Modules Available for MA History in 2012/13
Full time students take the core modules, an option in each semester and complete a dissertation.
Part-time students in year 1 of their programme take HS7005 Historical Research Methods in
semester 1 and an option in semester 2.
Part-time students in year 2 of their programme take an optional module in semester 1 and HS7303
History and Social Theory.
Semester 1
Compulsory
Historical Research Methods
Options
Political Leadership in Twentieth-century Britain
Mastering Medieval Sources
‘Those Were the Days’ – Perpetrators, Profiteers
and Bystanders of the Holocaust
US Politics in the 20th Century
Medieval Landscapes
Community, Conflict and Change in England and
Wales from the late 17th Century to the early 19th
Century
City in History
Victorian Society
HS7005
Dr Sally Horrocks,
coordinator, team taught
HS7019
HS7022 (taken
with ML7022)
HS7026
Dr Stuart Ball
Dr James Bothwell
coordinator, team taught
Dr Olaf Jensen
HS7030
HS7128
HS7129
Dr Eleanor Thompson
Dr Richard Jones
Dr Simon Sandall
HS7251
HS7499
Prof Simon Gunn
Dr James Moore
Semester 2
Compulsory
History and Social Theory
Options
Conservation, Heritage and the Urban Environment
Enter the Dragon-Ship: Migration in the Viking Age
Religion and Violence in Early-Modern Europe, 1500-1700
Nuremberg and After: Punishing Perpetrators since 1945.
HS7303
Dr Erika Hanna
HS7007
HS7029
HS7031
HS7032
Dr Rebecca Madgin
Dr Pragya Vohra
Mark Williams
Dr Caroline
Sharples
Dr Andy Hopper
The Local Identities and Palaeography of Early Modern England
1500Understanding English and Welsh Communities, 1700-2000
Urban Topography: Image and Reality 1540-1840
Colonial Cities in British Asia and Africa, c.1850-1950
HS7127
Vices and Virtues, Behaving and Misbehaving in British Society,
1850-1950
Patients and Practitioners: Responding to Illness in Early Modern
England
HS7209
HS7130
HS7202
HS7207
Prof Roey Sweet
Dr Prashant
Kidambi
Dr Lucy Faire
HM7008 Prof David
Gentilcore
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Module Outlines
Core Modules
HS7000 Dissertation
Maximum word limit: 20,000
Submission date: September 2013 (2014 for part time students commencing October 2012)
There will be assessed dissertation presentations for students submitting in 2013 during the week
beginning 13 May 2013. Please try to ensure that you are able to be in Leicester during this time.
Semester 1
HS7005 Historical Research Methods (coordinator: Dr Sally Horrocks; team taught) Mondays &
Wednesdays, 16.00-18.00
The purpose of this module is to equip you with the methodological and analytical skills to carry out
high level academic research, the results of which will be seen in your dissertation. It is taught by a
number of colleagues from across the School and will introduce you to their specialist expertise. The
course consists of 4 blocks of teaching. In connections and transformations you will reflect on
processes of historical change. Historical sources and analysis encourages you to think critically
about the creation, survival, interpretation and analysis of different kinds of historical sources.
Descriptive statistics for historians helps you to interpret and present data in an appropriate form.
For the final block of seminars you choose a specialist option for more detailed examination. These
will include GIS, palaeography, textual sources, and visual sources. Teaching is through seminars,
workshops, directed reading and group work. There are a range of individual and group
assessments.
Semester 2
HS7303 Social Theory and History (Dr Erika Hanna and tbc) Wednesdays, 16.00-18.00
This course seeks (a) to acquaint students with the key theoretical traditions that have influenced
the writing of history in the twentieth century and (b) to enable students to understand the
influence of these theoretical traditions on the varieties of history that developed over the course of
the twentieth century. Each week the readings include theoretical writing on the epistemology of
history, academic debates regarding the practice of history, and historical works written from a
particular theoretical perspective, including Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial histories. Through
this programme it also aims to enable students to think critically about the way that they formulate
research questions, use sources, and write history.
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Optional Modules: Semester 1
HS7019 Political Leadership in Twentieth-century Britain (Dr Stuart Ball)
This module examines the gaining, use and loss of power by the most significant individual in the
British political system: the Prime Minister. After an introductory session discussing themes and
sources, each of the following nine sessions will examine a significant Prime Minister of the
twentieth century: Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald,
Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher. In each
case, we will consider their background and rise to power; their personality, methods and image;
their effectiveness as Prime Minister, and the reasons for their departure from office. There is an
extensive secondary literature, including many biographical studies of the various Prime Ministers,
and a wide range of published contemporary sources, in particular of the diaries and letters of
leading politicians.
HS7022 Mastering Medieval Sources (coordinator; Dr James Bothwell; team taught) This module
must be taken with ML7022 Latin ab initio
The range and scale of sources for studying the middle ages is vast, but few students have had the
opportunity to tackle more than a few during their undergraduate degrees. This module gives MA
students exposure to a wide range of genres of medieval primary sources and the key skills to
understand them. It is ideal for students thinking about doing an MA thesis or further research on a
medieval topic but also stands alone as a coherent course. Mastering Medieval Sources comprises a
weekly seminar on sources and a weekly palaeography/documents class. Along with the Latin course
these will provide students with the basic skills needed to assess medieval sources in their original
manuscript context. The course is assessed by an extended essay and bibliography on a source genre
(c. 3000-3500 words). No prior knowledge of Latin or palaeography is assumed, only a deep
enthusiasm for finding out about the medieval past.
HS7026 ‘Those Were the Days’ – Perpetrators, Profiteers and Bystanders of the Holocaust (Dr Olaf
Jensen)
The Holocaust is probably the most horrific and challenging phenomenon of the 20th Century.
Approximately 6 million European Jews were murdered by Germans and their collaborators, more
than a million by face to face shootings. Moreover, approximately 14 million unarmed people were
killed by the Germans in Eastern Europe. The main question that still arises is how this mass killing
could have taken place and how the perpetrators were able to carry out such deeds. Were they
forced to do it or were they ‘willing executioners’? Were they ‘evil monsters’ or ‘ordinary people’?
This seminar will examine these questions in the light of Christopher Browning’s path-breaking
Ordinary Men (1992) and Daniel J. Goldhagen’s, Willing Executioners (1997) as well as subsequent
research from historical and social psychological perspectives. It will examine primary sources like
testimonies or autobiographical material as well as historical and psychological studies about
perpetrators. The guiding question will be how ‘ordinary people’ did become part of the genocidal
process, benefited from it or were directly involved in the ‘final solution.’
HS7030 US Politics in the 20th Century (Dr Eleanor Thompson)Tuesday 16.00-18.00
This module will take a broad, if not a comprehensive, survey of the politics of the twentieth century
United States. It will introduce and examine key and ongoing problems in U.S. political history,
including the formation of the twentieth century state, Progressive and New Deal era reform, the
rise and fall of the New Deal coalition, and the ascendancy of modern conservatism. Whilst looking
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at a few classic texts, it will focus primarily on those publications which have contributed to the
recent revival in political history. In so doing, it will consider a variety of approaches to U.S. political
history, including the organisational synthesis, policy history, American Political Development and
socio-cultural political history. A 2,000 word book review will give you an opportunity to engage
critically with this historiography, whilst a 3,000 word essay will allow you to apply this
historiography and forward your own interpretation of your chosen aspect of twentieth century U.S.
political history.
HS7128 Medieval Landscapes, 400-1500 (Dr Richard Jones) Thursdays, 18.30-21.30
The foundations of modern landscape and society were largely laid down as a result of significant
reconfigurations in the middle ages. This module focuses on this period of intense and dynamic
change during which both the physical and mental maps of England were redrawn. It shows how the
landscape can be seen as a product of, and as a contributory factor in shaping, medieval society.
Wide-ranging and interdisciplinary coverage includes settlement history, place-names, cartography,
the literary landscape tradition, climate and weather, field systems, trees and woodland, elite
display, ecclesiastical signatures, peasant perspectives, and medieval concepts of nature. On
completion of the module you will be able to demonstrate an appreciation of the role landscape has
to play in historical enquiry and will be equipped with skills which will enable you to ‘read’ these
landscapes in the field.
HS7129 Community, Conflict and Change in England and Wales in the late 17th Century to the
early 19th Century (Dr Simon Sandall) Mondays, 10.00-13.00
This module explores a range of core issues that affected local communities in England and Wales as
they went through a period of fundamental economic and social transformations between 1680 and
the 1830s. It looks at structures of power and at gender relations, at the contrasting experiences of
rich and poor, at changing traditions of protest and at crime and justice. It also focuses on how local
communities were governed, on local-central relationships, and involves case studies of two
contrasting regions - London and Cornwall.
HS7251 The City in History (Professor Simon Gunn) Fridays, 10.00-13.00
This module provides you with a foundation in the study of the urban past. How has the idea of a
town or city developed across the medieval and modern periods? How have relationships of power,
such as colonial rule, affected the ways people interacted in urban places over time? In what ways
have towns and cities been shaped by their rural hinterlands and by environmental factors such as
famines and floods? By investigating questions like these you will be introduced to the key concepts
– space, power, network, environment - through which historians and others aim to understand the
urban past. In the process you will begin to appreciate how towns have grown and diversified over
the past 500 years and the specific historical forms they have taken across time and place. By the
end of the module you should also have gained a clear sense of the making of the historic
environments which we value today. For the weekly seminars, you will be expected to have read
some of the classic accounts of urban history and to come prepared to discuss and debate them.
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HS7499 Victorian Society Dr James Moore Wednesdays, 14.00-16.00
The Victorians are still with us. In fact, they have never gone away but are will us still in the sewers
and water pipes beneath our feet, in the railway lines and road networks, in the suburbs and
towering religious and civic architecture above our heads. In other words, the Victorians made
modern Britain and we are living with the consequences of what has remained of their modernity,
and what has not. This module will take you from the Industrial Revolution to the Victorians’
Imperial high noon. You will share the module with (mainly English Literature) students on the MA
Victorian Studies course
Optional Modules: Semester 2
HS7007 Conservation, Heritage and the Urban Environment (Dr Rebecca Madgin)
This module is about the environment of present-day towns and cities and how it is (or is not)
conserved. We will examine the emergence of movements for conservation and heritage in the
1960s and how they came to shape urban policy, including their influence on economic
regeneration. We will analyse the principles of conservation in Britain and beyond, and talk with
professionals about how those principles are applied in practice. You will have opportunities for
fieldwork, looking at examples of conservation and urban regeneration in places like Leicester’s
cultural quarter and Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. Throughout, you will be encouraged to think
critically about the politics of conservation and heritage and engage with the debates that surround
them.
HS7029 Enter the Dragon-Ship: Migration in the Viking Age (Dr Pragya Vohra)
The Viking ship is one of the most striking images of the medieval period still familiar to us today,
from the elven ships in the Lord of the Rings movies to the badge on a Rover car. And yet, there is a
popular perception that people in the medieval period tended to remain static in one place, often
the place they were born. This module looks at those famed and intrepid travellers of the medieval
period -- the Vikings -- and explores the processes of travel and migration that shaped the Viking
world and medieval Europe, just as they shape the modern world we live in. How did the Vikings
maintain contact with their homelands, and a common sense of identity? How important was travel
to that sense of belonging? We will look at travellers and consider why they undertook long,
arduous journeys: explorers and their expeditions to find mythical lands; migrants who moved with
family and friends to make new lives in distant lands; war bands who went ‘a-viking’ overseas to win
wealth and honour; the travellers, pilgrims and traders through whom the different parts of the
Viking world kept in contact with one another, creating the Viking diaspora. This module aims to
provide students with an in-depth view of the complex processes involved in shaping the Viking Age,
to encourage students to engage with a variety of types of primary source and interpret different
and sometimes contradictory material and to challenge preconceptions of static medieval societies
and understand the processes that shaped medieval Europe
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HS 7031 Religion and Violence in Early-Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Dr Mark Williams)
The early-modern period is remembered as one of extreme violence perpetrated in the name of
sectarianism, tensions between church and state, and the consolidation of religious power. Popular
memories of the Inquisition, French Wars of Religion, German Peasants’ Revolt, and Spanish
colonialism in the Americas remain strongly associated with violence to this day. The relationship
between religion and violence is, however, far from straightforward. This module will challenge MA
students to understand the interaction of religion and violence in early-modern Europe within its
numerous and fluctuating contexts, contrasting theological justifications with cultural and social
tensions, political motivations with cultures of tolerance and intolerance. Through a comparative
approach which will consider outbreaks of violence across Europe (including the ‘Three Kingdoms’,
France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the United Provinces), it will facilitate reflection on the causes,
extent, and patterns of violence between numerous religious sects, social groups, and communities.
This will be accomplished through a weekly case study built around specific instances/forms of
violence which will provide a platform for wider comparison and discussion, including the 1641 Irish
Rising, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Inquisition, book-burning and iconoclasm, regicide,
bloodfeud, anti-Semitism and others.
The aim of the course will be to debate the relevance of ‘models’ of violence in this period, the role
of religion in facilitating or preventing violence, and the validity of ‘Enlightenment’ justifications for
the increase or decrease of violence across the early-modern period. This course will familiarise
students with the historical debates surrounding these events while also affording the opportunity
to engage with primary source accounts. It will encourage students to develop a critical
understanding of these accounts by exploring ideas of memory, trauma, and the politicisation of
violence after the fact. Other themes will include the role of urban space, print cultures, the role of
rumour and the spread of information, material cultures (iconoclasm and book-burning), and visual
cultures.
HS7032 Nuremberg and After: Punishing Perpetrators since 1945. (Dr Caroline Sharples)
This module will examine the treatment of war criminals and understandings of genocide since the
Second World War. Focussing particularly on the Holocaust (whose perpetrators continue to face
trial today), it begins with an exploration of the organisation and resonance of the 1945-6
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. This saw some of the leading figures of the Third Reich
placed in the dock yet, as we shall see, the tribunal’s existence had not always been assured. We
shall consider the divergent aims of the Allied powers at the end of the war, the type of evidence
submitted by the prosecution and the extent to which these proceedings recognised the particular
suffering of the Jews under the Nazi regime. Nuremberg had an enormous impact upon
international criminal law, including the introduction of the key concept of ‘crimes against humanity’
which has facilitated so many other war crimes investigations since 1945. The remainder of this
module will therefore look at responses to other examples of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, such
as Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone; and examine the continuing work of
the International Criminal Court based in The Hague. Throughout this module, we shall draw upon
key historiographical debates, trial documents, memoirs, press reports and other primary sources to
critique the legacy of Nuremberg and assess the willingness of the international community to
intervene in the face of human rights abuses.
HS7127 The Local Identities and Palaeography of Early Modern England, 1500-1700 (Dr Andrew
Hopper) Thursdays, 18.30-21.30
This module enables students to reconstruct local identities in early modern England. It builds upon
a recent coming together of social and political history, a development in which local history has
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been at the forefront. Themes include the impact upon local identities of riot, rebellion, and popular
politics, while problems of governance are explored through analyses of custom, crime and
immigration. The second half of each session tackles the manuscript sources upon which these
histories have been based, developing strategies for reading, analysing and interpreting archival
documents.
HS7130 Understanding English and Welsh Communities, 1700-2000 Mondays, 10.00-13.00
This module surveys themes and approaches affecting regional and local communities between c.
1700 and 2000. It is concerned with landscape art and social change, local belonging and identity,
churchyard interpretation, welfare and poor law history, narratives of the poor, rural change the
village, gender and family structures, historical demography, and the effects of industrialisation.
Above all, it considers the impact of these changes upon the nature and possible decline of
'community'. . The module relates historical knowledge to present centred issues and problems (e.g.
heritage-related issues, artistic interpretation, welfare systems and their problems, xenophobia, and
ideas about ‘belonging’ today). It develops an historical dimension to aesthetic judgements and
teaches interpretation of artistic motifs, landscape painting and memorial styles. This module
augments historical skills, discusses many fascinating sources, and prepares you for more advanced
study of local and regional history in England and Wales.
HS7202 Urban Topography: Image and Reality, 1540-1840 (Professor Roey Sweet)
This course spans a period of three hundred years, but the primary emphasis is on the 'long
eighteenth-century' - a period during which there was unprecedented urban growth and a vigorous
outpouring of literary, artistic and cartographic representations of the town. During this course we
will survey the changing ways in which towns have been depicted and represented through a variety
of media. Maps, engravings, travel literature all have a great deal to tell us about how towns
expressed their cultural identities and about how outsiders and visitors perceived towns and urban
society. We begin by examining the early town maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and
their evolution into the more familiar maps of the eighteenth and nineteenth century; subsequent
seminars cover topographical writing and descriptive literature; the changes to the built
environment and the use of public and private space; the development of urban topographical art,
and the proliferation of urban histories in the eighteenth century.
HS7207 Colonial Cities in British Asia and Africa, c.1850-1950 (Dr Prashant Kidambi)
Many of the major cities in the former colonial societies of Asia and Africa acquired their
recognizably modern characteristics during the high noon of imperialism in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. New political rationalities and technologies of governance drawn from
metropolitan Europe began to transform the fabric of urban life in many colonial cities. Equally, with
their western-educated bureaucracies, modern factories, business firms, and polyglot migrant
communities, colonial cities became key sites in the interaction between Europeans and nonEuropeans. This module focuses on the economic, political and cultural forces that shaped the cities
of British Asia and Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It seeks to show
how historical developments conventionally regarded as intrinsic to urban modernity in Europesuch as the impact of industrial capitalism, new techniques of governance, and the rise of the public
sphere- acquired a global reach during the age of empire. It suggests thereby that the social history
of the colonial city offers rich material for thinking comparatively about these processes.
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HS7209 Vices and Virtues: Behaving and Misbehaving in British Society, 1850-1980 (Dr Lucy
Faire)This module is offered as an evening seminar
The brewing of alcohol has been traced back to the Middle East of 3000BC. Presumably the first
hangover, if it were traceable, would originate soon after this time. This, in turn, would have been
accompanied by the first promise of "I'll never get drunk again" as well as the first disapproval on the
part of the abstainers. Thus vice and virtue have probably been intricately linked since pre-historical
times. Using this unifying theme of 'vice and virtues', the course examines everyday practices,
behaviour and consumption in the period 1850-1980. The following topics will be discussed in
weekly seminars: environment and behaviour; urbanity and youth; sex and space; drugs and
Orientalism; smoking and gender; drinking and class; thrift, gambling and power; manners and the
civilising process; and cleanliness and time. The course will focus on the perception and
representation of these practices as well as on individuals' 'actual' experience of them. It will also
analyse the social history of abstinence, moderation and indulgence and the way that they are
affected by demographic, social and economic factors such as age, gender, class and ethnicity.
HM7008 Patients and Practitioners: Responding to Illness in Early Modern England (Professor
David Gentilcore)
The meaning that patients and practitioners give to their encounter is not an unchanging given; on
the contrary, the relationship between them has undergone many shifts over the centuries, across
Europe (and beyond). This module will explore and reconstruct that changing world of meaning,
focusing on such themes as:
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


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the position/place of the patient
the relative status of different categories of practitioner within the ‘healing arts’
the relationship between natural, religious and magical forms of healing
contrasting ideas regarding illness, its diagnosis and prevention
the notion of what constitutes a cure
varieties of medical regulation
the impact of professionalization
It will do this by examining secondary readings on the subject, as well as case studies drawn from
primary sources.
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