We live in the here and now. But what got us here? This module studies the string of major social, political, and cultural developments that established our modern world. Radical (and not so radical) ideas from the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution’s structural transformations of how we work, build and buy things, and the struggles and stumbles of imperialism, capitalism and globalisation have gone far to set terms of life in the twenty-first century. The module will also help you develop your critical voice as a historian while asking comparative questions about historical difference across the world.

Seismic change. Gradual shift. Both? Or neither?

Between 1450 and 1800, Europe saw profound developments take place: whether it was the invention of the printing press, Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America, or Martin Luther’s challenge to the papacy, the events of this ‘Early Modern’ period dramatically changed the social and political landscape of the times.

And yet, this was a period that could equally be viewed as slow-paced: for example, did the people of Europe experience significant changes to life expectancy or social hierarchies during the period?

Through this module, you’ll consider the differing historical viewpoints of both Europe and the Early Modern period itself. You’ll think about the individuals of the time too, considering the notions of European identity, and understanding encounters and relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans. And, through the comprehension of key historical and historiographical terms, you’ll begin to ascertain the roots of modernity.

In order to understand your own strengths as a historian, it pays to understand to the methods of historians of the past.

In this Historiography module, you’ll start to ready yourself for the academic challenges of the final year of your degree. You’ll be asked to think more deeply about the questions posed by notable historians and to ask yourself what questions you should ask about the past. Do you pose different questions if you adopt a non-Western viewpoint? How should you go about answering those questions? And why should you study the past in the first place?

During Historiography I, you’ll learn about the theoretical approaches adopted by historians since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, and appreciate why these historians’ methods retained credibility into the 1990s. As the module progresses, you’ll develop your own critical approach to historical research, and learn techniques on how to articulate this in word and in speech.

For any developing historian, it’s just as important to reference contemporary historical methods as it is the methods of years gone by.

This is how Historiography II complements your learning from Historiography I. You’ll explore themes from 1990s to the present, each week focusing on a different theme, theory or methodology. These topics, which are currently hotly debated among academic historians, will be presented by one of Warwick’s experts within that particular area. You’ll be given an insight into your lecturer’s individual methodological and theoretical approach, while gaining awareness of what’s currently exciting and important in academic history writing.

Throughout this module, you’ll develop skills and experience to leave you suitably prepared to choose and deliver a dissertation in your final year of study.

At different moments in time, ‘being human’ has been constructed and interpreted differently according to dominant values, norms, and systems of knowledge.

This module considers the different ways in which humans have thought about themselves from the Renaissance to the early 20th century, both as individuals and as collectives. It forwards the idea that ‘human nature’ is not a universal, trans-historical concept constant over time, but rather is socioculturally constructed. Our students investigate those differences over time in Western culture and how they link to wider social, cultural and economic contexts. We learn about the crucial moments in the history of conceptualising and defining ‘human nature,’ from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, to Freud and early modernity.

Ultimately we ask how a new age of humanity and new ways of knowing oneself came into being, and discuss what these new ways of understanding the self closed down or replaced.

Underlying the module is the question of whether we are still part of the Enlightenment project.

While there is currently great uncertainty surrounding issues of race and migration in the post-Brexit era, it is impossible to deny the long history of migration into Britain.

Beginning with the nineteenth-century migration of people fleeing poverty and the Great Famine in Ireland, this moldule takes a roughly chronological approach by charting major events and debates, such as the 1919 racist riots, various legislative measures designed both to limit immigration and improve domestic ‘race relations’, anti-racism and the British Black Power movement, and ideas of ‘Britishness’ in multicultural Britain.

Throughout, this module examines a wide range of key themes, particularly focusing on the experiences of migrants, how immigration has influenced Britain and what it means to be British, and why migrants from some countries appear to be more welcome than others.

Our very own Modern Records Centre's collections contain a range of sources on race, ethnicity and migration in Britain from the late 19th century onwards, including documents relating to themes covered in this module.

Would you like to understand what is going on in Ukraine today and what is behind the Russian-Ukrainian conflict? Do you want to understand why so many people in the past and present were and are willing to die for their nation? Would you like to know how the Ukrainian, Polish and Russian nations were made? Then this module is for you.

An introduction to the history of global interactions between different parts of the world through a focus on early connections in the period 1200-1500. By following the circulation of people, knowledge, religion, and goods in the late medieval world, this module compares regions from the Mediterranean and Islamic world to India and China.

Studies will be set within the theoretical framework of global history. Topics include diasporas, material culture, African states and empires, the silk roads, global cities, and medieval travellers.

This module will introduce you to a range of long-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century primary texts in which there is sustained reflection and commentary on the individual, the polity, and an emerging conception of society. In doing so, this module raises broader philosophical questions about the construction of identity, character and virtue, political realism and idealism, and relativism and individualism. The module also involves students in reflecting on the changes in styles of painting, architecture and fashion and linking this to the core themes.

Being one of the oldest civilizations, China has a long, rich, and diverse history. In chronological frameworks, this module explores its most recent past: the history of modern China, which in actuality is still in the grip of its dynastic past, despite countless reforms, revolutions and modernization that started in mid-nineteenth century and were modelled on the West.

In this module you will explore the attempts of early modern monarchs and governments to gain hegemony over the British Isles and establish an imperial dominion beyond the Atlantic. You will focus on the connections between the kingdoms between the reigns of Elizabeth I and Charles I, and show how relations across the British Isles were affected by conflicts over the powers of crown and church, and challenged by splits between rival religious communities. These tensions, as the module will highlight, were grafted onto ancient national, cultural and ethnic fault lines.

We will look at how the experience of civil war, unrest and revolution took place within a larger international setting, studying the impact of civil and religious divisions on the development of the overseas empire, and highlighting the competing European affinities that impinged upon subjects of the three kingdoms. The module will focus on the experiences of the different religious, national and ethnic groupings within the British Isles and British America, and will encompass the history of culture and ideas, as well as religion and politics.

Eating is a deeply human activity. Language, and the human species itself, perhaps developed out of our desire to cook and share food. Yet the way we eat now may be destroying important aspects of human society and the environment itself. How did we get into this mess?

This module explores the long history of the production, marketing and consumption of food, from ancient times to the present, from vegetarianism to the first battery chicken. It provides a framework for thinking about the place of food and eating within historical analysis. Food will be considered from multiple overlapping perspectives - ethics, labour, environment, community, power, health, hunger and science - to help contextualise our current attitudes to food, and to introduce important historical concepts (from 'moral economies' to 'biopolitics') relevant to all areas of historical analysis.

Discover the history of the United States (1876-1929) through the rise of the culture industries, including the production, censorship, and consumption of literature, theater, music, radio, sports, fashion, cinema, and advertising - and the ways in which individuals have sought to resist or reformulate dominant national discourses through cultural production.

Topics include the incorporation of culture as an integrated big business in the late nineteenth century, the early history of baseball, the creation of the Western, the emergence of working-class culture in dime novels and vaudeville, blackface and the erasure of African American history, Hollywood's attitudes toward working women in the 1920s, and the rise of the ethnic gangster as a media hero.

You will learn not only about the history and theory of culture, national identity, and "modernism" in America, but also about the ways in which cultural history is developed, contested, and reconstructed via race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.

Explores the history of the United States (1929-2019) through the rise of the culture industries; the production, censorship, and consumption of literature, theatre, music, film, television, sport, fashion, and advertising; and the ways in which individuals have sought to resist or reformulate dominate national discourses through cultural production.

Topics include women in Hollywood; sportswear and androgyny in 1930s fashion, the Federal Theater Project, Mexican American youth culture and the Zoot Suit Riots; the Hollywood blacklist, masculinity and corporate culture in the postwar era, African Americans on network television, celebrity, and the history of the Hollywood blockbuster and fan cultures.

You will not only about the history and theory of culture, national identity, and "post-modernism" in America, but also about the ways in which cultural history is developed, contested, and reconstructed via gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.

What have you learned? What are you most interested in? And what do you want to tell us about history?

Over the previous years of study, you’ll have gained skills and understanding that will enable you to research, analyse, critique and discuss key historical themes – all the attributes you need to become a critical and imaginative thinker.

Your final-year dissertation is your opportunity to demonstrate this. It’s your platform to choose and explore an area that truly fascinates you, based on a module in your second or final year, or your year abroad. It’s your chance to prove yourself as a capable historian.

By working on your dissertation, you’ll undertake a substantive piece of historical research and produce an article-length piece of work. You’ll call upon the theoretical approaches you explored in the Historiography modules, and critically assess a wide variety of primary sources. You’ll have the scope to outline, write and sustain a coherent and logical argument.

Help is on hand throughout. You’ll be allocated a supervisor in term one of the final year, and there is also a Dissertations Coordinator available for general guidance and queries. If you’re spending a term in Venice, your tutors there will be able to support you too.

One of the first international financial centres. A city of enormous architectural and artistic significance. A metropolis of myth and empire. There is a lot that people already know about Venice; for a budding historian though, there is much more to unearth on this remarkable city.

This module will give you ample opportunity to learn about Venice through a range of primary textual, visual and material sources. And, by spending a term studying in the city, you’ll be able to put your learning into practice through a series of site visits.

Through this immersive study of Venice, you’ll find yourself getting closer to the city’s history between the late 14th century and the late 16th century. Venice will also act as a base from which you can explore wider issues, including gender, violence and church reform.

Thsi module, which looks at the production, trade, and prohibition of narcotics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeks to contextualize the current situation, teasing out the social, economic, and political effects of the drug trade and its US-led opposition.

This module aims to examine the phenomenon of Stalinism between 1928 (the beginning of the “Revolution from above”) and 1953 (Stalin’s death). After a discussion of the transformation of the economy, society and culture the focus is on the social and cultural history of Stalinism as a ‘civilisation’.

The Soviet leadership attempted to implement a socialist way of life and to construct a socialist identity. The consequences of this attempt for everyday life are considered as central mythologies of Stalinist propaganda and the ‘culture of violence’. We will also discuss how far Stalinism was a purely Russian/Soviet phenomenon. We will therefore look at the consequences of Stalinism for the international communist movement and for the sovietisation of Eastern Europe after 1945.

Popular music’s importance has long been the subject of debate with criticism from commentators and intellectuals, including the Frankfurt School’s Kulturindustrie’ critique which saw it as commodified entertainment, whereas others, notably Eric Hobsbawm, saw popular music as more complex and at times both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic.

These debates have continued and become part of a lively historiography which this module draws upon as it explores the main developments in popular music. It explores popular music’s role within mass culture, the impact of technology, the relationship between popular and art music, the debate over ‘authenticity’, the link to other arts movements, the impact of race, gender and class, and music’s role in reflecting and changing politics and identity.

An opportunity to explore the impact and significance of religious developments in England in the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), with the aim of showing how they transformed society, culture and politics at both national and local levels.

You will focus on the crusades to the Eastern Mediterranean, investigating the development of the crusading movement and the establishment of crusader states. The crusading movement had an enduring appeal throughout the medieval period and beyond: the reasons behind this fascination will be analysed, focusing on the motivations of people from various social groups who took part in the expeditions.

As current issues of rights to security, migrant rights and indigenous rights and rights to self-determination and autonomy take centre stage in Latin American political and social life, this course analyses the development of rights in the region in historical perspective.

It looks at the relationship between rights, democracy, liberalism, Catholicism and social revolt and analyses the range of civil, political, socio-economic and cultural rights and their interplay with notions of citizenship, race, class and gender. Students will analyse the current literature on rights, the historiography of resistance and revolution as well a broad range of primary sources.

An introduction to the history of the body in Soviet Russia from revolution to the collapse of the USSR, in light of revolutionary claims that socialism would bring about ‘a higher social-biologic type, or if you please, a superman’. We will consider the utopian visions of the ideal socialist body, as they were disseminated in propaganda, literature and art. The means by which the Soviet state sought to bring these visions to life will be explored – through healthcare, education and physical culture – and how Soviet citizens responded to the new social, emotional and sensory regimes of the body.

Your studies will also consider how ideological understandings of the ideal socialist body intersected with the messy realities of the physical in Soviet Russia, and consider the ways in which questions of sexuality, degeneration, disability and disease were reconciled with the dreams of a revolutionary utopia.