more familiar narratives of the great and the good.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to philosophical questions about the nature of art and beauty. For example: What is art? Can anything be a work of art? Can a pile of elephant dung be art? Is beauty objectively real or only ‘in the eye of the beholder’? Can aesthetic judgements be right or wrong? Is Beethoven better than Beyoncé? Is Shakespeare better than Eastenders? Or are aesthetic disputes like deciding between the merits of different flavours of ice cream?

Students can also consider questions that arise in relation to specific artforms: How is it possible to respond emotionally towards the plight of fictional characters that are known not to exist? Do rock/pop music and classical music require different aesthetic criteria for their appreciation and evaluation? Why do we take pleasure in the aesthetic representation of tragic events? Students will be guided through their reading of various classical and contemporary works on such issues, and encouraged to think for themselves about the problems addressed.

Module Overview

This module explores apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic texts using a range of novels, short stories, poems and films. Lectures will establish cultural and historical contexts and address issues such as form and genre. The module will explore a range of significant periods from early Judeo-Christian fears regarding the purging moral apocalypse, through Romantic preoccupations with nature and industrialisation, postmodernism and more contemporary concerns about viral or cybernetic apocalypse. We will draw from a range of disciplines including literary theory, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, philosophy and trauma theory.

Module Overview

This module provides a survey of the history and archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East between the reign of Alexander the Great and the death of Cleopatra VII after the Roman victory at the Battle of Actium in 30 BC. Students will have the opportunity to explore the political histories, power structures, cultural developments, economic processes and shifting ideologies associated with the major Hellenistic kingdoms and ending with the Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean region. Teaching also considers how the Hellenistic period was a time of innovation, cultural connectivity, even globalisation, laying the foundations of a Hellenized world of city-states which endured into and defined the Roman construction of a world empire in its aftermath.

Module Overview

This module explores the nineteenth-century literature of the USA, chiefly focusing on fiction and poetry. Authors covered include Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Walt Whitman and Willa Cather, among others.

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This module covers a broad range of twentieth-century American fiction and poetry. Beginning with Fitzgerald, other authors studied include Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

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Renaissance monarchs often employed artistic display to project royal authority. Ruling elites commissioned pieces of art not only for the embellishment of their residences, but also as a suitable vehicle to display authority. Kings and Queens commissioned tapestries, sculptures, royal palaces, or lavishly decorated printed books that narrated their achievements and omitted their failures. This module examines the diverse ways rulers and their entourage imagined and created an image of kingship through the visual arts.

Module Overview

This module examines key British medieval texts, primarily in Middle English, from the High and Late Middle Ages (that is, from approximately the twelfth century to fifteenth century). It explores the breadth of literary activity in the period through a variety of genres--such as debate poetry, ethnographies, beast fables, romance, dream visions, satire, devotional and mystical writings, and mystery plays--and the evolution of a new form of English (the precursor of modern English), revealing that the medieval period is, in truth, a far cry from the misnomer by which it is often identified, the ‘dark ages’.

Module Overview

This module examines how and why the culture of Britain changed in the period of increasing contact with, and eventual incorporation into, the Roman Empire. Examining the key material, behavioural, ideological and structural changes to society in the period c. 100 BC to AD 450, it will question to what degree each aspect was a wholesale incorporation of ‘foreign’ ideas, technologies and goods, a local interpretation and adoption of these importations into an existing social system, or a local creation that was distinctly Romano-British, if often termed ‘Roman’.

Module Overview

This module examines one of the most varied literary genres extant, one that, at times, is often relegated to the margins because of its slippery nature. Students will examine early examples of fantasy and trace the genre’s development across a number of key historical epochs, from the classical and medieval periods to the twenty-first century. They will consider especially Tolkien as a pivotal force in the growth of fantasy literature and theory, as well as The Inklings, a group whose works had a profound influence on the evolution of the genre in the twentieth century. A range of subgenres of the fantastic will be explored, which may include high and low fantasy, ironic fantasy, historical fantasy, or magic realism, and, alongside primary texts, they will read selections from modern theoretical and critical texts that articulate different interpretations and approaches to the fantastic.

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Students can gain an introduction to the historical and archaeological sources, approaches and methods necessary for the study of the ancient world. Lectures provide a survey of key moments in history, 1000 BC-AD 400, structured around the research specialisms of the module teaching team.

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The cultural heritage sector increasingly offers opportunities for the application of digital technologies as communication, research and recording tools. This module enables students to become familiar with some of these advanced recording techniques for the study and recording of objects.

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This module examines how physicians, other practitioners, and the public understood the body, disease, and health in the early modern period. Although the medical system of Galen (2nd century AD) and humoral medicine guided Western medicine until the 1800s, between 1500-1700 there were major challenges to this traditional system. The work of elites such as Paracelsus and Van Helmont (chemical medicine), Vesalius (anatomy), Harvey (circulation and respiratory physiology) will be placed in a greater religious, social, and cultural context.

Module Overview

This module aims to prepare students for designing their dissertation (independent study) proposals and for applying to jobs and postgraduate programmes. Students will explore how to prepare for and ensure success in their dissertations, employment, and study/research by identifying and articulating their transferable skills, breadth of knowledge, expertise, and interests. The module will provide information on how to become aware of opportunities, to plan and prepare for the future, and to build on their undergraduate careers.

Module Overview

The module looks at a number of ways in which historians have studied the family in Britain between c.1500 and 1800. It will examine a range of historical approaches from the demographic to the more qualitative and anthropological. Close attention is paid to the problems historians of the pre-industrial family confront in their examination of the surviving primary sources.

Module Overview

The civil wars that raged across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century were among the most turbulent and exhilarating times in British history. This module explores the diverse ways in which the wars were explained, experienced and remembered by those who lived through them. Students can consider the extent to which this period, often described as one of 'revolution', left a lasting impression on British society, culture, religion and politics.

Module Overview

This module, conceptually, textually, formally, and intellectually challenging, is designed to introduce students to a range of innovative literatures, in a variety of forms, in order both to interrogate the idea of experimental writing, and its own often aggressive interrogation of the expressive potential of literature.

Module Overview

Explore a wide range of cutting-edge digital approaches to studying the past through a significant and growing area of research, the digital humanities. By studying this module, you can focus on developing the practical skills, techniques, and methodologies that can play a vital role in your future studies and career.

The module provides opportunities to enhance, analyse, and interpret humanistic endeavours through approaches such as social network analysis, digital mapping, data visualisation, and textual analysis. You can also explore the impact and potential of artificial intelligence on the study of humanities in the digital worlds.

Module Overview

The modern period has often been understood as a time when peace was considered the natural state of societies, where states and non-governmental groups have been concerned with achieving a lasting peace and avoiding repetitions of bloody conflict. Wars, however, have not become a thing of the past, and today we live in a condition of seemingly permanent war where civilians are often the primary targets. This module will look at how ideas and practices of war have altered in the last few hundred years, and how these notions have been contested and challenged. The module asks where these ideas came from, and how concepts of war and peace, and violence and non-violence have been reframed in various ways. The course is focussed on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and moves chronologically from the Napoleonic wars, to contemporary conflicts through a series of case studies that cover wars, diplomacy, the aftermath of wars, and peace movements. Each case study will draw on key themes which run throughout the module, including pacifism, militarism, imperialism, culture, race, gender and nationalism.

Module Overview

This module examines British media and society in Britain from the end of World War I, through World War II, and into the uncertain waters of the postwar period and the 21st century. A range of domestic and international factors that shaped modern Britain will be investigated throughout the module, including the interwar slump, World War II, decolonisation, increased immigration, the ‘decline’ of the welfare state, the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland, the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, and Britain’s unsteady relationship with Europe. These events not only shaped Britain itself but also occurred in dialogue with the increasingly powerful role of media in the 20th and 21st centuries. This module will bring specific attention to the ways in which the press, cinema, radio, television, music, and also the web reflected, engaged with, and sometimes shaped popular understandings of society, culture, and politics in the period. We will examine this history of media in conjunction with a history of British society in order to investigate claims by historians that a ‘democratic culture’ emerged in 20th century Britain.

Module Overview

This module will interrogate aspects of the history of gender and sexuality in Britain over a 250-year span, coinciding with the arrival of ‘modernity’. It will introduce students to debates over the relationship between gender, sexuality, and structural changes in society, economy and politics, as well as thinking about gender and sexuality as discourse and subjectivity. Further, it will introduce students to a wide range of source material for the social and cultural history of early modern and modern Britain and seek to develop their confidence in using such diverse sources skillfully.

The module takes a thematic approach, although within each theme, specific chronological examples will be examined. Thus continuity and change can be highlighted, and it is intended to resist a narrative of progress towards ‘modern’ liberal views of gender and sexuality. However, a clear chronological framework will also be developed through examples which will help students gain a clear understanding of context.

Module Overview

The United States emerged from the Second World War a superpower, with, to an extent, a belief that it could remake the world. The challenges of the Cold War years were to demonstrate how limited was that power. This module explores the key social, political, economic and cultural developments in the United States between 1945 and 1990.

Module Overview

Works of fiction are not just a source of entertainment. They are a crucial and exciting route into understanding the past. Novels, short stories and poems allow us to understand how debates and ideas about society and identity circulated and how writers attempted to reinforce or change the way that readers looked at the world. This module will examine how a wide range of fiction produced in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addressed the key themes of class, politics and gender. Students will have the opportunity to examine the treatment of these concepts in genres as varied as crime fiction, popular romance, children’s literature, science fiction, war writing and feminist fiction.

Module Overview

This module analyses how physicians, other practitioners, and the public understood the body, disease, and health from antiquity to the modern era. The first part of the module will delineate how the medical system of Galen (2nd century AD) and humoral medicine guided Western medicine from antiquity until the 1800s. Students will then analyse the major challenges to this system from physicians such as Paracelsus, Vesalius, and William Harvey, as well as with the discovery of the germ theory of disease. Students will also explore the evolving role of states and local governments for public health, the development of the medical marketplace, changing understandings of the body, disease, and mental illness, and gender and medicine. The history of medicine will thus be placed in a greater religious, social, and cultural context, with a consideration of the role of medicine in popular culture. The module will therefore “embody” a cultural and intellectual approach to history and introduce students to the major historiographic debates in the history of medicine. Seminars will be primarily devoted to student-led case studies on specific themes, such as: Galenic case studies; Vesalius and anatomy, quackery in England; childbirth and midwifery; the rise of the medical profession; anatomy and the Anatomy Act; disease control and public health; madness and society; sexual health and the patient narrative.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to the understanding of exhibitions and curatorial practices. Following an introduction on the history of collections and museums, the course will explore the many issues related to the display of art and objects. It combines the study of theoretical approaches and the analysis of relevant case studies, and considers topics related to audiences for museums and exhibitions, the presentation and explanation of artefacts and artworks, and the new opportunities offered by digital technologies.

Module Overview

Italy is a highly-politicised and ideologically-divided country. Divisions and internal conflicts, which have reached dramatic peaks, are a permanent feature in Italian history. They mirror unsolved social and political contradictions that many historians consider to be the result of the process of the Italian Risorgimento. National unification was prompted by republicans, but it was the Monarchy that achieved it.

Module Overview

This module explores a broad sampling of major genres and authors, and aims to provide a basis for further study and enjoyment of Latin literature. Focusing on writers active between 90 BC and AD 14, often referred to as the Golden Age, we shall examine how the literature of this period bears witness to contemporary social, political and cultural transformations.

All texts will be read in English translation, though opportunities to read or translate from the original Latin will be available for interested students. This module is intended as a successor to the core first-year survey of Classical Literature.

Module Overview

This module examines some of the preoccupations of the fin de siècle through a series of texts and authors who helped to shape the cultural climate of the 1880s-1900s. These decades gave rise to a pervasive feeling of vital urgency and exhilaration in Britain, as well as a conflicted sense that society was teetering on a cliff edge of irredeemable degeneration. Texts will be read alongside and in light of social and political developments, such as anxieties about Britain’s empire and position on the global stage, evolution and degeneration, sexual identity, women’s rights, the rise of occultism and spiritualism, Decadence, and radical politics. The study of fin de siècle writing will be set against the backdrop of the infamous Oscar Wilde trial, and the sensationalised Jack the Ripper murders, contemporary anxieties about criminality, the empire, and eugenics.

Module Overview

How did people live and die in the middle ages? Drawing on the research expertise of the medievalists in the School, the module seeks to answer this question by addressing key themes relating to the life cycles of medieval people, from their childhood and education, via the roles that they took on in life (within families and in public; peaceful and violent), to their deaths. We will address primary sources that provide intimate insights into the everyday lives of medieval people: letters and autobiographies. Such sources will be contrasted with those that offer a more 'top-down' vision of how medieval society should function, such as rulebooks and conduct manuals. Finally, we will explore how people in the medieval period managed their material and spiritual interests through transactions recorded in documents such as charters and wills. A key aim of the module is to develop your research and writing skills by providing you with an opportunity to produce an extended piece of research. This, coupled with the intensive work with primary sources, will equip you to tackle a final year independent study in a wide range of medieval topics.

Module Overview

This module explores the relationship between madness and British society from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Students can examine how institutional approaches to the treatment of insanity have changed, from the eighteenth-century madhouse, to the Victorian asylum, to care in the community in the twentieth century. They will assess changing medical, legal and lay responses to insanity, including the role that class, gender, family and community played in defining insanity and its treatment.

Module Overview

In this module students will have the opportunity to explore the early twentieth century, one of the most creative periods in English literature, when writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence were challenging conventional ways of writing and reading, and rewriting how we experience and understand the world and ourselves. Required reading will include some of the most powerful works from the modern movement between 1910 and 1940 including James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Module Overview

This module will give students a unique opportunity to develop their practical skills for studying objects while developing their understanding of the relationship between history and material culture. Students can explore how object-based study can enhance their practice as conservators and historians and how material culture studies can lead to insights that cannot be reached through other approaches.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of media controversy and ‘moral panic’ during the twentieth century. It is designed to introduce students to media texts (especially films and television programmes) that have sparked debate and extreme differences of opinion among audiences in Britain and America. Students will be expected to engage with a range of films, television programmes and primary source material.

Module Overview

This is a general introductory module on the history of medicine and sexuality from 1850 to 2000. It aims to give an overview of some of the major themes within the modern history of medicine and sexuality. It focuses on how our understanding of the human body, reproduction and sexuality in a socio-cultural and political context evolved from the advent of evolutionary thought to present day debates about enhancement and reproductive medicine. Sexual behaviour and reproduction became major concerns in medicine and politics in the modern period. Sexuality became an object of scientific enquiry and governments developed new policies to regulate sexual behaviour. This module will give students an excellent grounding in modern and contemporary history that will complement further modules at level 2 and 3 that deal with sexuality, gender, race, science and medicine.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to some of the central concepts, issues, theories, and debates in an area of moral philosophy called "normative ethics", thereby providing them with a framework for thinking seriously about moral matters, and to assist them in developing their philosophical and analytical skills. We will distinguish and evaluate the leading positions on these issues through a range of more specific topics in normative ethics.

Module Overview

This module will concentrate on fine art (painting and sculpture) within Western Europe c.1750- c.1914. The module will explore the hegemony of Neoclassicism in the second half of the long eighteenth century through the seminal transformations of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Cubism in the nineteenth century.

Module Overview

People have migrated as long as the human race has existed and this module places this fundamental aspect of human experience at its heart. Issues surrounding migration and the movement of peoples are central to contemporary politics and society, as the management of people seeking refuge and better prospects preoccupies governments around the world. This situation makes ever more urgent our need to understand the history of migration and how it has shaped cultures across time and space. People on the move focuses upon the movement of people at particular points in modern history, considering the forces that propel people to risk their own lives and possibly those of their families, uproot from home and enter the potentially perilous and peripatetic life of a migrant. We will discuss the prospects and challenges of migration, and subsequently how diasporic cultures develop and the benefits and tensions surrounding integration. We will consider what happens when communities come into contact due to migration and the subsequent influences upon culture, religion, politics and identity. Through a series of in-depth case studies from the modern period, from the forced movement of the colonial era to twentieth century migration across the Atlantic, we will encounter a variety of geographical regions and processes of migration. A variety of historical sources will be interrogated to access the stories of migrants and about migrants, including texts (such legal and government documents, letters, memoirs and oral histories), images, objects and architecture. Addressing themes such as empire, economics, identity and religion in different contexts allows us to make meaningful comparisons between migrations across time and space.

Module Overview

This module examines literary representations of the world that emerge from the history of European exploration and expansion, and considers literary responses from groups that were marginalized through imperialism. Students will be encouraged to look at the treatment by white writers of issues of race and empire in the early twentieth century. They will also have the opportunity to explore ways in which postcolonial literatures develop strategies of 'writing back' to the imperial centre and re-thinking identity in terms of race, gender and nation. The final section offers a study of postcolonial Britain and some global implications of postcolonial writing.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to history of the US presidency by investigating selected past presidents from Washington to Trump. By reading and analysing the biographies of various presidents, key historical discussions as well as primary sources, including presidential addresses, campaign speeches, policy documents, and internal White House documents, and media accounts, students will be able to discuss and evaluate the major themes associated with the Office of the President.

The main question students will be asked to engage with through this course is “what makes an effective president?” In answering this question students will discuss themes ranging from the establishment of the office during the American Revolution, the ability of presidents to pass civil rights reform, the rise and fall of the imperial presidency, the decline and restoration of presidential influence, hidden illness in the oval office, the growth of partisanship, the impact of the media and presidential communication strategies, and the changing presidential electorate. By exploring these themes as well as the achievements, scandals and the legacies of various presidents, students will be able to determine how individual presidents have coped with the pressures of the office and what influence they have exerted on the office.

Module Overview

This module investigates the matter of sanctity during the middle ages, focusing in particular on two different aspects: the construction of the memory of saints, through texts, images and architecture, and the crucial role of their mortal remains. Spanning from the fourth to the fourteenth Century, this module offers not only a general approach to the phenomenon of sanctity, but also detailed analysis of different case studies, from early Christian saints and their commemoration in martyria to Romanesque shrines in France and Italy. The module then considers the phenomenon of new saints, through discussion of the celebrated site of Saint Francis’s burial, San Francesco, in Assisi. Students can explore the case of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, discussing how his memory was preserved in the text of his life and how his canonization was mirrored in the very fabric of Lincoln Cathedral.

Module Overview

This module looks to provide an introduction to the preventive conservation skills needed to set out as a practicing conservator. Students have the chance to develop an understanding of practical preventive conservation and collections management procedures, and can gain experience in environmental monitoring and surveying. Topics such as integrated pest management and emergency planning are also discussed.

Module Overview

This module enables you to explore how works examine, contest, and imagine multiple forms of living ‘otherwise’ in a globally interconnected, but unequal, world through reading a variety of 20th and 21st Century Anglophone Literature. You can engage in lively, interlinked thematic debates, that might include Indigeneity and settler colonialism; nationhood and anticolonial resistance; diaspora; globalization and neocolonialism; world literatures and the neoliberal world-system; cosmopolitanism; the trans-Indigenous; environment and climate; and speculative futures. Primary works could include African, Caribbean, Indigenous, Irish, South Asian, MENA, Pacific Rim, and diasporic literary and cinematographic texts such as film and television.

Module Overview

Students studying Renaissance Literature have the opportunity to look in detail at a range of texts from the late Elizabethan period to the mid-1630s, including work by Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson and Mary Wroth. They also have the chance to explore the historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were produced, and the effects that they had on the politics and culture of the British Isles in the period. Lectures aim to examine post-Reformation England and late humanism, patronage, gender relations, early modern literary theory, education and philosophy.

Module Overview

This module explores cultural renaissances in Europe and beyond. Students can examine the survival, imitation and revival of classical models from ancient Greece and Rome from late antiquity to the modern period. We engage with historical debates on the issue of periodisation and ask how and why cycles of decline and renewal continue to shape our understanding of the past.

Module Overview

Students taking Restoration Literature, the companion module to Renaissance Literature, can study in detail a range of texts written between the era of the English Civil War and the first decade of the eighteenth Century, including work by John Milton; Andrew Marvell; Aphra Behn; and John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester. Students have the opportunity to also study the historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were produced. Lectures aim to examine the origins and effects of the civil war, the ethics of rebellion and reform, the Restoration theatre, religious controversies, gender relations, developing philosophical thought and Restoration manners.

Module Overview

Students will study English literature of the Romantic period (1780-1830), including poetry, fiction, autobiography, and political polemic. The module will address revolutions in politics and literary form and ideas of nature, the sublime, sensibility and feeling, abolition and slavery, Enlightenment feminism, the Gothic, Orientalism, and childhood. Students will have the opportunity to study works by writers including William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Olaudah Equiano, placing them in their cultural context.

Module Overview

Concern with, and ideas about, the supernatural influenced all areas of life for medieval and early modern men and women, and cut across all levels of society. In an age where religion was a state concern, many of these concerns were articulated or shaped within the context of the Church, all across Western Europe, yet throughout our period religious life was characterised by its great diversity. This module examines changing religious practices and beliefs in Europe, although with a particular focus on England, from the early Middle Ages until the seventeenth century, charting continuity and change in people’s thinking about their relationship – both individually and collectively - with the divine. The module is divided into three blocks: (1) early medieval, in which we explore the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, the slow emergence of an institutional church, missionary and conversion activities, and campaigns against heresy; (2) high to late medieval where we examine the tension between the theology of the church and the beliefs of the individual in a time of increased attempts at centralisation by the Western Church; (3) early modern, from the Reformation, via the Civil War, to early eighteenth-century rational religion and alternative versions of spirituality, and their impact on attitudes to religious and other minority groups.

Module Overview

East Africa became a significant theatre of empire from the mid-nineteenth century, when David Livingstone championed European intervention to bring ‘Christianity, commerce and civilisation’ to the region. This module will explore the expansion of the British Empire into East Africa from the late nineteenth-century era of ‘high imperialism’ until decolonisation in the 1960s. This region provides rich opportunities to deepen an understanding of imperialism and offers key themes in the history of empire, including exploration, slavery, race, identity, gender, imperial networks, cultural representation and indigenous agency.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for English students to spend a semester at second level studying at one of the University’s partner institutions, developing academically and personally. During the semester abroad students undertake a course load at the partner institution of equivalent standard to that of one semester of the programme at Lincoln. Participation in study abroad also offers unique opportunities for personal student development in the wider sense, taking in cultural, sporting and social opportunities.

In order to participate, students are usually expected to obtain a 2:1 or higher at Level 1, have a good record of attendance and participation, and must complete an application process. A limited number of places will be available each year, and participation is at the discretion of the Module Co-ordinator and the Programme Leader.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for History students to spend a term studying at one of the University’s partner institutions in North America or Europe. Students will be expected to cover their own transport, accommodation and living costs.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

The period from 1700 to 1850 was one of transition and change in the British Isles and North America, marking an ideological and material shift away from the legacy of medieval Europe and the period of initial colonial contact. This module challenges students to engage with historical, cartographical, and material evidence. Students are introduced to the landscapes, streetscapes, and social make-up of the long eighteenth century, and can discuss in seminars how broad events impacted everyday lives, the urban, and rural landscape.

Module Overview

This module examines Arthurian narratives, myths, and traditions within a variety of contexts and media, and traces a variety of themes associated with Arthur and his court, including history and national identity; violence; kingship and rule; loyalty and betrayal; and love, sex, and gender roles.

Students will be expected to assess the importance of a myth that spans more than a millennium and address how medieval texts made meaning within their specific socio-cultural situations, as well as how later periods make meaning through their deployment of the medieval in new contexts.

Module Overview

This module tests the claim that the period from the 1880s to the First World War was an ‘Age of Transition’, which witnessed the birth of modern British politics. Through an analysis of this argument, students are introduced to some of the major developments in British political history in the period 1885-1914, including the birth of the welfare state, the creation of the Labour Party, the conflict over ‘Votes for Women’ and British foreign policy before World War One.

Module Overview

This module surveys the history of the Roman Empire not as a succession of emperors and achievements, victories and defeats, but as a complex of experiments in government and of attitudes to governance. Beginning with the transition from representative republican rule to the domination of an imperial dynasty and its network of élite dependants in the early first century, and concluding with the incipient takeover of this system by a newly Christianised ruling class in the early fourth century, students can explore the role of the emperor in the Roman world and the patterns of communication between him and his subjects.

Module Overview

Almost all historians share the view that the social, economic and political structures of Europe in 1000 A.D. were significantly different to those that characterised the western superpower of Late Antiquity, the Roman Empire. In this challenging module, students will be encouraged to engage with a range of source material that will allow them to come to their own conclusions. Given this wide focus, students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the fascinating story of post-Carolingian Europe in such a way that they enhance their abilities to think comparatively, a crucial weapon in the historian’s armoury.

Module Overview

This module aims to develop students' understanding of the political, social and cultural history of Late Antiquity (150-750), with a particular focus on two world-changing religious developments: the rise of Christianity and Islam. Although the geographical focus of our studies will be on eastern Mediterranean lands of an empire ruled from Constantinople, known to later scholars as the Byzantine Empire, the geographical range of the module will be wide and include western Europe, including the western Mediterranean, Persia, Arabia, and ‘barbarian’ territories beyond the Roman frontiers on the Rhine and Danube.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to some of the key interdisciplinary themes in American cultural history in the first half of the twentieth century as well as to theoretical works that have shaped American cultural studies since the 1950s. The module will investigate and evaluate academic argument relating to the study of American cultural history from a variety of theoretical, philosophical and methodological perspectives including feminism, social theory, post-structuralism, and postmodernism.

Module Overview

This module will introduce students to the principles of understanding, evaluating and constructing exhibitions. It will focus on exhibiting in art, history and archaeology and will include both theoretical approaches to the understanding and critique of exhibitions and practical aspects of mounting an exhibition. The module will include visiting museums, galleries and other exhibition spaces to examine and analyse exhibitions in situ, as well as talks from museum professionals on aspects of exhibition development. Students will be assessed through the production of plans for a small temporary exhibition they develop individually.

Module Overview

This module is designed to introduce the basic skills of working with glass, ceramic and fine metalwork. It provides an opportunity to investigate the potential and limitations of working with various materials, processes and techniques, associated with the practice of object manufacture against a relevant historical background.

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Between the 11th and the 12th centuries Europe went through some radical changes. This module will focus on case studies, such as Lincoln, London and Paris, among others. Students will have the opportunity to study how and why such centres grew from small towns to some of the greatest and most vibrant metropolis of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. For a comparative study, a range of primary sources will be taken into account, including contemporary descriptions of these cities and their inhabitants, historical records, art and architecture.

Module Overview

The typical image of a rural village, whether a chocolate box idyll prettily nestled around its church or a commuter dormitory boringly empty of anything fun to do, rarely shows much evidence for anything dramatic. However, these places were created by people who lived through events which are almost unimaginable to us today including the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, and for whom a perpetual challenge was simply surviving in a period where barely half of those born lived to adulthood. In this module students will have the opportunity to learn how to critically analyse and interpret historical and archaeological evidence and to use their knowledge and skills to write a new history of any rural settlement of their choice.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to the lives and experiences of women in the ancient world. By engaging with a wide range of material, visual and written evidence, students can investigate both the real historical circumstances of women’s lives and the ways in which they were constructed, represented and perceived.

The focus of this module is on the Roman world, and the material considered ranges in date from the Republican period to the end of the second Century AD. Material from Greece, especially where it affects Roman art, literature and ideas, will also be considered.

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This module is designed to explore ideas of heritage protection, management and conservation from around the world. It will consider United Nations' efforts in the field and consider how this international perspective shapes local and national actions.

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In this module, students will have the opportunity to take a vivid and intellectually exciting journey through primary and secondary sources in order to understand the historical trajectory of the Iberian Peninsula from the end of the sixth century to the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031. The aim of the module is to provide an introduction to two major medieval cities, Toledo and Córdoba, via acquaintance with and discussion of material that allows us to reflect upon a fascinating complex of problems.

Module Overview

In the Twentieth Century new aviation technologies transformed understandings of war, peace, civilian and military. The module considers how ideas about air power developed, what informed this understanding of war, and what the consequences were. This is not a traditional military history concerned with narrative accounts of battles or armies, but one that asks questions about the relationship between military and civilian in society and culture in the twentieth century.

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Why have detective narratives proved so enduringly popular? This module will interrogate the iconic figure of the private eye in American popular culture, through the fiction and film of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

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This module explores a key resource for understanding the thoughts, feelings and conversations of ancient people. Graffiti in Greek and Latin (and other languages) were marked onto fixed and portable surfaces throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and their informal and non-official nature offers a unique window into the lives and worldviews of people often invisible or marginal in standard documentary, literary and material sources

Module Overview

This module will give students an opportunity to engage in close philosophical study of texts by the most influential ancient philosophers. Texts will be studied in English translation. They will include works by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by less familiar philosophers of the ancient world (c. 500 BC-500 AD Greece and Rome). The focus of the module will be philosophical, not interpretive or historical: students will be expected assess the credibility of the positions and arguments advanced by Plato, Aristotle and others and to develop their own views in dialogue with these thinkers.

Module Overview

The victories of Arab armies over the forces of the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the seventh century were of monumental importance. Not only did they signal the decline of the two great superpowers of the late ancient world but they were accompanied, some scholars would argue caused, by the rise of a new monotheistic world religion: Islam. The first half of the module seeks to understand the conquests of the Arab armies and the emergence of Islam historically and culturally, in two specific contexts: (1) political conflict between the Persian and Byzantine Empires, during which Arabia often acted as a military frontier and different Arab groups as allies to one side or another; (2) contact and competition between Christianity, Judaism and other religious traditions in Arabia. The second half of the module explores how, after the initial victories over the Byzantine and Persian Empires, the new Islamic polity renewed itself, rolled forward further conquests, and focuses in particular on how an ‘Islamic’ culture was formed.

Module Overview

This module will explore the different schools of thought and the political activities of the various groups and individuals that comprised the anarchist movement. Anarchism is a political doctrine based on freedom, egalitarianism and social justice and that developed in Europe as a political movement in the mid-XIX century. Anarchism never reached the ascendancy achieved by liberalism or communism; however, it had a significant influence on the political ideas, social movements, culture, and education of the international labour movement.

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This module examines both the birth and development of the concept of chivalry in the Middle Ages. Students can use a wide range of primary sources, as well as medieval and contemporary historiography, to explore how the role, image and function of medieval knights evolved over time.

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The module will examine consumption in many of its forms in early modern Western Europe. Focusing on a number of areas, such as food, clothing, furnishings, houses and other goods increasingly accessible to people at all levels of society, the module will encourage students to consider how and why these were available.

Module Overview

This module offers an opportunity to engage with American literature (in a variety of forms) and some of its socio-historical, political and ideological contexts from the late 1990s to the present day. We will explore aspects of canon-formation in American fiction, and study a selection of texts by both new and established writers, in some cases at the point where they are first published in paperback. We will take a thematic approach, locating American cultural production in regional, national and global contexts, with a particular emphasis on writing in the 21st century. There are no pre-requisites for this module.

Module Overview

This module will enable students to engage in the research and development of displays through the process of curating an exhibition for the museum or heritage sector. Students will select objects and structure this selection through an appropriate narrative. They will propose modes and examples of interpretation such as gallery text, audio or visual aids. The emphasis will be on developing knowledge and understanding of the role and responsibilities of the curator, and the project will enable students to evidence a focused and critically rigorous curatorial rationale.

Module Overview

This module considers early modern imperialism and its impact on artistic production at a global scale. Students will have the opportunity to examine Iberia and its world as a point for cultural encounter and cross-fertilization. The module aims to explore how local communities conflated their symbols of identity within transnational artistic trends and through a number of carefully selected case studies, will analyse the way in which communities – artists, patrons, collectors and audiences – negotiated these cultural encounters in the production and assimilation of the arts.

Module Overview

This module explores the legacy of English landscape painting, for instance in the work of John Constable, Paul Nash and others, which has played a fundamental part in perpetuating such imagery within our national consciousness. It will encourage a critical appreciation of artistic influences, the personal feelings, cultural attitudes and ideological perspectives in relation to the varied depictions of the English countryside. The close relationship between these depictions and the social and economic history of English rural society during the period c.1690 to present will be stressed throughout the module.

Students will also critically identify, from a wider range of images and texts such as literature, film and advertising, the subjectivity of evidence that encourages popular impressions of the English countryside.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of science, sexuality and politics in the UK, Continental Europe, the US and Latin America from 1850 to 2000. It will give students an excellent grounding in modern and contemporary history that will complement further modules at level 3 that deal with sexuality, gender, race, science and medicine. It module examines the controversial rise of eugenics movements as a global phenomenon. The purpose of this module is to sustain a balanced and informed discussion about how race, reproduction, and the improvement of human heredity have acquired great political relevance in the modern period. It explores how scientists and different governments became preoccupied with hereditary theories, race, reproduction and sexual behaviour. It examines how societies across the Atlantic developed government policies around areas such as family planning, pronatalism, sterilisation, and race, which culminated in the implementation of euthanasia programmes in Nazi Germany. This module looks at eugenics programmes and politics in a transnational context, exploring how, for example, Nazi Germany’s sterilisation programmes were inspired by those already implemented in the US and how a number of Latin American countries adapted and transformed eugenics policies from Southern Europe and developed whitening policies.

Module Overview

This module explores the various ways in which the world was put on display in the nineteenth century, and with what aims and effects. The nineteenth century was a period during which museums, galleries, exhibitions, zoos and circuses all expanded in numbers and took on distinctive modern forms; it was also one where the ‘freak show’ became both popular but also frowned upon, while optical toys and attractions reformed ‘ways of seeing’.

Module Overview

This module explores the transformation of the United States from a set of thirteen colonies to an independent republic. Topics considered include: the causes of the Revolution, the governance of the new republic, the place of the new republic in the world, the experiences of excluded groups (loyalists, native Americans, African Americans).

Module Overview

Monsters and attics, desolate landscapes, imprisonment and pursuit: the gothic genre emerged in the late eighteenth century to depict our darkest fears and desires. Termed 'the literature of nightmare', gothic departs from a realistic mode of representation and employs a powerful means of symbolic expression. Students are given the opportunity to investigate ways in which the genre has explored psychological and political anxieties, and themes of sexual and social transgression. We consider literary texts from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including literature and film, and we give attention to sub-genres such as ‘female gothic’, ‘imperial gothic’ and ‘children’s gothic’.

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This module will explore the development, decline and revival of stained glass from the early middle ages to the mid twentieth century. The focus will be on British stained glass with particular reference to windows that students can visit in person, particularly in Lincoln Cathedral and the parish churches of the region. Students will learn to analyse windows through a number of methodological frameworks in particular: production (design and manufacture), consumption (patronage, iconography and meaning) and aesthetics (style, drawing, manipulation of light).

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This module explores what it meant to grow up and to grow old in the nineteenth century, through often contradictory accounts of experiencing age categories from childhood to old age.

Students will have the opportunity to examine various constructions of ageing, to reflect on age as a crucial facet of identity. This module considers age as a lens to explore the nineteenth century as a transitional period of growth and expansion as well as decay and decline, through a range of Romantic and Victorian texts.

Module Overview

Historian, journalist, political commentator and gossip columnist Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans, wrote what is still one of our main sources for British history of the thirteenth century. This module looks at Matthew Paris’s Great Chronicle, considering both Matthew himself and what he tells us about thirteenth-century English society. Students have the opportunity to think about what history was in the thirteenth-century and about attitudes to foreigners and national identity; power and poverty; propaganda and fiction; and time, space and the apocalypse.

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Students at level three have to undertake an Independent Study project. This is an extended piece of work that gives them the opportunity to demonstrate they have acquired the skills to undertake historical inquiry and analysis.

Module Overview

In their final year, every student on the BA (Hons) History degree programme at the University of Lincoln must produce an independent study. This is an extended piece of work which gives them the opportunity to demonstrate they have acquired the skills to undertake detailed and substantial subject-specific research and writing founded on critical inquiry and analysis.

Module Overview

This module covers the history and historiography of one of the most popular and sophisticated systems of medicine in the world: Chinese medicine. Starting from a comparison of the conceptualisation and representation of the body in early China versus ancient Greece, the module introduces students to key ideas in Chinese medicine such as “Yin Yang”, “Five Processes”, “Qi”, “Meridians” and “Five Organs and Six Bowels”. Diagnosis (including pulse-taking and tongue examination) and therapy (including moxibustion and acupuncture) are explored, alongside the Chinese tradition of “self-cultivation” and the various techniques that promote health –– and even immortality. Theories concerning food and drugs are dissected, and the tremendous plurality of practitioners throughout the history of Chinese medicine are analysed in detail. No prior knowledge on the history of medicine, Chinese history, or Chinese language is required.

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The module will give students practical experience of the workplace. Students will normally define, plan and undertake a specific project. In addition students will gain experience of a range of tasks appropriate to sector-specific professional skills.

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Hong Kong’s history lies at the intersection of Chinese, British imperial, and transnational histories. This module explores the history of Hong Kong from its colonisation by Britain in 1841 up to the present day.

The module seeks to introduce the city’s history to students, explore the ways historians have engaged with and approached this history, and to help students develop skills of historical analysis and debate. Through engaging with the rich historical debates and with English-language and translated primary materials, students on this module may study issues and themes including, but not limited to: imperialism; colonialism; transnational networks; international and diplomatic history; economic and business history; social history; urban history; migration and diaspora history.

Module Overview

One of the ways in which early modern monarchs and rulers legitimised their authority and projected their power was through architecture and urban design. In this period capital cities across Europe, America and Asia were embellished with architecture and urban design inspired by Renaissance ideals of social order. This module examines the ways rulers imagined and built a number of imperial capital cities across Europe, America and Asia.

Module Overview

In this module students have the opportunity to research in depth an author or topic of their choosing. Students are expected to commence research over the summer between Levels 2 and 3 and, on their return, have regular, one-to-one meetings with a tutor who is a research specialist in that field. The supervisor offers advice and direction, but primarily this module encourages independent research leading to the production of a 10,000 word dissertation.

Module Overview

What was the workhouse? What was life like within its doors? Into the workhouse explores this infamous institution in England and Wales, from its beginnings as just one of a variety of methods of relieving poverty, through to its zenith in the Victorian era with the implementation of a harsh regime. We will trace this transition, from fairly ad hoc cottage through to purpose-built institution, throughout this module. We start the course by asking: who were ‘the poor’? And what help was available to them? We will learn what poor relief was, and how it was an important part of a broader economy of makeshifts - offering everything from money to bread, from shoes to tools, and from a bed to medical help. How poor relief operated varied from place to place until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. This ‘New’ poor law placed a Commission in charge of a compulsory workhouse system with which we are familiar from novels and films. Why and how this new system was created will be our next focus, before we embark on a field trip to a workhouse and museum to understand what life was like within its walls.

While the Victorian workhouse is often portrayed as a static and dreary Dickensian place, full of helpless individuals, this module will uncover a fresh, dynamic perspective. We will find out how individuals navigated and used workhouses, and how they asserted their agency. We will understand how workhouses were protested against, and pulled into disrepute in a series of national scandals. Workhouses were also a site of immense social innovation, especially in medical care. The institution saw renewed attention in the late nineteenth-century but came to an end in 1929. What led to its demise and the lasting legacy will be studied in the final week. In this module you will critically analyse a wide range of sources, including official reports, parish registers, plans and maps and workhouse artefacts, as well as first-hand accounts of workhouse life in legal depositions, pauper letters, poems and diaries.

Module Overview

This module is designed to examine how terms such as Ireland and Irishness have been constructed and questioned across the last century, a period of immense and often turbulent historical and social change. It aims to explore the representation of place, the nature of nationalism, the changing family unit, gender roles and Ireland's relationship to globalization in Irish poetry, drama and fiction.

Module Overview

This module explores the world of Latin epistolary culture from the late Republic to the early Patristic period of the fourth Century AD. The preservation of documentary letters on materials such as stone and papyrus offer a complementary perspective on the lives, experiences and concerns of ordinary men and women across the Mediterranean. Students can consider a wide range of letter types, including about trade and agriculture, introductions and recommendations (literary and otherwise), and epistolary poetry.

Module Overview

This module responds to the recent interest in the representation of lives within literary studies. It discusses a range of life representations (including biography, autobiography, letters, confessions, memoirs, and poems) from the Romantic period to the contemporary moment. Students may consider the origins of autobiography, address Modernist experiments with life representations, and discuss twentieth-century and contemporary innovations, including disability narratives and cross-cultural autobiographies. Themes such as the construction of selfhood, conceptions of memory, the relational self, and the ethics of life writing are addressed.

Module Overview

The first principle of ecological thinking is that it is not only human beings that are meaningful, and that we are neither so separate from, nor so dominant over, the non-human as we tend to think. In this module students can explore what difference it makes to read literature from this perspective. We study literature as part of our complex interaction with our environment, and, perhaps sometimes, as a uniquely valuable one. Students can read texts from ancient Greek pastoral to contemporary dystopias, and from the poet John Clare to the woodland historian Oliver Rackham.

Module Overview

This module explores how criminal lunatics - criminals who developed insanity in prison and individuals who committed a crime whilst insane - were represented and treated in nineteenth century Britain. Students can examine why some criminals were deemed insane and others were not; how criminal lunacy was defined in medicine and in law; how and why the institutions, people and practices for treating the criminal and criminal lunatic changed over the period; the role gender and class played in crimes, trials, diagnoses and treatment; and how criminality and criminal insanity were represented by laymen.

Module Overview

Making Militants explores the role of violent teaching practices of various sorts in the making of men and women in Late Antiquity. Focusing on the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, it addresses a pivotal period in the transition from the ancient to the medieval world, surveying the multiple small-scale arenas that made up the Late Antiquity – the household, the schoolroom, the barracks and the monastery. By close reading of letters, biographical accounts, rulebooks, speeches and a wide range of other sources, we consider how violent educative practices made people who were capable of operating in a changing, unpredictable and often dangerous world. The men and women who were made in such spaces were the products of a society that was fundamentally violent, their own violence a product of long-established socialisation practices rather than acts of anti-social deviance.

Module Overview

This module will analyse how the medicalised body has been represented, exploited, challenged and reclaimed in art and visual culture. The themes, ideas, priorities and objects of medicine – such as death, health, sexuality, taboo, trauma, bodily functions, and viscera – have taken centre stage in art and visual culture since the end of the nineteenth century. This module will explore the manifold ways in which artists have engaged with subjects including medical technologies, disease, disability, blood, and pain, and we will do so in relation to constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class and ability. What significance do pathology, disease, and patient experience take on in art and visual culture? To what effects have artists portrayed and perhaps questioned modern therapies and medical technologies, and their subjects, practices and theories? We will focus on a range of media including painting, sculpture, performance art, conceptual art, film, and photography.

Module Overview

The 20th century saw unprecedented social, economic, political and cultural change in Britain. However, the equally dramatic shifts in how sexuality and masculinity were experienced and represented are often ignored. This module aims to enable students to study the history of 20th Century Britain while using the lens of gender and sexuality to understand how ordinary men lived their lives. Students will get the opportunity to work with a wide variety of primary sources such as: court records, newspapers, film, photographs, music, autobiographies, oral history and literature.

Module Overview

This module explores the representation of East-West contact in Middle English romances, with a particular emphasis on the interlacement of racial and ethnic otherness and on different types of violence, from martial exploits and religious coercion to rape and cannibalism.

Students will have the chance to experience the breadth of the romance genre—its many thematic and topical branches, and its many sub-genres and their respective conventions—as well as insight to the actual act of crusading, and the cultural and social crises that arose from this act.

Module Overview

This module examines some of the philosophical issues raised by the Newtonian revolution in the natural sciences, such as: What is the nature of Newton’s distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ space? In what sense can forces be said to exist? What is the ontology of force? Is it sufficient to provide a mathematical definition of force (e.g., f=ma)? Is gravity a special kind of force with its own unique set of properties? What is the nature of ‘action at a distance’? Is Newton’s view of space metaphysical? This is an interdisciplinary module that situates Newtonian science in its sociocultural context.

Module Overview

This module explores literature by nineteenth-century women writers through the Romantic and Victorian eras up to the suffrage campaigns. We explore how women negotiated cultural ideals of femininity and the challenges of authorship to produce writings across forms including novel, short story, poetry, play, and in a range of genres such as social realism, gothic, fairy tale and life writing. We consider how these works engage with contemporaneous social debates, especially about women’s social position. Authors addressed include Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, Dorothy Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Mary Molesworth, Amy Levy and Elizabeth Robins. These works are interpreted in relation to their cultural context and in light of recent critical debates.

Module Overview

This module will investigate the history of imperial Britain through material culture. The objects of study will range from trophies looted in battle and a drum transported with slaves to Virginia, to African sculpture depicting Europeans. Historians increasingly recognise the fresh insights that objects offer to major themes in imperial history such as gender, race and class. This module responds to these new academic developments and will use objects and their biographies to study key phases and themes in the history of the British Empire. Tracing the long history of such objects can enable us to explore how objects change meanings as they move through various colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Module Overview

This module examines the emergence, development and legacy of Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism and how these movements influenced British culture. The module will explore how Pre-Raphaelite painters attempted to redefine the natural role of art and how ‘Aesthetic’ artists went on to question their approach. The module will explore the work of the key protagonists of each movement and how their work crossed over into other media such as stained glass, painted furniture and book illustration.

Module Overview

Portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives on screen are under increasing scrutiny from audiences, activists and media scholars. But, for much of the history of film and television, non-normative sexual and gender identities have been marginalised or hidden. This module examines the history of queer representations in screen culture from the era of silent films to the present day. Students will have the opportunity to work with examples from a range of national contexts, including (but not limited to) Britain and America, as well as engaging with influential scholarship in queer theory and the history of gender and sexuality.

Module Overview

How can history and heritage be more inclusive of LGBTIQ+ lives and experiences? And how can queer perspectives help us to better understand the complexities of the past? This module responds to these questions by examining queer histories from the Ancient World to the present day. Taking a global view, the module investigates how concepts such as sex, sexuality, gender, the body, friendship, and family have been organised in diverse ways across different times and places. In addition to considering how particular sexual and gender identities have emerged, the module also engages with ideas of queer history as a method for historical enquiry: one that is sceptical about binary analyses and linear narratives of progress.

Module Overview

Media and screen culture were powerful means of defining ‘Englishness’ as a racial construct in the 20th century. This module examines the complex relationship between race, media, and screen culture from World War I, when representations of the British empire were increasingly available to British audiences, up to the 1980s, when tensions over immigration were evident on film and television screens throughout the UK. Students will examine constructions of race across a variety of primary sources including ‘empire films’ from the 1930s, documentaries, home-movies, and television, as well as media authored by Black and Asian Britons in the post-war period. Students will gain a critical in-depth understanding of the place of race within British screen culture, media, and society in the 20th Century.

Module Overview

Although early modern England was a kingdom, governed by a monarch, many historians have claimed that there was a strong ‘republican’ undercurrent to Tudor and Stuart political thought. This module introduces students to the key approaches and methodologies of the history of ideas by focusing upon the various ways in which scholars have studied and conceptualised republicanism in early modern England and the ongoing debate surrounding the origin, content and influence of republican ideas in the period 1500-1700.

Module Overview

This module explores the history, archaeology, visual and material culture of Roman Lincoln (Lindum Colonia), within the context of the provinces of Roman Britain. It is designed to provide students with the opportunity to handle and analyse objects from the Lincolnshire Archives and The Collection museum, to engage with the evidence that is visible in the modern city, to engage with excavation reports as primary evidence, and to consider how a military and urban centre was connected to rural sites, towns and the forts beyond.

Module Overview

This module explores the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious history of two capitals of the Roman empire: Rome and Constantinople, or Old Rome and New Rome as they came to be called in the East. These were imperial cities where the most powerful figures - emperors and patriarchs, popes and saints - of Antiquity and the Middle Ages constructed and destroyed, appropriated and reorientated spaces, buildings, and structures. In this module we shall look at palaces and fortifications, hippodromes and churches, triumphal arches and mausolea, fora and harbours, discovering and discussing not only how and why they were built and maintained, but also their perception and remembrance over the centuries from 200 to 1200. Students will gain knowledge of the evolving configuration of Rome and Constantinople, and have the opportunity to prepare a cultural biography of a monument of their choice from one of these two cities of empire.

Module Overview

This module investigates the nature of rulership during the middle ages, exploring how images and architecture served to visually define and articulate the authority of kings and rulers during the Middle Ages. The module will discuss in depth three different case studies: Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire; the Norman rulers of Southern Italy; Louis IX and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

Module Overview

This module considers the genre of modern science fiction and its evolution into one of today’s most popular narrative genres. Analysing a variety of forms – novel, short story, drama, graphic novel and film – students will have the opportunity to examine the socio-historical contexts of some of the most influential narratives of this period.

This ranges from the emergence of “scientific romance” in the late nineteenth century, to late twentieth-century forms like cyberpunk and radical fantasy; from the problems of defining “genre fictions” and privileging science fiction over fantasy, to our enduring fascination with alternate histories, non-human agents (robots, animals, genetic hybrids, the environment), ecocatastrophe and post-apocalypse.

Module Overview

This module concentrates on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, with a particular emphasis on The Canterbury Tales, perhaps Chaucer’s most famous work. Students will have the opportunity to examine the General Prologue and a variety of tales in relation to their historical context and literary antecedents, and, throughout, specific attention will be given to questions of genre (ranging from fable and epic to satire and romance), literary authority, narrative construction, and medieval aesthetics.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for students to study the works of Shakespeare in detail. The dissemination, influence, and adaptation of Shakespeare is unrivalled, and without an understanding of the conventions that the works dissolved and those that they initiated, a full appreciation of the canon of English literature is inevitably lessened.

This modules challenges Shakespeare’s status as an icon of tradition and elitism by reading the texts in the light of recent developments in critical theory, and by locating them in the culture of their age. Students will be invited to examine the ways in which different theoretical approaches might have a bearing upon the interpretation of Shakespeare, they will also be conversant with the religious climate of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the conditions of performance and play-going in Shakespeare’s theatre, and the significant cultural and historical events of the period.

Module Overview

This module allows students to study the works of the Bard in detail, and to read them in the light of critical theory and literary history. Shakespeare’s plays are a cornerstone of the canon of English literature, but in wider culture they are often treated as inflexible repositories of ‘truth’ and ‘human nature’.

This module will resist such approaches, and concentrate instead upon the ways in which the plays address the concerns of their day, as well as how they have been made to signify in other eras. Students can develop an understanding of how Shakespeare’s work dealt with early modern dramatic conventions, politics, and thought; how it addressed questions of history, religion, and race; and how it shaped the culture within which it was written. This module considers Shakespeare’s mature comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Module Overview

This module allows students to pursue an in-depth study of one author’s literary or dramatic works. The author of choice varies from year to year according to academics’ current research interests, but potential authors may include writers of fiction and/or poetry such as Angela Carter, Charlotte Bronte, Iain Banks, Thomas Pynchon, M.R.James, Jane Austen and Sylvia Plath; and dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Thomas Middleton, Aphra Behn, Ben Johnson and debbie tucker green. Students will explore the writer’s oeuvre in terms of themes, style, and engagement with form and genre traditions, and with contemporary cultural debates. We also address practicalities of authorship such as the role of editors, publishing/performance formats, and different readerships/audiences. Students will also consider the writer’s legacies including the ‘afterlife’ of their works in adaptation. As well as studying texts, students will engage with conceptual debates about the role of the author : is attention to the author’s life an outmoded and over-deterministic approach to the study of a text? or a necessary part of contextualisation? As we scrutinise the figure of the author in biography, literary societies, literary tourism and popular culture, we ask : what purposes does the ‘author’ as a cultural construction serve ? and does this have anything to do with reading?

Module Overview

This module allows students to pursue an in-depth study of one author’s literary or dramatic works. The author of choice varies from year to year according to academics’ current research interests, but potential authors may include writers of fiction and/or poetry such as Angela Carter, Charlotte Bronte, Iain Banks, Thomas Pynchon, M.R.James, Jane Austen and Sylvia Plath; and dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Thomas Middleton, Aphra Behn, Ben Johnson and debbie tucker green. Students will explore the writer’s oeuvre in terms of themes, style, and engagement with form and genre traditions, and with contemporary cultural debates. We also address practicalities of authorship such as the role of editors, publishing/performance formats, and different readerships/audiences. Students will also consider the writer’s legacies including the ‘afterlife’ of their works in adaptation. As well as studying texts, students will engage with conceptual debates about the role of the author : is attention to the author’s life an outmoded and over-deterministic approach to the study of a text? or a necessary part of contextualisation? As we scrutinise the figure of the author in biography, literary societies, literary tourism and popular culture, we ask : what purposes does the ‘author’ as a cultural construction serve ? and does this have anything to do with reading?

Module Overview

Slavery was fundamental to the society and economy of Late Antiquity, as it was throughout much of the ancient world. This module explores the different ways in which slavery and dependency structured how the people of the late ancient world lived, as far as possible focusing on the experiences of the enslaved themselves. Drawing on laws, literary texts, religious writings and material and visual culture, students will gain a deep understanding of the complexities of slavery, will develop their vocabulary for talking about enslavement as social and cultural praxes, and will learn how to use a range of research resources for examining the social worlds of Late Antiquity. The module will be assessed through the production of a series of blog posts, so that students will also learn the valuable skills of writing for the web and creating interesting and engaging digital content.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice in History. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

This module aims to examine how living in cities shaped the ways our lives and society have developed since the 19th Century. In the early 19th Century the population of Europe largely lived in rural settlements, yet 100 years later the populations of Western Europe's cities had exploded. Cities produced new forms of social organisation: for the first time drag queens and prostitutes rubbed shoulders with housewives, the rich discovered the poor on their very doorsteps and the unregulated spaces of cities became havens for counter-cultures, deviant sexualities and radical politics.

Module Overview

This module surveys the history of the Roman Empire not as a succession of emperors and achievements, victories and defeats, but as a complex of experiments in government and of attitudes to governance. Beginning with the transition from representative republican rule to the domination of an imperial dynasty and its network of élite dependants in the early first century, and concluding with the incipient takeover of this system by a newly Christianised ruling class in the early fourth century, students can explore the role of the emperor in the Roman world and the patterns of communication between him and his subjects.

Module Overview

This module will focus on the process of economic and political integration, which has taken place in Western Europe since 1945. The emphasis will be placed on the global forces which have shaped, and are still shaping, this process of integration. The module will also investigate the impact of the Cold and Korean Wars, the European Recovery Programme and other factors from outside Europe.

Module Overview

This module explores how childhood is constructed in a wide range of literary texts – texts by adults for adults, by adults for children, and by children themselves. Underpinning the module is the notion of ‘childhood’ as a cultural construct into which writers invest various, even contradictory, meanings. Students have the opportunity to explore texts by adults who idealise or demonise the child to suit their personal and philosophical agendas. Students may then analyse the mixture of didactic and therapeutic agendas in enduring genres of children’s literature such as the fairytale, adventure story and cautionary tale. Finally, we turn to children as authors in a study of juvenilia.

Module Overview

The world as we encounter it in visual perception is a world of coloured objects – red buses, yellow daffodils, blue skies, and the like. Colour raises a variety of perplexing philosophical puzzles concerning the nature of physical reality and our epistemic to the mental states of others. This module serves as an introduction to these issues.

Some of the questions to be explored include: Do objects really have the colours we ordinarily take them to possess? If so, what sort of property is colour? Are colours really just ‘impressions’ that exist only in the mind? If so, what causes these impressions? Do such impressions have representational content? What is the relationship between philosophical and scientific theories of colour? This is an interdisciplinary module that also explores issues relating to colour in art history and the history of science.

Module Overview

To the citizens of the Roman world, civility (civilitas) – right conduct of government, sound behaviour of individuals, citizenship itself – was a function of the city (civitas), which constituted the centre of the Roman state and society. This module will take students on a guided tour of the Roman city, using each stop along the way as a point of entry into one or more aspects of the politics, society, economy, and culture of Rome and its empire. Students will be challenged to reimagine urban life via a detailed engagement with a representative array of written, material, and visual sources and the main lines of the secondary literature.

Module Overview

Before the Roman invasion of AD 43, everyone in Britain lived in ‘the countryside’, for the simple reason that there were no cities or towns. Indeed, throughout the four centuries of Roman rule which followed, the vast majority of people still lived outside of urban and military centres. The core objective of this module is an archaeological exploration of the great diversity of evidence, analysing the significance of the changing nature of rural society and the creation of rural landscapes and identities, focusing on Britain from the late pre-Roman Iron Age, through the Roman period, to its sub-Roman aftermath (c. 100 BC–AD 500).

Module Overview

This module examines how African Americans tried to cast off the economic, political, cultural and social ties that bound them to second-class citizenship within the United States. We primarily focus on the Southern version of the black freedom struggle before casting our attention to a wider American political, social, and racial context — particularly as we challenge “the master narrative” of the civil rights movement that was once presented and represented as the singular history of the movement for African American freedom.

In charting the course of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century and beyond, we analyse the most venerated events and personalities of the era and aim to understand the movement on its own terms. We will explore its richness and its internal complexities, especially when reviewing the varying tactics and ideological differences of the movement’s leaders. The module asks us to question the presumed victories of the civil rights movement, to stretch our chronological understanding beyond traditional beginnings and endings, to acknowledge the complexity of American racial identity, and reveal what it tells us about the wider political and social dimensions of modern US history.

Module Overview

The image of Vikings from the north plundering their way across Europe is firmly fixed in popular imagination. Few people stop to think that the same people were also farmers, the heads of families and had home lives. The historical sources for the Vikings in the North Atlantic are pitifully few – a small number of sagas and a few other records. We often know more about the Vikings from those with whom they came into contact than from their own accounts.

This module integrates the different lines of evidence – historical, archaeological and environmental – and evaluates whether the idea of a ‘Viking world’ is a useful approach. Students can gain an introduction to texts in translation and archaeological reports, and explore the main limitations of our understanding of the North Atlantic regions in this period.

Module Overview

This module aims to develop students' understanding of the political, social and cultural history of Late Antiquity (150-750), with a particular focus on two world-changing religious developments: the rise of Christianity and Islam. Although the geographical focus of our studies will be on eastern Mediterranean lands of an empire ruled from Constantinople, known to later scholars as the Byzantine Empire, the geographical range of the module will be wide and include western Europe, including the western Mediterranean, Persia, Arabia, and ‘barbarian’ territories beyond the Roman frontiers on the Rhine and Danube.

Module Overview

This module aims to explore new thematic trends, stylistic innovations and cultural developments in post-millennial British fiction, including a focus on globalising processes, transnational migration and digital technology.

The module also addresses the development (and rethinking of the concepts) of gender and class in literature of the period and account for the continuing importance of the literary form in an age of digital publishing.

Module Overview

This module aims to explore the intellectual and cultural achievements of the Renaissance, as well as its historiographic context. The period of transition from 'medieval' to 'modern' society that the Renaissance represents (or has been characterised as representing) is one of the most challenging areas of historical study, profoundly influencing historiography. Students have the opportunity to examine in depth to what extent the historical periodisation of the 'Renaissance' has been a deliberate, although sometimes contentious, means to better understand events of the past, particularly in relation to cultural analysis.

Module Overview

Students can study a diverse range of prose, poetry, and drama written by women from the eighteenth century to the present is considered alongside key concepts in feminist theory and the history of the women’s movement. Writers range from Mary Wollstonecraft to Zora Neale Hurston to Jeanette Winterson. Topics range from the feminine aesthetic and French feminism to feminist utopianism and cyberfeminism.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to the different approaches to the study of history which have developed, with a particular focus on twentieth-century ideas and innovations, such as ‘history from below’, women’s and gender history, history of sexuality, cultural history, post-colonial approaches, and recent developments in the field. Students will be encouraged to think critically and creatively about how history has developed within the academy, as a particular branch of knowledge and as a discipline with its own rules and procedures.

Module Overview

This module considers the range of theories that we can use when we read and think about literature. Students will have the opportunity to study psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism and postmodernism, among others, to think about why and how we structure meaning and interpretation in certain ways. We consider questions such as ‘what is an author?’, ‘what is gender?’ and ‘why do certain things frighten us?’ through theorists such as Roland Barthes, Judith Butler and Sigmund Freud.

Module Overview

This module will explore the development and cultural impact of the first 100 years of photography. Initially driven by the commercial viability of portraiture, photography soon inspired a range of professional, artistic and amateur practitioners in the nineteenth century. Photographic innovation in the early twentieth century exerted a significant influence on the way that modernists sought to represent the world. Street photography emerged as a new insistent type of realism and represented urban experience in new ways. The social power of photography was spread through increasingly affordable cameras and propagated through print media.

Students will learn to analyse images and explore how photographs functioned to produce and exert power.

Module Overview

This module provides students with the opportunity to resurrect and understand the ordinary lives of people like themselves and their forebears from the sources available to us. The course picks up on both well-established and recent trends in historical research that have sought to give voice to ordinary people and promote from the historical records the lives of marginalised people such as homosexuals, women, children, the working classes, ethnic minorities alongside more familiar narratives of the great and the good.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to philosophical questions about the nature of art and beauty. For example: What is art? Can anything be a work of art? Can a pile of elephant dung be art? Is beauty objectively real or only ‘in the eye of the beholder’? Can aesthetic judgements be right or wrong? Is Beethoven better than Beyoncé? Is Shakespeare better than Eastenders? Or are aesthetic disputes like deciding between the merits of different flavours of ice cream?

Students can also consider questions that arise in relation to specific artforms: How is it possible to respond emotionally towards the plight of fictional characters that are known not to exist? Do rock/pop music and classical music require different aesthetic criteria for their appreciation and evaluation? Why do we take pleasure in the aesthetic representation of tragic events? Students will be guided through their reading of various classical and contemporary works on such issues, and encouraged to think for themselves about the problems addressed.

Module Overview

This module explores apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic texts using a range of novels, short stories, poems and films. Lectures will establish cultural and historical contexts and address issues such as form and genre. The module will explore a range of significant periods from early Judeo-Christian fears regarding the purging moral apocalypse, through Romantic preoccupations with nature and industrialisation, postmodernism and more contemporary concerns about viral or cybernetic apocalypse. We will draw from a range of disciplines including literary theory, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, philosophy and trauma theory.

Module Overview

This module provides a survey of the history and archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East between the reign of Alexander the Great and the death of Cleopatra VII after the Roman victory at the Battle of Actium in 30 BC. Students will have the opportunity to explore the political histories, power structures, cultural developments, economic processes and shifting ideologies associated with the major Hellenistic kingdoms and ending with the Roman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean region. Teaching also considers how the Hellenistic period was a time of innovation, cultural connectivity, even globalisation, laying the foundations of a Hellenized world of city-states which endured into and defined the Roman construction of a world empire in its aftermath.

Module Overview

This module explores the nineteenth-century literature of the USA, chiefly focusing on fiction and poetry. Authors covered include Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Walt Whitman and Willa Cather, among others.

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This module covers a broad range of twentieth-century American fiction and poetry. Beginning with Fitzgerald, other authors studied include Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

Module Overview

Renaissance monarchs often employed artistic display to project royal authority. Ruling elites commissioned pieces of art not only for the embellishment of their residences, but also as a suitable vehicle to display authority. Kings and Queens commissioned tapestries, sculptures, royal palaces, or lavishly decorated printed books that narrated their achievements and omitted their failures. This module examines the diverse ways rulers and their entourage imagined and created an image of kingship through the visual arts.

Module Overview

This module examines key British medieval texts, primarily in Middle English, from the High and Late Middle Ages (that is, from approximately the twelfth century to fifteenth century). It explores the breadth of literary activity in the period through a variety of genres--such as debate poetry, ethnographies, beast fables, romance, dream visions, satire, devotional and mystical writings, and mystery plays--and the evolution of a new form of English (the precursor of modern English), revealing that the medieval period is, in truth, a far cry from the misnomer by which it is often identified, the ‘dark ages’.

Module Overview

This module examines how and why the culture of Britain changed in the period of increasing contact with, and eventual incorporation into, the Roman Empire. Examining the key material, behavioural, ideological and structural changes to society in the period c. 100 BC to AD 450, it will question to what degree each aspect was a wholesale incorporation of ‘foreign’ ideas, technologies and goods, a local interpretation and adoption of these importations into an existing social system, or a local creation that was distinctly Romano-British, if often termed ‘Roman’.

Module Overview

This module examines one of the most varied literary genres extant, one that, at times, is often relegated to the margins because of its slippery nature. Students will examine early examples of fantasy and trace the genre’s development across a number of key historical epochs, from the classical and medieval periods to the twenty-first century. They will consider especially Tolkien as a pivotal force in the growth of fantasy literature and theory, as well as The Inklings, a group whose works had a profound influence on the evolution of the genre in the twentieth century. A range of subgenres of the fantastic will be explored, which may include high and low fantasy, ironic fantasy, historical fantasy, or magic realism, and, alongside primary texts, they will read selections from modern theoretical and critical texts that articulate different interpretations and approaches to the fantastic.

Module Overview

Students can gain an introduction to the historical and archaeological sources, approaches and methods necessary for the study of the ancient world. Lectures provide a survey of key moments in history, 1000 BC-AD 400, structured around the research specialisms of the module teaching team.

Module Overview

The cultural heritage sector increasingly offers opportunities for the application of digital technologies as communication, research and recording tools. This module enables students to become familiar with some of these advanced recording techniques for the study and recording of objects.

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This module examines how physicians, other practitioners, and the public understood the body, disease, and health in the early modern period. Although the medical system of Galen (2nd century AD) and humoral medicine guided Western medicine until the 1800s, between 1500-1700 there were major challenges to this traditional system. The work of elites such as Paracelsus and Van Helmont (chemical medicine), Vesalius (anatomy), Harvey (circulation and respiratory physiology) will be placed in a greater religious, social, and cultural context.

Module Overview

This module aims to prepare students for designing their dissertation (independent study) proposals and for applying to jobs and postgraduate programmes. Students will explore how to prepare for and ensure success in their dissertations, employment, and study/research by identifying and articulating their transferable skills, breadth of knowledge, expertise, and interests. The module will provide information on how to become aware of opportunities, to plan and prepare for the future, and to build on their undergraduate careers.

Module Overview

The module looks at a number of ways in which historians have studied the family in Britain between c.1500 and 1800. It will examine a range of historical approaches from the demographic to the more qualitative and anthropological. Close attention is paid to the problems historians of the pre-industrial family confront in their examination of the surviving primary sources.

Module Overview

The civil wars that raged across England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century were among the most turbulent and exhilarating times in British history. This module explores the diverse ways in which the wars were explained, experienced and remembered by those who lived through them. Students can consider the extent to which this period, often described as one of 'revolution', left a lasting impression on British society, culture, religion and politics.

Module Overview

This module, conceptually, textually, formally, and intellectually challenging, is designed to introduce students to a range of innovative literatures, in a variety of forms, in order both to interrogate the idea of experimental writing, and its own often aggressive interrogation of the expressive potential of literature.

Module Overview

Explore a wide range of cutting-edge digital approaches to studying the past through a significant and growing area of research, the digital humanities. By studying this module, you can focus on developing the practical skills, techniques, and methodologies that can play a vital role in your future studies and career.

The module provides opportunities to enhance, analyse, and interpret humanistic endeavours through approaches such as social network analysis, digital mapping, data visualisation, and textual analysis. You can also explore the impact and potential of artificial intelligence on the study of humanities in the digital worlds.

Module Overview

The modern period has often been understood as a time when peace was considered the natural state of societies, where states and non-governmental groups have been concerned with achieving a lasting peace and avoiding repetitions of bloody conflict. Wars, however, have not become a thing of the past, and today we live in a condition of seemingly permanent war where civilians are often the primary targets. This module will look at how ideas and practices of war have altered in the last few hundred years, and how these notions have been contested and challenged. The module asks where these ideas came from, and how concepts of war and peace, and violence and non-violence have been reframed in various ways. The course is focussed on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and moves chronologically from the Napoleonic wars, to contemporary conflicts through a series of case studies that cover wars, diplomacy, the aftermath of wars, and peace movements. Each case study will draw on key themes which run throughout the module, including pacifism, militarism, imperialism, culture, race, gender and nationalism.

Module Overview

This module examines British media and society in Britain from the end of World War I, through World War II, and into the uncertain waters of the postwar period and the 21st century. A range of domestic and international factors that shaped modern Britain will be investigated throughout the module, including the interwar slump, World War II, decolonisation, increased immigration, the ‘decline’ of the welfare state, the ‘Troubles’ in Ireland, the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, and Britain’s unsteady relationship with Europe. These events not only shaped Britain itself but also occurred in dialogue with the increasingly powerful role of media in the 20th and 21st centuries. This module will bring specific attention to the ways in which the press, cinema, radio, television, music, and also the web reflected, engaged with, and sometimes shaped popular understandings of society, culture, and politics in the period. We will examine this history of media in conjunction with a history of British society in order to investigate claims by historians that a ‘democratic culture’ emerged in 20th century Britain.

Module Overview

This module will interrogate aspects of the history of gender and sexuality in Britain over a 250-year span, coinciding with the arrival of ‘modernity’. It will introduce students to debates over the relationship between gender, sexuality, and structural changes in society, economy and politics, as well as thinking about gender and sexuality as discourse and subjectivity. Further, it will introduce students to a wide range of source material for the social and cultural history of early modern and modern Britain and seek to develop their confidence in using such diverse sources skillfully.

The module takes a thematic approach, although within each theme, specific chronological examples will be examined. Thus continuity and change can be highlighted, and it is intended to resist a narrative of progress towards ‘modern’ liberal views of gender and sexuality. However, a clear chronological framework will also be developed through examples which will help students gain a clear understanding of context.

Module Overview

The United States emerged from the Second World War a superpower, with, to an extent, a belief that it could remake the world. The challenges of the Cold War years were to demonstrate how limited was that power. This module explores the key social, political, economic and cultural developments in the United States between 1945 and 1990.

Module Overview

Works of fiction are not just a source of entertainment. They are a crucial and exciting route into understanding the past. Novels, short stories and poems allow us to understand how debates and ideas about society and identity circulated and how writers attempted to reinforce or change the way that readers looked at the world. This module will examine how a wide range of fiction produced in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addressed the key themes of class, politics and gender. Students will have the opportunity to examine the treatment of these concepts in genres as varied as crime fiction, popular romance, children’s literature, science fiction, war writing and feminist fiction.

Module Overview

This module analyses how physicians, other practitioners, and the public understood the body, disease, and health from antiquity to the modern era. The first part of the module will delineate how the medical system of Galen (2nd century AD) and humoral medicine guided Western medicine from antiquity until the 1800s. Students will then analyse the major challenges to this system from physicians such as Paracelsus, Vesalius, and William Harvey, as well as with the discovery of the germ theory of disease. Students will also explore the evolving role of states and local governments for public health, the development of the medical marketplace, changing understandings of the body, disease, and mental illness, and gender and medicine. The history of medicine will thus be placed in a greater religious, social, and cultural context, with a consideration of the role of medicine in popular culture. The module will therefore “embody” a cultural and intellectual approach to history and introduce students to the major historiographic debates in the history of medicine. Seminars will be primarily devoted to student-led case studies on specific themes, such as: Galenic case studies; Vesalius and anatomy, quackery in England; childbirth and midwifery; the rise of the medical profession; anatomy and the Anatomy Act; disease control and public health; madness and society; sexual health and the patient narrative.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to the understanding of exhibitions and curatorial practices. Following an introduction on the history of collections and museums, the course will explore the many issues related to the display of art and objects. It combines the study of theoretical approaches and the analysis of relevant case studies, and considers topics related to audiences for museums and exhibitions, the presentation and explanation of artefacts and artworks, and the new opportunities offered by digital technologies.

Module Overview

Italy is a highly-politicised and ideologically-divided country. Divisions and internal conflicts, which have reached dramatic peaks, are a permanent feature in Italian history. They mirror unsolved social and political contradictions that many historians consider to be the result of the process of the Italian Risorgimento. National unification was prompted by republicans, but it was the Monarchy that achieved it.

Module Overview

This module explores a broad sampling of major genres and authors, and aims to provide a basis for further study and enjoyment of Latin literature. Focusing on writers active between 90 BC and AD 14, often referred to as the Golden Age, we shall examine how the literature of this period bears witness to contemporary social, political and cultural transformations.

All texts will be read in English translation, though opportunities to read or translate from the original Latin will be available for interested students. This module is intended as a successor to the core first-year survey of Classical Literature.

Module Overview

This module examines some of the preoccupations of the fin de siècle through a series of texts and authors who helped to shape the cultural climate of the 1880s-1900s. These decades gave rise to a pervasive feeling of vital urgency and exhilaration in Britain, as well as a conflicted sense that society was teetering on a cliff edge of irredeemable degeneration. Texts will be read alongside and in light of social and political developments, such as anxieties about Britain’s empire and position on the global stage, evolution and degeneration, sexual identity, women’s rights, the rise of occultism and spiritualism, Decadence, and radical politics. The study of fin de siècle writing will be set against the backdrop of the infamous Oscar Wilde trial, and the sensationalised Jack the Ripper murders, contemporary anxieties about criminality, the empire, and eugenics.

Module Overview

How did people live and die in the middle ages? Drawing on the research expertise of the medievalists in the School, the module seeks to answer this question by addressing key themes relating to the life cycles of medieval people, from their childhood and education, via the roles that they took on in life (within families and in public; peaceful and violent), to their deaths. We will address primary sources that provide intimate insights into the everyday lives of medieval people: letters and autobiographies. Such sources will be contrasted with those that offer a more 'top-down' vision of how medieval society should function, such as rulebooks and conduct manuals. Finally, we will explore how people in the medieval period managed their material and spiritual interests through transactions recorded in documents such as charters and wills. A key aim of the module is to develop your research and writing skills by providing you with an opportunity to produce an extended piece of research. This, coupled with the intensive work with primary sources, will equip you to tackle a final year independent study in a wide range of medieval topics.

Module Overview

This module explores the relationship between madness and British society from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Students can examine how institutional approaches to the treatment of insanity have changed, from the eighteenth-century madhouse, to the Victorian asylum, to care in the community in the twentieth century. They will assess changing medical, legal and lay responses to insanity, including the role that class, gender, family and community played in defining insanity and its treatment.

Module Overview

In this module students will have the opportunity to explore the early twentieth century, one of the most creative periods in English literature, when writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence were challenging conventional ways of writing and reading, and rewriting how we experience and understand the world and ourselves. Required reading will include some of the most powerful works from the modern movement between 1910 and 1940 including James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Module Overview

This module will give students a unique opportunity to develop their practical skills for studying objects while developing their understanding of the relationship between history and material culture. Students can explore how object-based study can enhance their practice as conservators and historians and how material culture studies can lead to insights that cannot be reached through other approaches.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of media controversy and ‘moral panic’ during the twentieth century. It is designed to introduce students to media texts (especially films and television programmes) that have sparked debate and extreme differences of opinion among audiences in Britain and America. Students will be expected to engage with a range of films, television programmes and primary source material.

Module Overview

This is a general introductory module on the history of medicine and sexuality from 1850 to 2000. It aims to give an overview of some of the major themes within the modern history of medicine and sexuality. It focuses on how our understanding of the human body, reproduction and sexuality in a socio-cultural and political context evolved from the advent of evolutionary thought to present day debates about enhancement and reproductive medicine. Sexual behaviour and reproduction became major concerns in medicine and politics in the modern period. Sexuality became an object of scientific enquiry and governments developed new policies to regulate sexual behaviour. This module will give students an excellent grounding in modern and contemporary history that will complement further modules at level 2 and 3 that deal with sexuality, gender, race, science and medicine.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to some of the central concepts, issues, theories, and debates in an area of moral philosophy called "normative ethics", thereby providing them with a framework for thinking seriously about moral matters, and to assist them in developing their philosophical and analytical skills. We will distinguish and evaluate the leading positions on these issues through a range of more specific topics in normative ethics.

Module Overview

This module will concentrate on fine art (painting and sculpture) within Western Europe c.1750- c.1914. The module will explore the hegemony of Neoclassicism in the second half of the long eighteenth century through the seminal transformations of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Cubism in the nineteenth century.

Module Overview

People have migrated as long as the human race has existed and this module places this fundamental aspect of human experience at its heart. Issues surrounding migration and the movement of peoples are central to contemporary politics and society, as the management of people seeking refuge and better prospects preoccupies governments around the world. This situation makes ever more urgent our need to understand the history of migration and how it has shaped cultures across time and space. People on the move focuses upon the movement of people at particular points in modern history, considering the forces that propel people to risk their own lives and possibly those of their families, uproot from home and enter the potentially perilous and peripatetic life of a migrant. We will discuss the prospects and challenges of migration, and subsequently how diasporic cultures develop and the benefits and tensions surrounding integration. We will consider what happens when communities come into contact due to migration and the subsequent influences upon culture, religion, politics and identity. Through a series of in-depth case studies from the modern period, from the forced movement of the colonial era to twentieth century migration across the Atlantic, we will encounter a variety of geographical regions and processes of migration. A variety of historical sources will be interrogated to access the stories of migrants and about migrants, including texts (such legal and government documents, letters, memoirs and oral histories), images, objects and architecture. Addressing themes such as empire, economics, identity and religion in different contexts allows us to make meaningful comparisons between migrations across time and space.

Module Overview

This module examines literary representations of the world that emerge from the history of European exploration and expansion, and considers literary responses from groups that were marginalized through imperialism. Students will be encouraged to look at the treatment by white writers of issues of race and empire in the early twentieth century. They will also have the opportunity to explore ways in which postcolonial literatures develop strategies of 'writing back' to the imperial centre and re-thinking identity in terms of race, gender and nation. The final section offers a study of postcolonial Britain and some global implications of postcolonial writing.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to history of the US presidency by investigating selected past presidents from Washington to Trump. By reading and analysing the biographies of various presidents, key historical discussions as well as primary sources, including presidential addresses, campaign speeches, policy documents, and internal White House documents, and media accounts, students will be able to discuss and evaluate the major themes associated with the Office of the President.

The main question students will be asked to engage with through this course is “what makes an effective president?” In answering this question students will discuss themes ranging from the establishment of the office during the American Revolution, the ability of presidents to pass civil rights reform, the rise and fall of the imperial presidency, the decline and restoration of presidential influence, hidden illness in the oval office, the growth of partisanship, the impact of the media and presidential communication strategies, and the changing presidential electorate. By exploring these themes as well as the achievements, scandals and the legacies of various presidents, students will be able to determine how individual presidents have coped with the pressures of the office and what influence they have exerted on the office.

Module Overview

This module investigates the matter of sanctity during the middle ages, focusing in particular on two different aspects: the construction of the memory of saints, through texts, images and architecture, and the crucial role of their mortal remains. Spanning from the fourth to the fourteenth Century, this module offers not only a general approach to the phenomenon of sanctity, but also detailed analysis of different case studies, from early Christian saints and their commemoration in martyria to Romanesque shrines in France and Italy. The module then considers the phenomenon of new saints, through discussion of the celebrated site of Saint Francis’s burial, San Francesco, in Assisi. Students can explore the case of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, discussing how his memory was preserved in the text of his life and how his canonization was mirrored in the very fabric of Lincoln Cathedral.

Module Overview

This module looks to provide an introduction to the preventive conservation skills needed to set out as a practicing conservator. Students have the chance to develop an understanding of practical preventive conservation and collections management procedures, and can gain experience in environmental monitoring and surveying. Topics such as integrated pest management and emergency planning are also discussed.

Module Overview

Students studying Renaissance Literature have the opportunity to look in detail at a range of texts from the late Elizabethan period to the mid-1630s, including work by Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson and Mary Wroth. They also have the chance to explore the historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were produced, and the effects that they had on the politics and culture of the British Isles in the period. Lectures aim to examine post-Reformation England and late humanism, patronage, gender relations, early modern literary theory, education and philosophy.

Module Overview

This module explores cultural renaissances in Europe and beyond. Students can examine the survival, imitation and revival of classical models from ancient Greece and Rome from late antiquity to the modern period. We engage with historical debates on the issue of periodisation and ask how and why cycles of decline and renewal continue to shape our understanding of the past.

Module Overview

Students taking Restoration Literature, the companion module to Renaissance Literature, can study in detail a range of texts written between the era of the English Civil War and the first decade of the eighteenth Century, including work by John Milton; Andrew Marvell; Aphra Behn; and John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester. Students have the opportunity to also study the historical and cultural contexts in which these texts were produced. Lectures aim to examine the origins and effects of the civil war, the ethics of rebellion and reform, the Restoration theatre, religious controversies, gender relations, developing philosophical thought and Restoration manners.

Module Overview

Students will study English literature of the Romantic period (1780-1830), including poetry, fiction, autobiography, and political polemic. The module will address revolutions in politics and literary form and ideas of nature, the sublime, sensibility and feeling, abolition and slavery, Enlightenment feminism, the Gothic, Orientalism, and childhood. Students will have the opportunity to study works by writers including William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Olaudah Equiano, placing them in their cultural context.

Module Overview

Concern with, and ideas about, the supernatural influenced all areas of life for medieval and early modern men and women, and cut across all levels of society. In an age where religion was a state concern, many of these concerns were articulated or shaped within the context of the Church, all across Western Europe, yet throughout our period religious life was characterised by its great diversity. This module examines changing religious practices and beliefs in Europe, although with a particular focus on England, from the early Middle Ages until the seventeenth century, charting continuity and change in people’s thinking about their relationship – both individually and collectively - with the divine. The module is divided into three blocks: (1) early medieval, in which we explore the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, the slow emergence of an institutional church, missionary and conversion activities, and campaigns against heresy; (2) high to late medieval where we examine the tension between the theology of the church and the beliefs of the individual in a time of increased attempts at centralisation by the Western Church; (3) early modern, from the Reformation, via the Civil War, to early eighteenth-century rational religion and alternative versions of spirituality, and their impact on attitudes to religious and other minority groups.

Module Overview

East Africa became a significant theatre of empire from the mid-nineteenth century, when David Livingstone championed European intervention to bring ‘Christianity, commerce and civilisation’ to the region. This module will explore the expansion of the British Empire into East Africa from the late nineteenth-century era of ‘high imperialism’ until decolonisation in the 1960s. This region provides rich opportunities to deepen an understanding of imperialism and offers key themes in the history of empire, including exploration, slavery, race, identity, gender, imperial networks, cultural representation and indigenous agency.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for English students to spend a semester at second level studying at one of the University’s partner institutions, developing academically and personally. During the semester abroad students undertake a course load at the partner institution of equivalent standard to that of one semester of the programme at Lincoln. Participation in study abroad also offers unique opportunities for personal student development in the wider sense, taking in cultural, sporting and social opportunities.

In order to participate, students are usually expected to obtain a 2:1 or higher at Level 1, have a good record of attendance and participation, and must complete an application process. A limited number of places will be available each year, and participation is at the discretion of the Module Co-ordinator and the Programme Leader.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for History students to spend a term studying at one of the University’s partner institutions in North America or Europe. Students will be expected to cover their own transport, accommodation and living costs.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

The period from 1700 to 1850 was one of transition and change in the British Isles and North America, marking an ideological and material shift away from the legacy of medieval Europe and the period of initial colonial contact. This module challenges students to engage with historical, cartographical, and material evidence. Students are introduced to the landscapes, streetscapes, and social make-up of the long eighteenth century, and can discuss in seminars how broad events impacted everyday lives, the urban, and rural landscape.

Module Overview

This module examines Arthurian narratives, myths, and traditions within a variety of contexts and media, and traces a variety of themes associated with Arthur and his court, including history and national identity; violence; kingship and rule; loyalty and betrayal; and love, sex, and gender roles.

Students will be expected to assess the importance of a myth that spans more than a millennium and address how medieval texts made meaning within their specific socio-cultural situations, as well as how later periods make meaning through their deployment of the medieval in new contexts.

Module Overview

This module tests the claim that the period from the 1880s to the First World War was an ‘Age of Transition’, which witnessed the birth of modern British politics. Through an analysis of this argument, students are introduced to some of the major developments in British political history in the period 1885-1914, including the birth of the welfare state, the creation of the Labour Party, the conflict over ‘Votes for Women’ and British foreign policy before World War One.

Module Overview

This module surveys the history of the Roman Empire not as a succession of emperors and achievements, victories and defeats, but as a complex of experiments in government and of attitudes to governance. Beginning with the transition from representative republican rule to the domination of an imperial dynasty and its network of élite dependants in the early first century, and concluding with the incipient takeover of this system by a newly Christianised ruling class in the early fourth century, students can explore the role of the emperor in the Roman world and the patterns of communication between him and his subjects.

Module Overview

Almost all historians share the view that the social, economic and political structures of Europe in 1000 A.D. were significantly different to those that characterised the western superpower of Late Antiquity, the Roman Empire. In this challenging module, students will be encouraged to engage with a range of source material that will allow them to come to their own conclusions. Given this wide focus, students will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the fascinating story of post-Carolingian Europe in such a way that they enhance their abilities to think comparatively, a crucial weapon in the historian’s armoury.

Module Overview

This module aims to develop students' understanding of the political, social and cultural history of Late Antiquity (150-750), with a particular focus on two world-changing religious developments: the rise of Christianity and Islam. Although the geographical focus of our studies will be on eastern Mediterranean lands of an empire ruled from Constantinople, known to later scholars as the Byzantine Empire, the geographical range of the module will be wide and include western Europe, including the western Mediterranean, Persia, Arabia, and ‘barbarian’ territories beyond the Roman frontiers on the Rhine and Danube.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to some of the key interdisciplinary themes in American cultural history in the first half of the twentieth century as well as to theoretical works that have shaped American cultural studies since the 1950s. The module will investigate and evaluate academic argument relating to the study of American cultural history from a variety of theoretical, philosophical and methodological perspectives including feminism, social theory, post-structuralism, and postmodernism.

Module Overview

This module will introduce students to the principles of understanding, evaluating and constructing exhibitions. It will focus on exhibiting in art, history and archaeology and will include both theoretical approaches to the understanding and critique of exhibitions and practical aspects of mounting an exhibition. The module will include visiting museums, galleries and other exhibition spaces to examine and analyse exhibitions in situ, as well as talks from museum professionals on aspects of exhibition development. Students will be assessed through the production of plans for a small temporary exhibition they develop individually.

Module Overview

This module is designed to introduce the basic skills of working with glass, ceramic and fine metalwork. It provides an opportunity to investigate the potential and limitations of working with various materials, processes and techniques, associated with the practice of object manufacture against a relevant historical background.

Module Overview

Between the 11th and the 12th centuries Europe went through some radical changes. This module will focus on case studies, such as Lincoln, London and Paris, among others. Students will have the opportunity to study how and why such centres grew from small towns to some of the greatest and most vibrant metropolis of Western Europe in the Middle Ages. For a comparative study, a range of primary sources will be taken into account, including contemporary descriptions of these cities and their inhabitants, historical records, art and architecture.

Module Overview

The typical image of a rural village, whether a chocolate box idyll prettily nestled around its church or a commuter dormitory boringly empty of anything fun to do, rarely shows much evidence for anything dramatic. However, these places were created by people who lived through events which are almost unimaginable to us today including the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, and for whom a perpetual challenge was simply surviving in a period where barely half of those born lived to adulthood. In this module students will have the opportunity to learn how to critically analyse and interpret historical and archaeological evidence and to use their knowledge and skills to write a new history of any rural settlement of their choice.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to the lives and experiences of women in the ancient world. By engaging with a wide range of material, visual and written evidence, students can investigate both the real historical circumstances of women’s lives and the ways in which they were constructed, represented and perceived.

The focus of this module is on the Roman world, and the material considered ranges in date from the Republican period to the end of the second Century AD. Material from Greece, especially where it affects Roman art, literature and ideas, will also be considered.

Module Overview

This module is designed to explore ideas of heritage protection, management and conservation from around the world. It will consider United Nations' efforts in the field and consider how this international perspective shapes local and national actions.

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In this module, students will have the opportunity to take a vivid and intellectually exciting journey through primary and secondary sources in order to understand the historical trajectory of the Iberian Peninsula from the end of the sixth century to the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031. The aim of the module is to provide an introduction to two major medieval cities, Toledo and Córdoba, via acquaintance with and discussion of material that allows us to reflect upon a fascinating complex of problems.

Module Overview

In the Twentieth Century new aviation technologies transformed understandings of war, peace, civilian and military. The module considers how ideas about air power developed, what informed this understanding of war, and what the consequences were. This is not a traditional military history concerned with narrative accounts of battles or armies, but one that asks questions about the relationship between military and civilian in society and culture in the twentieth century.

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Why have detective narratives proved so enduringly popular? This module will interrogate the iconic figure of the private eye in American popular culture, through the fiction and film of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

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This module explores a key resource for understanding the thoughts, feelings and conversations of ancient people. Graffiti in Greek and Latin (and other languages) were marked onto fixed and portable surfaces throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and their informal and non-official nature offers a unique window into the lives and worldviews of people often invisible or marginal in standard documentary, literary and material sources

Module Overview

This module will give students an opportunity to engage in close philosophical study of texts by the most influential ancient philosophers. Texts will be studied in English translation. They will include works by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by less familiar philosophers of the ancient world (c. 500 BC-500 AD Greece and Rome). The focus of the module will be philosophical, not interpretive or historical: students will be expected assess the credibility of the positions and arguments advanced by Plato, Aristotle and others and to develop their own views in dialogue with these thinkers.

Module Overview

The victories of Arab armies over the forces of the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the seventh century were of monumental importance. Not only did they signal the decline of the two great superpowers of the late ancient world but they were accompanied, some scholars would argue caused, by the rise of a new monotheistic world religion: Islam. The first half of the module seeks to understand the conquests of the Arab armies and the emergence of Islam historically and culturally, in two specific contexts: (1) political conflict between the Persian and Byzantine Empires, during which Arabia often acted as a military frontier and different Arab groups as allies to one side or another; (2) contact and competition between Christianity, Judaism and other religious traditions in Arabia. The second half of the module explores how, after the initial victories over the Byzantine and Persian Empires, the new Islamic polity renewed itself, rolled forward further conquests, and focuses in particular on how an ‘Islamic’ culture was formed.

Module Overview

This module will explore the different schools of thought and the political activities of the various groups and individuals that comprised the anarchist movement. Anarchism is a political doctrine based on freedom, egalitarianism and social justice and that developed in Europe as a political movement in the mid-XIX century. Anarchism never reached the ascendancy achieved by liberalism or communism; however, it had a significant influence on the political ideas, social movements, culture, and education of the international labour movement.

Module Overview

This module examines both the birth and development of the concept of chivalry in the Middle Ages. Students can use a wide range of primary sources, as well as medieval and contemporary historiography, to explore how the role, image and function of medieval knights evolved over time.

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The module will examine consumption in many of its forms in early modern Western Europe. Focusing on a number of areas, such as food, clothing, furnishings, houses and other goods increasingly accessible to people at all levels of society, the module will encourage students to consider how and why these were available.

Module Overview

This module offers an opportunity to engage with American literature (in a variety of forms) and some of its socio-historical, political and ideological contexts from the late 1990s to the present day. We will explore aspects of canon-formation in American fiction, and study a selection of texts by both new and established writers, in some cases at the point where they are first published in paperback. We will take a thematic approach, locating American cultural production in regional, national and global contexts, with a particular emphasis on writing in the 21st century. There are no pre-requisites for this module.

Module Overview

This module will enable students to engage in the research and development of displays through the process of curating an exhibition for the museum or heritage sector. Students will select objects and structure this selection through an appropriate narrative. They will propose modes and examples of interpretation such as gallery text, audio or visual aids. The emphasis will be on developing knowledge and understanding of the role and responsibilities of the curator, and the project will enable students to evidence a focused and critically rigorous curatorial rationale.

Module Overview

This module considers early modern imperialism and its impact on artistic production at a global scale. Students will have the opportunity to examine Iberia and its world as a point for cultural encounter and cross-fertilization. The module aims to explore how local communities conflated their symbols of identity within transnational artistic trends and through a number of carefully selected case studies, will analyse the way in which communities – artists, patrons, collectors and audiences – negotiated these cultural encounters in the production and assimilation of the arts.

Module Overview

This module explores the legacy of English landscape painting, for instance in the work of John Constable, Paul Nash and others, which has played a fundamental part in perpetuating such imagery within our national consciousness. It will encourage a critical appreciation of artistic influences, the personal feelings, cultural attitudes and ideological perspectives in relation to the varied depictions of the English countryside. The close relationship between these depictions and the social and economic history of English rural society during the period c.1690 to present will be stressed throughout the module.

Students will also critically identify, from a wider range of images and texts such as literature, film and advertising, the subjectivity of evidence that encourages popular impressions of the English countryside.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of science, sexuality and politics in the UK, Continental Europe, the US and Latin America from 1850 to 2000. It will give students an excellent grounding in modern and contemporary history that will complement further modules at level 3 that deal with sexuality, gender, race, science and medicine. It module examines the controversial rise of eugenics movements as a global phenomenon. The purpose of this module is to sustain a balanced and informed discussion about how race, reproduction, and the improvement of human heredity have acquired great political relevance in the modern period. It explores how scientists and different governments became preoccupied with hereditary theories, race, reproduction and sexual behaviour. It examines how societies across the Atlantic developed government policies around areas such as family planning, pronatalism, sterilisation, and race, which culminated in the implementation of euthanasia programmes in Nazi Germany. This module looks at eugenics programmes and politics in a transnational context, exploring how, for example, Nazi Germany’s sterilisation programmes were inspired by those already implemented in the US and how a number of Latin American countries adapted and transformed eugenics policies from Southern Europe and developed whitening policies.

Module Overview

This module explores the various ways in which the world was put on display in the nineteenth century, and with what aims and effects. The nineteenth century was a period during which museums, galleries, exhibitions, zoos and circuses all expanded in numbers and took on distinctive modern forms; it was also one where the ‘freak show’ became both popular but also frowned upon, while optical toys and attractions reformed ‘ways of seeing’.

Module Overview

This module explores the transformation of the United States from a set of thirteen colonies to an independent republic. Topics considered include: the causes of the Revolution, the governance of the new republic, the place of the new republic in the world, the experiences of excluded groups (loyalists, native Americans, African Americans).

Module Overview

Monsters and attics, desolate landscapes, imprisonment and pursuit: the gothic genre emerged in the late eighteenth century to depict our darkest fears and desires. Termed 'the literature of nightmare', gothic departs from a realistic mode of representation and employs a powerful means of symbolic expression. Students are given the opportunity to investigate ways in which the genre has explored psychological and political anxieties, and themes of sexual and social transgression. We consider literary texts from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including literature and film, and we give attention to sub-genres such as ‘female gothic’, ‘imperial gothic’ and ‘children’s gothic’.

Module Overview

This module will explore the development, decline and revival of stained glass from the early middle ages to the mid twentieth century. The focus will be on British stained glass with particular reference to windows that students can visit in person, particularly in Lincoln Cathedral and the parish churches of the region. Students will learn to analyse windows through a number of methodological frameworks in particular: production (design and manufacture), consumption (patronage, iconography and meaning) and aesthetics (style, drawing, manipulation of light).

Module Overview

This module explores what it meant to grow up and to grow old in the nineteenth century, through often contradictory accounts of experiencing age categories from childhood to old age.

Students will have the opportunity to examine various constructions of ageing, to reflect on age as a crucial facet of identity. This module considers age as a lens to explore the nineteenth century as a transitional period of growth and expansion as well as decay and decline, through a range of Romantic and Victorian texts.

Module Overview

Historian, journalist, political commentator and gossip columnist Matthew Paris, monk of St Albans, wrote what is still one of our main sources for British history of the thirteenth century. This module looks at Matthew Paris’s Great Chronicle, considering both Matthew himself and what he tells us about thirteenth-century English society. Students have the opportunity to think about what history was in the thirteenth-century and about attitudes to foreigners and national identity; power and poverty; propaganda and fiction; and time, space and the apocalypse.

Module Overview

Students at level three have to undertake an Independent Study project. This is an extended piece of work that gives them the opportunity to demonstrate they have acquired the skills to undertake historical inquiry and analysis.

Module Overview

In their final year, every student on the BA (Hons) History degree programme at the University of Lincoln must produce an independent study. This is an extended piece of work which gives them the opportunity to demonstrate they have acquired the skills to undertake detailed and substantial subject-specific research and writing founded on critical inquiry and analysis.

Module Overview

This module covers the history and historiography of one of the most popular and sophisticated systems of medicine in the world: Chinese medicine. Starting from a comparison of the conceptualisation and representation of the body in early China versus ancient Greece, the module introduces students to key ideas in Chinese medicine such as “Yin Yang”, “Five Processes”, “Qi”, “Meridians” and “Five Organs and Six Bowels”. Diagnosis (including pulse-taking and tongue examination) and therapy (including moxibustion and acupuncture) are explored, alongside the Chinese tradition of “self-cultivation” and the various techniques that promote health –– and even immortality. Theories concerning food and drugs are dissected, and the tremendous plurality of practitioners throughout the history of Chinese medicine are analysed in detail. No prior knowledge on the history of medicine, Chinese history, or Chinese language is required.

Module Overview

The module will give students practical experience of the workplace. Students will normally define, plan and undertake a specific project. In addition students will gain experience of a range of tasks appropriate to sector-specific professional skills.

Module Overview

Hong Kong’s history lies at the intersection of Chinese, British imperial, and transnational histories. This module explores the history of Hong Kong from its colonisation by Britain in 1841 up to the present day.

The module seeks to introduce the city’s history to students, explore the ways historians have engaged with and approached this history, and to help students develop skills of historical analysis and debate. Through engaging with the rich historical debates and with English-language and translated primary materials, students on this module may study issues and themes including, but not limited to: imperialism; colonialism; transnational networks; international and diplomatic history; economic and business history; social history; urban history; migration and diaspora history.

Module Overview

One of the ways in which early modern monarchs and rulers legitimised their authority and projected their power was through architecture and urban design. In this period capital cities across Europe, America and Asia were embellished with architecture and urban design inspired by Renaissance ideals of social order. This module examines the ways rulers imagined and built a number of imperial capital cities across Europe, America and Asia.

Module Overview

In this module students have the opportunity to research in depth an author or topic of their choosing. Students are expected to commence research over the summer between Levels 2 and 3 and, on their return, have regular, one-to-one meetings with a tutor who is a research specialist in that field. The supervisor offers advice and direction, but primarily this module encourages independent research leading to the production of a 10,000 word dissertation.

Module Overview

What was the workhouse? What was life like within its doors? Into the workhouse explores this infamous institution in England and Wales, from its beginnings as just one of a variety of methods of relieving poverty, through to its zenith in the Victorian era with the implementation of a harsh regime. We will trace this transition, from fairly ad hoc cottage through to purpose-built institution, throughout this module. We start the course by asking: who were ‘the poor’? And what help was available to them? We will learn what poor relief was, and how it was an important part of a broader economy of makeshifts - offering everything from money to bread, from shoes to tools, and from a bed to medical help. How poor relief operated varied from place to place until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. This ‘New’ poor law placed a Commission in charge of a compulsory workhouse system with which we are familiar from novels and films. Why and how this new system was created will be our next focus, before we embark on a field trip to a workhouse and museum to understand what life was like within its walls.

While the Victorian workhouse is often portrayed as a static and dreary Dickensian place, full of helpless individuals, this module will uncover a fresh, dynamic perspective. We will find out how individuals navigated and used workhouses, and how they asserted their agency. We will understand how workhouses were protested against, and pulled into disrepute in a series of national scandals. Workhouses were also a site of immense social innovation, especially in medical care. The institution saw renewed attention in the late nineteenth-century but came to an end in 1929. What led to its demise and the lasting legacy will be studied in the final week. In this module you will critically analyse a wide range of sources, including official reports, parish registers, plans and maps and workhouse artefacts, as well as first-hand accounts of workhouse life in legal depositions, pauper letters, poems and diaries.

Module Overview

This module is designed to examine how terms such as Ireland and Irishness have been constructed and questioned across the last century, a period of immense and often turbulent historical and social change. It aims to explore the representation of place, the nature of nationalism, the changing family unit, gender roles and Ireland's relationship to globalization in Irish poetry, drama and fiction.

Module Overview

This module explores the world of Latin epistolary culture from the late Republic to the early Patristic period of the fourth Century AD. The preservation of documentary letters on materials such as stone and papyrus offer a complementary perspective on the lives, experiences and concerns of ordinary men and women across the Mediterranean. Students can consider a wide range of letter types, including about trade and agriculture, introductions and recommendations (literary and otherwise), and epistolary poetry.

Module Overview

This module responds to the recent interest in the representation of lives within literary studies. It discusses a range of life representations (including biography, autobiography, letters, confessions, memoirs, and poems) from the Romantic period to the contemporary moment. Students may consider the origins of autobiography, address Modernist experiments with life representations, and discuss twentieth-century and contemporary innovations, including disability narratives and cross-cultural autobiographies. Themes such as the construction of selfhood, conceptions of memory, the relational self, and the ethics of life writing are addressed.

Module Overview

The first principle of ecological thinking is that it is not only human beings that are meaningful, and that we are neither so separate from, nor so dominant over, the non-human as we tend to think. In this module students can explore what difference it makes to read literature from this perspective. We study literature as part of our complex interaction with our environment, and, perhaps sometimes, as a uniquely valuable one. Students can read texts from ancient Greek pastoral to contemporary dystopias, and from the poet John Clare to the woodland historian Oliver Rackham.

Module Overview

This module explores how criminal lunatics - criminals who developed insanity in prison and individuals who committed a crime whilst insane - were represented and treated in nineteenth century Britain. Students can examine why some criminals were deemed insane and others were not; how criminal lunacy was defined in medicine and in law; how and why the institutions, people and practices for treating the criminal and criminal lunatic changed over the period; the role gender and class played in crimes, trials, diagnoses and treatment; and how criminality and criminal insanity were represented by laymen.

Module Overview

Making Militants explores the role of violent teaching practices of various sorts in the making of men and women in Late Antiquity. Focusing on the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, it addresses a pivotal period in the transition from the ancient to the medieval world, surveying the multiple small-scale arenas that made up the Late Antiquity – the household, the schoolroom, the barracks and the monastery. By close reading of letters, biographical accounts, rulebooks, speeches and a wide range of other sources, we consider how violent educative practices made people who were capable of operating in a changing, unpredictable and often dangerous world. The men and women who were made in such spaces were the products of a society that was fundamentally violent, their own violence a product of long-established socialisation practices rather than acts of anti-social deviance.

Module Overview

This module will analyse how the medicalised body has been represented, exploited, challenged and reclaimed in art and visual culture. The themes, ideas, priorities and objects of medicine – such as death, health, sexuality, taboo, trauma, bodily functions, and viscera – have taken centre stage in art and visual culture since the end of the nineteenth century. This module will explore the manifold ways in which artists have engaged with subjects including medical technologies, disease, disability, blood, and pain, and we will do so in relation to constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class and ability. What significance do pathology, disease, and patient experience take on in art and visual culture? To what effects have artists portrayed and perhaps questioned modern therapies and medical technologies, and their subjects, practices and theories? We will focus on a range of media including painting, sculpture, performance art, conceptual art, film, and photography.

Module Overview

The 20th century saw unprecedented social, economic, political and cultural change in Britain. However, the equally dramatic shifts in how sexuality and masculinity were experienced and represented are often ignored. This module aims to enable students to study the history of 20th Century Britain while using the lens of gender and sexuality to understand how ordinary men lived their lives. Students will get the opportunity to work with a wide variety of primary sources such as: court records, newspapers, film, photographs, music, autobiographies, oral history and literature.

Module Overview

This module explores the representation of East-West contact in Middle English romances, with a particular emphasis on the interlacement of racial and ethnic otherness and on different types of violence, from martial exploits and religious coercion to rape and cannibalism.

Students will have the chance to experience the breadth of the romance genre—its many thematic and topical branches, and its many sub-genres and their respective conventions—as well as insight to the actual act of crusading, and the cultural and social crises that arose from this act.

Module Overview

This module examines some of the philosophical issues raised by the Newtonian revolution in the natural sciences, such as: What is the nature of Newton’s distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ space? In what sense can forces be said to exist? What is the ontology of force? Is it sufficient to provide a mathematical definition of force (e.g., f=ma)? Is gravity a special kind of force with its own unique set of properties? What is the nature of ‘action at a distance’? Is Newton’s view of space metaphysical? This is an interdisciplinary module that situates Newtonian science in its sociocultural context.

Module Overview

This module explores literature by nineteenth-century women writers through the Romantic and Victorian eras up to the suffrage campaigns. We explore how women negotiated cultural ideals of femininity and the challenges of authorship to produce writings across forms including novel, short story, poetry, play, and in a range of genres such as social realism, gothic, fairy tale and life writing. We consider how these works engage with contemporaneous social debates, especially about women’s social position. Authors addressed include Jane Austen, Anne Bronte, Dorothy Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Mary Molesworth, Amy Levy and Elizabeth Robins. These works are interpreted in relation to their cultural context and in light of recent critical debates.

Module Overview

This module will investigate the history of imperial Britain through material culture. The objects of study will range from trophies looted in battle and a drum transported with slaves to Virginia, to African sculpture depicting Europeans. Historians increasingly recognise the fresh insights that objects offer to major themes in imperial history such as gender, race and class. This module responds to these new academic developments and will use objects and their biographies to study key phases and themes in the history of the British Empire. Tracing the long history of such objects can enable us to explore how objects change meanings as they move through various colonial and post-colonial contexts.

Module Overview

This module examines the emergence, development and legacy of Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism and how these movements influenced British culture. The module will explore how Pre-Raphaelite painters attempted to redefine the natural role of art and how ‘Aesthetic’ artists went on to question their approach. The module will explore the work of the key protagonists of each movement and how their work crossed over into other media such as stained glass, painted furniture and book illustration.

Module Overview

Portrayals of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lives on screen are under increasing scrutiny from audiences, activists and media scholars. But, for much of the history of film and television, non-normative sexual and gender identities have been marginalised or hidden. This module examines the history of queer representations in screen culture from the era of silent films to the present day. Students will have the opportunity to work with examples from a range of national contexts, including (but not limited to) Britain and America, as well as engaging with influential scholarship in queer theory and the history of gender and sexuality.

Module Overview

How can history and heritage be more inclusive of LGBTIQ+ lives and experiences? And how can queer perspectives help us to better understand the complexities of the past? This module responds to these questions by examining queer histories from the Ancient World to the present day. Taking a global view, the module investigates how concepts such as sex, sexuality, gender, the body, friendship, and family have been organised in diverse ways across different times and places. In addition to considering how particular sexual and gender identities have emerged, the module also engages with ideas of queer history as a method for historical enquiry: one that is sceptical about binary analyses and linear narratives of progress.

Module Overview

Media and screen culture were powerful means of defining ‘Englishness’ as a racial construct in the 20th century. This module examines the complex relationship between race, media, and screen culture from World War I, when representations of the British empire were increasingly available to British audiences, up to the 1980s, when tensions over immigration were evident on film and television screens throughout the UK. Students will examine constructions of race across a variety of primary sources including ‘empire films’ from the 1930s, documentaries, home-movies, and television, as well as media authored by Black and Asian Britons in the post-war period. Students will gain a critical in-depth understanding of the place of race within British screen culture, media, and society in the 20th Century.

Module Overview

Although early modern England was a kingdom, governed by a monarch, many historians have claimed that there was a strong ‘republican’ undercurrent to Tudor and Stuart political thought. This module introduces students to the key approaches and methodologies of the history of ideas by focusing upon the various ways in which scholars have studied and conceptualised republicanism in early modern England and the ongoing debate surrounding the origin, content and influence of republican ideas in the period 1500-1700.

Module Overview

This module explores the history, archaeology, visual and material culture of Roman Lincoln (Lindum Colonia), within the context of the provinces of Roman Britain. It is designed to provide students with the opportunity to handle and analyse objects from the Lincolnshire Archives and The Collection museum, to engage with the evidence that is visible in the modern city, to engage with excavation reports as primary evidence, and to consider how a military and urban centre was connected to rural sites, towns and the forts beyond.

Module Overview

This module explores the political, social, economic, cultural, and religious history of two capitals of the Roman empire: Rome and Constantinople, or Old Rome and New Rome as they came to be called in the East. These were imperial cities where the most powerful figures - emperors and patriarchs, popes and saints - of Antiquity and the Middle Ages constructed and destroyed, appropriated and reorientated spaces, buildings, and structures. In this module we shall look at palaces and fortifications, hippodromes and churches, triumphal arches and mausolea, fora and harbours, discovering and discussing not only how and why they were built and maintained, but also their perception and remembrance over the centuries from 200 to 1200. Students will gain knowledge of the evolving configuration of Rome and Constantinople, and have the opportunity to prepare a cultural biography of a monument of their choice from one of these two cities of empire.

Module Overview

This module investigates the nature of rulership during the middle ages, exploring how images and architecture served to visually define and articulate the authority of kings and rulers during the Middle Ages. The module will discuss in depth three different case studies: Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire; the Norman rulers of Southern Italy; Louis IX and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

Module Overview

This module considers the genre of modern science fiction and its evolution into one of today’s most popular narrative genres. Analysing a variety of forms – novel, short story, drama, graphic novel and film – students will have the opportunity to examine the socio-historical contexts of some of the most influential narratives of this period.

This ranges from the emergence of “scientific romance” in the late nineteenth century, to late twentieth-century forms like cyberpunk and radical fantasy; from the problems of defining “genre fictions” and privileging science fiction over fantasy, to our enduring fascination with alternate histories, non-human agents (robots, animals, genetic hybrids, the environment), ecocatastrophe and post-apocalypse.

Module Overview

This module concentrates on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, with a particular emphasis on The Canterbury Tales, perhaps Chaucer’s most famous work. Students will have the opportunity to examine the General Prologue and a variety of tales in relation to their historical context and literary antecedents, and, throughout, specific attention will be given to questions of genre (ranging from fable and epic to satire and romance), literary authority, narrative construction, and medieval aesthetics.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for students to study the works of Shakespeare in detail. The dissemination, influence, and adaptation of Shakespeare is unrivalled, and without an understanding of the conventions that the works dissolved and those that they initiated, a full appreciation of the canon of English literature is inevitably lessened.

This modules challenges Shakespeare’s status as an icon of tradition and elitism by reading the texts in the light of recent developments in critical theory, and by locating them in the culture of their age. Students will be invited to examine the ways in which different theoretical approaches might have a bearing upon the interpretation of Shakespeare, they will also be conversant with the religious climate of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the conditions of performance and play-going in Shakespeare’s theatre, and the significant cultural and historical events of the period.

Module Overview

This module allows students to study the works of the Bard in detail, and to read them in the light of critical theory and literary history. Shakespeare’s plays are a cornerstone of the canon of English literature, but in wider culture they are often treated as inflexible repositories of ‘truth’ and ‘human nature’.

This module will resist such approaches, and concentrate instead upon the ways in which the plays address the concerns of their day, as well as how they have been made to signify in other eras. Students can develop an understanding of how Shakespeare’s work dealt with early modern dramatic conventions, politics, and thought; how it addressed questions of history, religion, and race; and how it shaped the culture within which it was written. This module considers Shakespeare’s mature comedies, histories, and tragedies.

Module Overview

This module allows students to pursue an in-depth study of one author’s literary or dramatic works. The author of choice varies from year to year according to academics’ current research interests, but potential authors may include writers of fiction and/or poetry such as Angela Carter, Charlotte Bronte, Iain Banks, Thomas Pynchon, M.R.James, Jane Austen and Sylvia Plath; and dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Thomas Middleton, Aphra Behn, Ben Johnson and debbie tucker green. Students will explore the writer’s oeuvre in terms of themes, style, and engagement with form and genre traditions, and with contemporary cultural debates. We also address practicalities of authorship such as the role of editors, publishing/performance formats, and different readerships/audiences. Students will also consider the writer’s legacies including the ‘afterlife’ of their works in adaptation. As well as studying texts, students will engage with conceptual debates about the role of the author : is attention to the author’s life an outmoded and over-deterministic approach to the study of a text? or a necessary part of contextualisation? As we scrutinise the figure of the author in biography, literary societies, literary tourism and popular culture, we ask : what purposes does the ‘author’ as a cultural construction serve ? and does this have anything to do with reading?

Module Overview

This module allows students to pursue an in-depth study of one author’s literary or dramatic works. The author of choice varies from year to year according to academics’ current research interests, but potential authors may include writers of fiction and/or poetry such as Angela Carter, Charlotte Bronte, Iain Banks, Thomas Pynchon, M.R.James, Jane Austen and Sylvia Plath; and dramatists such as Caryl Churchill, Thomas Middleton, Aphra Behn, Ben Johnson and debbie tucker green. Students will explore the writer’s oeuvre in terms of themes, style, and engagement with form and genre traditions, and with contemporary cultural debates. We also address practicalities of authorship such as the role of editors, publishing/performance formats, and different readerships/audiences. Students will also consider the writer’s legacies including the ‘afterlife’ of their works in adaptation. As well as studying texts, students will engage with conceptual debates about the role of the author : is attention to the author’s life an outmoded and over-deterministic approach to the study of a text? or a necessary part of contextualisation? As we scrutinise the figure of the author in biography, literary societies, literary tourism and popular culture, we ask : what purposes does the ‘author’ as a cultural construction serve ? and does this have anything to do with reading?

Module Overview

Slavery was fundamental to the society and economy of Late Antiquity, as it was throughout much of the ancient world. This module explores the different ways in which slavery and dependency structured how the people of the late ancient world lived, as far as possible focusing on the experiences of the enslaved themselves. Drawing on laws, literary texts, religious writings and material and visual culture, students will gain a deep understanding of the complexities of slavery, will develop their vocabulary for talking about enslavement as social and cultural praxes, and will learn how to use a range of research resources for examining the social worlds of Late Antiquity. The module will be assessed through the production of a series of blog posts, so that students will also learn the valuable skills of writing for the web and creating interesting and engaging digital content.

Module Overview

Teaching History deepens students' understanding of the practice of teaching history in the classroom. The module encourages students, especially but not exclusively those who may be considering a career in education (or related industries), to think more deeply about pedagogic theory and teaching practice in History. Students will be given the opportunity to gain some practical experience in instructing their peers and online audiences. There will be a strong focus on reflecting on prior learning experiences and the module will begin by providing students with an overview of the history of history teaching. History teaching will be examined at primary and secondary level, and in other educational contexts.

Module Overview

This module aims to examine how living in cities shaped the ways our lives and society have developed since the 19th Century. In the early 19th Century the population of Europe largely lived in rural settlements, yet 100 years later the populations of Western Europe's cities had exploded. Cities produced new forms of social organisation: for the first time drag queens and prostitutes rubbed shoulders with housewives, the rich discovered the poor on their very doorsteps and the unregulated spaces of cities became havens for counter-cultures, deviant sexualities and radical politics.

Module Overview

This module surveys the history of the Roman Empire not as a succession of emperors and achievements, victories and defeats, but as a complex of experiments in government and of attitudes to governance. Beginning with the transition from representative republican rule to the domination of an imperial dynasty and its network of élite dependants in the early first century, and concluding with the incipient takeover of this system by a newly Christianised ruling class in the early fourth century, students can explore the role of the emperor in the Roman world and the patterns of communication between him and his subjects.

Module Overview

This module will focus on the process of economic and political integration, which has taken place in Western Europe since 1945. The emphasis will be placed on the global forces which have shaped, and are still shaping, this process of integration. The module will also investigate the impact of the Cold and Korean Wars, the European Recovery Programme and other factors from outside Europe.

Module Overview

This module explores how childhood is constructed in a wide range of literary texts – texts by adults for adults, by adults for children, and by children themselves. Underpinning the module is the notion of ‘childhood’ as a cultural construct into which writers invest various, even contradictory, meanings. Students have the opportunity to explore texts by adults who idealise or demonise the child to suit their personal and philosophical agendas. Students may then analyse the mixture of didactic and therapeutic agendas in enduring genres of children’s literature such as the fairytale, adventure story and cautionary tale. Finally, we turn to children as authors in a study of juvenilia.

Module Overview

The world as we encounter it in visual perception is a world of coloured objects – red buses, yellow daffodils, blue skies, and the like. Colour raises a variety of perplexing philosophical puzzles concerning the nature of physical reality and our epistemic to the mental states of others. This module serves as an introduction to these issues.

Some of the questions to be explored include: Do objects really have the colours we ordinarily take them to possess? If so, what sort of property is colour? Are colours really just ‘impressions’ that exist only in the mind? If so, what causes these impressions? Do such impressions have representational content? What is the relationship between philosophical and scientific theories of colour? This is an interdisciplinary module that also explores issues relating to colour in art history and the history of science.

Module Overview

To the citizens of the Roman world, civility (civilitas) – right conduct of government, sound behaviour of individuals, citizenship itself – was a function of the city (civitas), which constituted the centre of the Roman state and society. This module will take students on a guided tour of the Roman city, using each stop along the way as a point of entry into one or more aspects of the politics, society, economy, and culture of Rome and its empire. Students will be challenged to reimagine urban life via a detailed engagement with a representative array of written, material, and visual sources and the main lines of the secondary literature.

Module Overview

Before the Roman invasion of AD 43, everyone in Britain lived in ‘the countryside’, for the simple reason that there were no cities or towns. Indeed, throughout the four centuries of Roman rule which followed, the vast majority of people still lived outside of urban and military centres. The core objective of this module is an archaeological exploration of the great diversity of evidence, analysing the significance of the changing nature of rural society and the creation of rural landscapes and identities, focusing on Britain from the late pre-Roman Iron Age, through the Roman period, to its sub-Roman aftermath (c. 100 BC–AD 500).

Module Overview

This module examines how African Americans tried to cast off the economic, political, cultural and social ties that bound them to second-class citizenship within the United States. We primarily focus on the Southern version of the black freedom struggle before casting our attention to a wider American political, social, and racial context — particularly as we challenge “the master narrative” of the civil rights movement that was once presented and represented as the singular history of the movement for African American freedom.

In charting the course of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century and beyond, we analyse the most venerated events and personalities of the era and aim to understand the movement on its own terms. We will explore its richness and its internal complexities, especially when reviewing the varying tactics and ideological differences of the movement’s leaders. The module asks us to question the presumed victories of the civil rights movement, to stretch our chronological understanding beyond traditional beginnings and endings, to acknowledge the complexity of American racial identity, and reveal what it tells us about the wider political and social dimensions of modern US history.

Module Overview

The image of Vikings from the north plundering their way across Europe is firmly fixed in popular imagination. Few people stop to think that the same people were also farmers, the heads of families and had home lives. The historical sources for the Vikings in the North Atlantic are pitifully few – a small number of sagas and a few other records. We often know more about the Vikings from those with whom they came into contact than from their own accounts.

This module integrates the different lines of evidence – historical, archaeological and environmental – and evaluates whether the idea of a ‘Viking world’ is a useful approach. Students can gain an introduction to texts in translation and archaeological reports, and explore the main limitations of our understanding of the North Atlantic regions in this period.

Module Overview

This module aims to develop students' understanding of the political, social and cultural history of Late Antiquity (150-750), with a particular focus on two world-changing religious developments: the rise of Christianity and Islam. Although the geographical focus of our studies will be on eastern Mediterranean lands of an empire ruled from Constantinople, known to later scholars as the Byzantine Empire, the geographical range of the module will be wide and include western Europe, including the western Mediterranean, Persia, Arabia, and ‘barbarian’ territories beyond the Roman frontiers on the Rhine and Danube.

Module Overview

This module aims to explore new thematic trends, stylistic innovations and cultural developments in post-millennial British fiction, including a focus on globalising processes, transnational migration and digital technology.

The module also addresses the development (and rethinking of the concepts) of gender and class in literature of the period and account for the continuing importance of the literary form in an age of digital publishing.

Module Overview

This module aims to explore the intellectual and cultural achievements of the Renaissance, as well as its historiographic context. The period of transition from 'medieval' to 'modern' society that the Renaissance represents (or has been characterised as representing) is one of the most challenging areas of historical study, profoundly influencing historiography. Students have the opportunity to examine in depth to what extent the historical periodisation of the 'Renaissance' has been a deliberate, although sometimes contentious, means to better understand events of the past, particularly in relation to cultural analysis.

Module Overview

Students can study a diverse range of prose, poetry, and drama written by women from the eighteenth century to the present is considered alongside key concepts in feminist theory and the history of the women’s movement. Writers range from Mary Wollstonecraft to Zora Neale Hurston to Jeanette Winterson. Topics range from the feminine aesthetic and French feminism to feminist utopianism and cyberfeminism.