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Transcript: History Pathway

Hello, I'm Rosie Doyle, I work in the History Department. I'm the Student Engagement Coordinator in the Department and I am also a historian of Latin America. I teach on Latin America and then my research specialism is Mexico. I teach a first-year module about the history of modern Latin America from 1492 to the present. It's a team-taught module with a range of other colleagues who research on Latin America. We have someone who works on Brazil, someone who works on the global history of food in Latin America, someone who's currently working on the war on drugs in Mexico. So that's a team-taught module we lecture in the first year that's an optional module. I also teach a final-year course on the History of Human Rights in Latin America. It's a thematic course, so as the degree goes on it becomes more specialist.

Like many of my colleagues, I'm interested in understanding the processes of early modern and modern history - one of my colleagues works on medieval history (so pre-modern history) - from a perspective that doesn't put Europe at the center of things (non-Eurocentric). So hopefully, that will be something that will be of interest to you. You may not have studied history from outside Europe in the past.

Thinking about History as a discipline and why that might be interesting to you, the exciting thing about History is that you're needing to know what kind of questions to ask of the sources that have been left for us by people of the past, and how to empathise with people of the past by looking at the things that have been left. Those sources might be written sources, images, photos, material culture (we're quite particularly strong in this department with researchers on material culture, so objects and what they tell us about the past), and there might be oral histories. I'm part of a network that discusses oral histories, so knowledge that's passed down in ways of unwritten sources which allows us to get at a kind of more social history. We're not only looking at the history of elites and people who might be literate, or not only looking at societies that prioritise writing. That's why you should be excited about History.

As Liberal Arts students, you will know that we can't really understand the contemporary world without thinking about the processes that happened in the past that got us here. If you're interested in issues of social inequality today, then you need to know possibly about the history of colonialism (which is one of the aspects of history that I look at). Or, you might be interested in the histories of race, class, and gender. The History Department at Warwick is very strong on that. Since it was opened in the 1960s, we've been very strong on social histories, looking at race, class, and gender, and increasingly strong on global histories (looking at those processes from a global perspective or from places outside Europe). So the department has research expertise and a lot of world-renowned academics that study the British Isles, Continental Europe, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the Americas, covering the period from 1300 through to the present day, using a range of historical approaches as I was saying - looking at social history, sometimes quite interdisciplinary approaches which would also be interesting for students of Liberal Arts, since it's a very interdisciplinary degree. I use quite a lot of social science research in my work, I have colleagues who look at literature and culture and think about the boundaries between history and literature and those kinds of things.

That's a bit about why I love History and a little bit about our department, and why you might be interested in taking the History Pathway.