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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 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 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.

Module Overview

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

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 provides an introduction to Indian philosophy and gives students the opportunity to study some of the classic texts of Indian philosophy in detail. While texts will be studied in English translation students can also gain a familiarity with the elements of classical Indian (principally Sanskrit) philosophical vocabulary. Topics will be drawn from both the astika (orthodox Hindu) schools such as Naya-Vaisheshika and Samkhya-Yoga and nastika schools such as Jainism and Buddhism, and will cover areas such as logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics. 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 classical Indian thinkers and to develop their own views in dialogue with them.

Module Overview

Clio, the muse of History, had many and diverse children. This module examines both the birth and development of historiography in Ancient Greek Literature. Students will use a wide range of primary sources together with secondary sources and engage with diverse types of writing, ranging from military historians to ethnographers, biographers, geographers, and female historians.

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

Beginning with the Royal Historical Society’s “Race, Ethnicity and Equality Report” (published in 2018), which raises urgent questions on the diversity of staff, students and curricula at History departments in UK universities, the module analyses live debates on “Decolonising the Curriculum” in higher education. We critique how histories of Empire, colonialism and slavery have been taught in Anglo-American settings, and introduce postcolonial analysis on archives, as well as the “Global South” and “indigenous knowledge” that have often been marginalised in Eurocentric historiographies.

Turning towards the University as a key apparatus of power in the contemporary world, the module then reveals the complex legacies of slavery in the making of a number of UK and US institutions including Liverpool, Bristol, Oxford (#RhodesMustFall), SOAS, University of Virginia and others. Introducing the new field of “Critical University Studies” (CUS), students will learn about the emergence of universities in former colonies including India and South Africa, as well as the phenomenon of “transnational education” that entails the establishment, by prestigious European and American institutions, of satellite campuses around the world. The module then unpacks public understandings of colonial history via recent scholarship on nationalism, patriotism, museums and memories, and ends with a hopeful reflection on pedagogies that will be more inclusive and intersectional in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. This module will be particularly suited to students who intend to develop careers in education.

Module Overview

The purpose of this module is to enable students to examine claims made about what, if anything, makes life meaningful by some of the major figures in the history of philosophy (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx). The module begins by considering the Question of Meaning itself. Is it intelligible? What is it to seek meaning in life? Is God necessary for life as a whole to have meaning? If so, and if God doesn’t exist, what is an appropriate response to life’s “absurdity” or lack of meaning? Is suicide an ethically defensible response? Or can individual lives have meaning even if life as a whole has none? Could a life be meaningful even if it were entirely occupied with selfish or vicious activities? Could, for example, the life of a torturer be meaningful? Or must our lives have an ethical resonance to be meaningful? We will also consider nihilist views that the conditions necessary for meaning do not obtain, and metaethical debates about the nature of value in general.

Module Overview

The aim of this module is to give students a thorough understanding of two intimately related philosophical traditions that came to prominence in the 19th and 20th centuries: existentialism and phenomenology. Each attempts to address the nature and meaning of human existence from the perspective of individual, first-person experience, focusing in particular on fundamental questions of being, meaning, death, nihilism, freedom, responsibility, value, human relations, and religious faith.

The module will examine selected existential themes through the writings of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus. Since existentialism is as much a artistic phenomenon as a philosophical one, students will also be given the opportunity to explore existentialist ideas in the works of various literary figures, such as Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Milan Kundera.

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

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

King Alfred, Viking invasions, the Norman Conquest, Domesday Book, wars of succession spilling over the Channel into Normandy: some of the most emblematic and controversial moments and monuments of English history date to the period students will encounter in this module. But did this period really see the birth of England? How was the modest kingdom of Wessex of the late ninth century transformed in the following two centuries into a state that some historians believe to have been unusually precocious, innovative and efficient in its governing structures? What role did other parties and peoples from the British Isles and further afield play in these developments? And after the extraordinary events of 1066 – which saw England conquered by the Normans – how do we explain a subsequent political crisis so devastating that the survival of the kingdom itself was in doubt by the middle of the twelfth century?

These questions lie at the heart of this module, which will ask students to examine primary sources and engage in longstanding historiographical debates on a weekly basis. Special attention will be paid to showing students how historians use source materials of varying kinds from the Middle Ages to develop, nuance or challenge rival interpretations of this formative period in the early English, Anglo-Scandinavian, and Anglo-Norman worlds; in the process, students will increase their knowledge, broaden their skills, and begin to think about the exciting challenges historians face when trying to understand the many complex and contested aspects of England’s medieval past.

This module will show students that the origins of the country we now know as England merit close and detailed examination. For while historians argue about whether England existed in a recognisable form in 871 when King Alfred became king of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, that England not only existed by the middle of the twelfth century but was one of the most powerful kingdoms in Europe, its territorial influence spreading far beyond the Channel, is a matter of consensus. How and when did an idea of England take shape and what were the formative historical processes that made that idea reality? An exploration of these ideas underpins this module, which will introduce students to a range of source materials, both written and archaeological, ranging from coins to chronicles, and castles to collections of documents known as cartularies.

Accordingly, this module will ask students to consider important questions about the origins of government, the beginnings of legal and administrative structures that in some sense persist to this day, and the distribution of the economic resources that made kingship and feudal society possible. By extension, this module will offer students a chance to acquaint themselves with the skills and techniques that allow historians to handle the complex and wide-ranging sources we rely upon to study the period in question, in the process demystifying the study of the Middle Ages and providing a solid basis for further study of medieval societies.

Module Overview

Humanities in Action: Enterprise Projects tasks students with directing their skills towards solving a real-world business, policy, or organizational problem. Set a contemporary challenge by a current organizational leader, students will independently manage a group project and draw on their distinct and specific skills to propose a feasible solution grounded in the humanities.

Module Overview

In this module, you will examine how empire functioned not just as a geopolitical map, but as varied systems of racialised and gendered control, enforced through institutions ranging from the classroom and the prison cell to the railway lines that carved up landscapes. By investigating the flows of settlers, migrants, and intermediaries, including the porters behind famous explorers and the labourers sustaining global trade, you will reappraise the myth of ‘blank spaces’ and uncover the complex human networks that linked metropoles to colonies and colonies to one another. Through diverse case studies extending from the Caribbean and East Africa to East and Southeast Asia, you will interrogate the changing dynamics of power, from the ‘benign neglect’ of the nineteenth century to the ends of empire in the twentieth century, violent or otherwise. The module encourages you to look beyond traditional archives to recover the voices of the silenced, analysing sources such as memoirs, newspapers, and oral histories to reconstruct ‘colonial lives’. Whether examining the legacy of imperial heroes or the messy transition to independence, you will develop the digital and research skills to produce work that brings these hidden histories to light, critically reflecting on how the echoes of empire continue to shape our world today.

Module Overview

The University has a strong commitment to providing academic programmes with high vocational relevance, which is maintained through working links with local, national and international organisations and, in particular, through student work placements.

The Placement Year aims to give students a continuous experience of full-time work within an organisation. It should be a three-way co-operative activity between employer, student and University from which all parties benefit. It is more than simply obtaining work during a gap in study – work placements should enable students to experience at first hand the daily workings of an organisation while setting that experience in the broader context of their studies.

The Placement Year constitutes a work placement during an academic year, funded by full-time paid employment* taking place between Level 2 and Level 3. The minimum duration of placement is 39 weeks.

Students wishing to undertake the work placement year must successfully complete the Level 2 of their programme.

All students on the Placement Year as part of their full-time undergraduate study will remain enrolled with the University during the period of placement and receive support. Students originally enrolled on 3-year programmes wishing to transfer to the 4-year programme must do so before the start of their placement, should gain the consent of their funders, where appropriate, and advise the University of their intention before the September enrolment.

Module Overview

This module aims to provide an introduction to the basics of Latin for students with little to no prior experience of the language. Students can gain the ability to translate and interpret sentences and short passages in prose and verse with confidence. This can aid sensitive reading of primary sources from the Classical world in translation, as well as in the original at higher levels of study.

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 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

Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed that ‘the death of God’ would lead to a period of ‘nihilism’ – the view that life lacks meaning and value. But Nietzsche also saw the death of God as a liberating opportunity to move beyond traditional moral values, which he regarded as life-denying and stifling the potential of human beings.

A central aim of Nietzsche’s philosophy, therefore, is to make his readers question the value of traditional morality. Are kindness, compassion, altruism, charity, and equality really valuable? Do such values promote the cultivation of great cultures and great human beings? Or are they simply what is most useful to, what Nietzsche called, ‘the herd’? All the major themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy will be considered: art, tragedy, ‘genealogy,’ master and slave moralities, guilt, truth, self-creation, the Übermensch (or ‘superman’), the ‘higher’ individual, life-affirmation, and eternal recurrence.

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 focuses on a range of philosophical questions relating to mental illness and its treatment. What makes a person mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What makes a conscious state psychotic or delusional? How might mental disorders be distinguished from non-disordered mental states and conditions? Would certain putative mental illnesses be better characterized as “problems with living” rather than as specifically medical conditions? Should, as per the prevailing tendency in contemporary psychiatry, the subjective experience of individuals suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia, be understood chiefly in terms of a chemical imbalance, and accordingly treated by an adjustment to brain chemistry? Or should, as per the traditional psychoanalytic view, such conditions be understood as irreducibly tied to internal symbolic content to be decoded by the analyst and patient? We will also consider questions raised by particular psychopathologies. Is psychopathy best understood as a mental illness, and if so, is it appropriate to hold psychopaths responsible for their attitudes and actions? Are certain forms of cognition currently seen as neurological/ neuro-developmental disorders (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) better understood as representing diverse or statistically atypical ways in which humans are capable of seeing and interacting with the world? These and other questions will be explored through the lens of recent literature in the analytic tradition as well as seminal texts in the history of the philosophy of mental illness (e.g., Freud, Foucault, R.D. Laing).

Module Overview

From immigration raids and street-level protests to contested foreign interventions and the global rise of far-right populism, the United States is currently living through a period of overlapping political crises. Federal immigration enforcement in cities like Minneapolis has provoked widespread public protest and legal challenges, raising urgent questions about state violence, civil liberties, and the reach of executive power. At the same time, instability in places such as Venezuela, and the role of the United States within it, has reignited debates about presidential authority in foreign policy and the legacy of American interventionism. These moments are not isolated events, but flashpoints in a much longer struggle over power, legitimacy, and democracy. This course helps you make sense of the crises of the present by placing them in historical context.

Rather than treating contemporary politics as unprecedented chaos, the module traces how modern presidential power was built, expanded, and repeatedly contested across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing especially how we got to the Trump era, the course explores how populism, media ecosystems, racial politics, national security, and economic inequality have reshaped both the presidency and public expectations of leadership.

Module Overview

This module introduces students to thinking with ‘the global’ by reading a wide range of 20th and 21st century Anglophone literatures. The module explores and complicates the ‘global’ from a range of cultural, theoretical and disciplinary vantages, such as Indigenous Studies, postcolonial criticism, decolonial thought, critical race theory, world literature, and world-systems theory.

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

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

This module explores the history of sport in the modern world from the eighteenth century to the present. Sport both shapes and is shaped by modern society and the global expansion of sports across the world and professionalization have led to certain sports becoming the economic powerhouses of today. Sport has played an important role in nation-building in the last two hundred years, and sports teams continue to be significant markers of identity at local, regional and national levels. This module will also explore the impact of global phenomena, such as imperialism which spread certain sports to particular areas of the world. Topics will range from the local to the global, drawing on the colleagues' specialisms, including examples from modern Britain and Europe, the Caribbean, South Asia and East Asia. Sports discussed will include major global sports such as association football, cricket and rugby, but also hockey, racing, athletics and gymnastics.

Major events such as the Olympics will be considered alongside more focused examples to allow us to explore themes including class, gender, nation, identity and race, and their intersection.

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

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

The civil wars that tore through England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century were among the most turbulent and exhilarating moments in British history. This module explores how the wars were understood, experienced and remembered by the people who lived through them. Alongside iconic figures such as the Roundhead general Oliver Cromwell and the dashing Cavalier Prince Rupert, students will encounter cross-dressing soldiers, spies, nurses, witches, and members of radical movements including the Ranters, Quakers and Diggers. The module also examines how the wars were commemorated and remembered, and their lasting cultural legacies in art, literature, film, and TV. Above all, it encourages students to explore whether this period—often described as a ‘revolution’—fundamentally transformed British society, culture, religion, and politics.

Module Overview

Explore a world transformed by 16th-century voyages of discovery and imperial expansion. This module offers a fascinating introduction to how the Renaissance was a truly global phenomenon, challenging traditional Eurocentric views. Students will delve into the impact of major historical shifts across Renaissance England, Europe and also the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The module is highly interdisciplinary and examines political, social, religious, cultural, and artistic topics through the lens of global scholarship. This module challenges assumptions and approaches the period from new perspectives, focusing on both elite and Indigenous, African, and non-elite experiences often hidden from older scholarship. Students will learn practical skills by engaging directly with primary sources in seminars to build confidence in historical research and analysis. This module is designed for students eager to understand a pivotal era and master the methods historians use to recover diverse stories.

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Language enables us to communicate about ourselves and the world around us. However, it is not clear how language achieves this nor is it clear what influence language has on these activities. Therefore, in this module we will examine language itself. We will try to clarify its nature and how it works.

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The Tudor and Stuart era (1485-1714) witnessed political revolutions, religious reformations, social upheaval, cultural transformation and expanding global horizons. This module allows students to explore the sources, approaches and methods used by historians to understand this pivotal period. Besides engaging with Lincoln’s early modern past, students will also consider the merits of British (as opposed to Anglo-centric) perspectives and explore the nature of colonial rule in Ireland and the Atlantic world that marked the beginnings of Britain’s empire. There will also be a stress on thinking about how historians can recover the stories of peoples hidden in the archive or omitted from older scholarship, including black and non-elite experiences of life in early modern Britain. Lectures will provide a survey of the political, religious, social and cultural history of the Tudor and Stuart period. Seminars will give students the opportunity to engage with primary sources and to build their confidence and skills in researching and analysing pre-modern materials.

Module Overview

This module explores the social, political and cultural realities shaped and framed by holy wars during the Middle Ages, with a primary focus on the Mediterranean (ca. 600-1200). We will explore and question the concept of holy wars from both Christian and Muslim perspectives, considering also the Byzantine responses to Jihad. Among the different locations under consideration in this module and linked to the framework of Crusades, we will focus on two zones of encounters and conflicts between Islam and Christianity: the Iberian Peninsula and the South of Italy. Beyond this, we will explore the eastern shores of the Mediterranean by focusing on the struggle for the dominion of the holy city of Jerusalem.

This module will help students develop a broad set of critical and analytical skills, while engaging with a variety of textual, visual and material sources. Students will gain an understanding of how the interplay of social, religious, political and cultural phenomena contributed to shaping a complex world – that of the crusades – which was more diverse and multilayered than some later historiographical representations might suggest.

Module Overview

This module explores texts of the long Victorian era (1830-1914), a period of enormous social and cultural upheaval in which we find the roots of our modern selves. ‘Victorian worlds’ explores texts of a variety of forms (e.g. novel, short story, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose) and genres (e.g. realism, Gothic, travel writing, life writing, fantasy) focused on different locations and social experiences, in recognition of a multiplicity of perspectives on ‘the Victorian world’. As we study these works in their historical contexts, we ask how these writers used literature to forge understandings of themselves in relation to their changing, and often challenging, environments.

Module Overview

America has often been presented as a society in which class divisions are of minimal importance, or even non-existent. Yet class hierarchies existed in American colonies long before the War of Independence, and continue to exist long after. These divisions often coincide with other forms of inequality— such as those of race, gender and sexuality. The much-cited (and often misunderstood) ‘American Dream’ is in part a vision in which anyone, from whatever background, might rise to the very highest levels of society — given enough ‘pluck and luck’, in the words of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick. American literature has often sought to engage with this ‘Dream’, often finding its flaws and weak points but just as frequently being allured by its utopian appeal.

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.

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 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 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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This module provides an introduction to Indian philosophy and gives students the opportunity to study some of the classic texts of Indian philosophy in detail. While texts will be studied in English translation students will also gain a familiarity with the elements of classical Indian (principally Sanskrit) philosophical vocabulary. Topics will be drawn from both the astika (orthodox Hindu) schools such as Naya-Vaisheshika and Samkhya-Yoga and nastika schools such as Jainism and Buddhism, and will cover areas such as logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics.

Module Overview

Clio, the muse of History, had many and diverse children. This module examines both the birth and development of historiography in Ancient Greek Literature. Students will use a wide range of primary sources together with secondary sources and engage with diverse types of writing, ranging from military historians to ethnographers, biographers, geographers, and female historians.

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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 introduces students to the use of digital technologies in the documentation, analysis, and communication of cultural heritage. Through both theoretical exploration and practical application, students will develop the skills to evaluate and employ advanced digital recording techniques in the study and interpretation of heritage objects and sites.

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

The aim of this module is to give students a thorough understanding of two intimately related philosophical traditions that came to prominence in the 19th and 20th centuries: existentialism and phenomenology. Each attempts to address the nature and meaning of human existence from the perspective of individual, first-person experience, focusing in particular on fundamental questions of being, meaning, death, nihilism, freedom, responsibility, value, human relations, and religious faith. The module will examine selected existential themes through the writings of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus. Since existentialism is as much a artistic phenomenon as a philosophical one, students will also be given the opportunity to explore existentialist ideas in the works of various literary figures, such as Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Milan Kundera.

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: speculative fiction. Students will examine early examples of fantasy and science fiction, and they will trace the development of both categories across a number of key historical epochs, from the classical and medieval periods to the twenty-first century. They will consider canonical authors such as Tolkien, a pivotal force in the growth of fantasy literature and theory, as well as less familiar figures in the history of fantasy and science fiction. Overall, students will encounter a variety of subgenres of fantasy and science fiction, which may include: high and low fantasy, ironic fantasy, historical fantasy, magic realism; ‘hard’ science fiction, science fiction horror, weird fiction, ‘cosy catastrophe’, afrofuturism, cli-fi.

Module Overview

This module explores core concepts in the Medical Humanities via critical engagements with global Anglophone literatures. The module asks: how do Contemporary Global Literatures (re)imagine wellbeing? How do these literatures help us reflect on what we mean when we speak of ‘global health’? And who is the ‘we’ defining what it means to have ‘health’ anyway? How has imperialism, colonialism, the capitalist world system and globally interconnected communities shaped understandings and experiences of health and illness?

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

By the late twelfth century, England’s rulers – the Angevin kings - were among the wealthiest and most powerful in Western Europe. At the time of his accession, King Richard the Lionheart ruled over a vast collection of territories (later known as the Angevin Empire), which stretched from the borders with Scotland in the North to the Pyrenees in the South. Yet, at the time of his brother King John’s death in 1216, most Angevin possessions on the continent had been lost and baronial rebels had overrun more than half of England. Using medieval records and chronicles in English translation, this module explores the dramatic reigns of King Richard and King John, and their reputations as rulers, asking whether the former really was a legend in his own lifetime, and whether the latter deserves to be remembered as one of our most disastrous medieval monarchs. Together we will consider King Richard’s participation in the Third Crusade, the impact of his absence on his English subjects, and his struggle to retain Angevin territories on the Continent. We will also analyse the loss of Normandy under King John, John’s violent quarrel with Pope Innocent III over the appointment of Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, the growth of opposition to John in England, the birth of Magna Carta, and the outcome of the civil war that was still raging on John’s death (including the Battle of Lincoln of 1217).

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 ÐÔÉ«ÌÃ 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

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

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

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

This module explores English literature and visual culture of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it takes an interdisciplinary approach to the Romantic and Victorian periods, with a focus on the relationship between image and text between 1770 and 1900. Students will gain familiarity with the developments of visual technologies across the period (including the panorama and photography), the significant aesthetic categories of the period (such as the sublime and the picturesque) and developments in literary form and genre (from the novel of sensibility and the Gothic novel to Victorian realism). Students will study Romantic writers’ use of the visual—such as Blake’s idiosyncratic intermedial style and the ekphrastic poetry of Keats, Shelley, and Hemans—before turning to the birth of photography and Victorian debates about the relationship between poetry and painting.

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, anatomies, contagion, disease, disability, psychiatry, blood, and pain, and we will do so in relation to constructions of gender, sexuality, race, class and disability. What significance do pathology, disease, illness narratives 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, prints, sculpture, performance art, conceptual art, film, and photography.

Module Overview

Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed that ‘the death of God’ would lead to a period of ‘nihilism’ – the view that life lacks meaning and value. But Nietzsche also saw the death of God as a liberating opportunity to move beyond traditional moral values, which he regarded as life-denying and stifling the potential of human beings.

A central aim of Nietzsche’s philosophy, therefore, is to make his readers question the value of traditional morality. Are kindness, compassion, altruism, charity, and equality really valuable? Do such values promote the cultivation of great cultures and great human beings? Or are they simply what is most useful to, what Nietzsche called, ‘the herd’? All the major themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy will be considered: art, tragedy, ‘genealogy,’ master and slave moralities, guilt, truth, self-creation, the Übermensch (or ‘superman’), the ‘higher’ individual, life-affirmation, and eternal recurrence.

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 enslaved Africans 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 focuses on a range of philosophical questions relating to mental illness and its treatment. What makes a person mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What makes a conscious state psychotic or delusional? How might mental disorders be distinguished from non-disordered mental states and conditions? Would certain putative mental illnesses be better characterized as “problems with living” rather than as specifically medical conditions? Should, as per the prevailing tendency in contemporary psychiatry, the subjective experience of individuals suffering from mental illnesses, such as depression and schizophrenia, be understood chiefly in terms of a chemical imbalance, and accordingly treated by an adjustment to brain chemistry? Or should, as per the traditional psychoanalytic view, such conditions be understood as irreducibly tied to internal symbolic content to be decoded by the analyst and patient? We will also consider questions raised by particular psychopathologies. Is psychopathy best understood as a mental illness, and if so, is it appropriate to hold psychopaths responsible for their attitudes and actions? Are certain forms of cognition currently seen as neurological/ neuro-developmental disorders (e.g., autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) better understood as representing diverse or statistically atypical ways in which humans are capable of seeing and interacting with the world? These and other questions will be explored through the lens of recent literature in the analytic tradition as well as seminal texts in the history of the philosophy of mental illness (e.g., Freud, Foucault, R.D. Laing).

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

Explore how Renaissance ideals and rapid urbanisation shaped capital cities across Europe, America, and Asia. This fascinating module delves into the astonishing history of how rulers and empires employed stunning architecture and meticulous urban design to project authority, wealth, and a sense of social order through architectural and urban design.

In this module, you will examine how Renaissance principles of social order were applied to towns and cities globally, from grand European capitals to existing and new cities in Asia and the Americas.

We will explore both city plans that were never realised alongside architectural and urban masterpieces. This will include Sir Christopher Wren's fascinating post-fire reconstruction plans for London and the lasting influence of the Garden of Versailles on urban design in Paris and London.

Students will have the chance to explore the direct link between the regulation of the built environment, urban design, and the mechanics of imperialism.

This module presents an unparalleled opportunity to compare cities in the UK and across Europe with those developed in the Americas and Asia during the early modern period.

Module Overview

What did liberty mean in an age of kings and queens, and just how revolutionary were the political ideas of Tudor and Stuart Britain? This module introduces students to the key approaches and methodologies of the ‘history of ideas’ by exploring how scholars have studied radical political and religious thought in early modern Britain. Covering over 200 years of British history (1485–1714), students will examine the major events of the Tudor and Stuart reigns and engage with the writings of some of the period’s most influential thinkers, including Thomas More, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, alongside works of literature and visual culture. Ultimately, the module encourages students to reflect on how debates about liberty, authority, and resistance in Tudor and Stuart Britain continue to resonate far beyond the early modern period.

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

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, ‘The Internet: A Social and Cultural History,’ examines how ordinary people experienced the internet in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Using a social and cultural history approach, we will move beyond histories of technological innovators to instead examine how a range of people embraced the internet within their daily lives, navigated multiplying ‘search’ platforms, made decisions around associated hardware like the iphone, and also grappled with new understandings of surveillance in the early 21st century. Central to the module will be a consideration of the methodologies historians can use to provide histories of internet spaces, activities, and events.

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

Language enables us to communicate about ourselves and the world around us. However, it is not clear how language achieves this nor is it clear what influence language has on these activities. Therefore, in this module we will examine language itself. We will try to clarify its nature and how it works.

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

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.