HR924-7-SP-CO:
Approaches to Cultural and Social History
PLEASE NOTE: This module is inactive. Visit the Module Directory to view modules and variants offered during the current academic year.
2023/24
Philosophical, Historical and Interdisciplinary Studies (School of)
Colchester Campus
Spring
Postgraduate: Level 7
Inactive
Monday 15 January 2024
Friday 22 March 2024
20
22 September 2023
Requisites for this module
(none)
(none)
(none)
(none)
(none)
This module focuses on the theoretical and methodological implications of the `cultural turn`. It introduces students to key concepts in the field, exploring debates about the meanings of such terms as `subjectivity`, `identities`, and `discourse`.
The latter part of the course pursues the possibilities opened by cultural approaches, as reflected in new and emerging debates and themes such as childhood, public and private, sex, the psyche, and memory.
The aims of this module are:
- To ensure that students are familiar with a range of concepts, approaches, and theories used in contemporary historical writing.
- To enable students to critically assess and engage with diverse theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches to the study of history at an advanced level.
- To support students in developing the appropriate skills to successfully apply differing concepts, approaches, and theories to the study of history.
- To support students’ development of critical understanding of how the questions that historians ask relate to concepts, sources, and methods, as well as previous scholarship.
- To enable students to compare different concepts, approaches, and theories to the study of historical across and between different chronological and geographical contexts.
By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:
- Understand some of the developments that have influenced the writing of social and cultural history over recent decades.
Throughout this module, we will be asking questions such as: what makes cultural history distinctive? What are its sources? How does an emphasis on representation change or challenge accepted notions of the relationship between language and experience, evidence and interpretation, the economic and the cultural?nd experience, evidence and interpretation, the economic and the cultural?
You will want to do some introductory reading, to orientate yourself and make sure you are acquainted with the background to the themes of this module. Your best starting point are the two books cited below of which Peter Burke is sole author, but all those listed will provide useful background and are books you may want to return to over the course of the term.
- Peter Burke History and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
- Peter Burke What is Cultural History?, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
- Peter Burke ed. New Perspectives in Historical Writing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
- Anna Green & Kathleen Troup, eds The Houses of History: a Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999).
- Ulinka Rublack ed., A Concise Companion to History (Oxford, 2011 [reprinted with corrections 2012)).
- Quentin Skinner ed. Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge: CUP, 1985)
This module will be delivered via:
- One 2-hour seminar per week
Debates about theory which are detached from reference to practice can be arid, so in each weekly seminar we shall address the relationship between theory and practice (in the form of case studies) so far as possible.
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Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, 1829-1902 (1894) History of the great civil war, 1642-1649 / by Samuel R. Gardiner. Longmans, Green.
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Boydston, J. (2008) ‘Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis’,
Gender & History, 20(3), pp. 558–583. Available at:
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2008.00537.x.
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Michael Roper (2005) ‘“Between Manliness and Masculinity: The ‘War Generation’ and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914-1950”’,
Journal of British Studies, 44(2), pp. 343–362. Available at:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/427130.
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Barbara Jeanne Fields (1982) ‘Ideology and Race in American History’, in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C Vann Woodward, pp. 143–177.
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Brown (1996)
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs?: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press. Available at:
https://search-ebscohost-com.uniessexlib.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=965096&site=ehost-live&authtype=sso&custid=s9814295.
The above list is indicative of the essential reading for the course.
The library makes provision for all reading list items, with digital provision where possible, and these resources are shared between students.
Further reading can be obtained from this module's
reading list.
Assessment items, weightings and deadlines
Coursework / exam |
Description |
Deadline |
Coursework weighting |
Exam format definitions
- Remote, open book: Your exam will take place remotely via an online learning platform. You may refer to any physical or electronic materials during the exam.
- In-person, open book: Your exam will take place on campus under invigilation. You may refer to any physical materials such as paper study notes or a textbook during the exam. Electronic devices may not be used in the exam.
- In-person, open book (restricted): The exam will take place on campus under invigilation. You may refer only to specific physical materials such as a named textbook during the exam. Permitted materials will be specified by your department. Electronic devices may not be used in the exam.
- In-person, closed book: The exam will take place on campus under invigilation. You may not refer to any physical materials or electronic devices during the exam. There may be times when a paper dictionary,
for example, may be permitted in an otherwise closed book exam. Any exceptions will be specified by your department.
Your department will provide further guidance before your exams.
Overall assessment
Reassessment
Module supervisor and teaching staff
Senior Student Administrator, Department of History, Telephone: 01206 872190
Yes
No
Yes
Prof Rohan McWilliam
Anglia Ruskin University
professor of Modern Hritish History
Available via Moodle
No lecture recording information available for this module.
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