Dissertation
- 60 credits
- Summer Teaching, Year 1
You will research and write a dissertation, based on primary sources, on a topic relevant to current research in contemporary history.
Historical Skills and Methods
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1
This module provides an introduction to critical issues in historical methodology and practice. It’s also an opportunity to consider how they might be used in devising and researching an individual research project.
We focus on some of the methodologies of research and composition that have become influential in historical scholarship in the last four decades. Attention is given to the impact of various aspects of the ‘cultural turn’ on the study and writing of history, with particular reference to how historians:
- categorise and deploy notions of identity (notably gender and race)
- have re-evaluated the relationship of the ‘archive’ to historical knowledge
- have become increasingly conscious of visual images and media for comprehending the past.
We will address the growing attention, not only among scholars but in the wider world, to issues of ‘memory’. We also explore the risks and opportunities posed to academic historians by this trend.
The course also involves a more ‘hands-on’ dimension. You’re introduced to primary-source materials (notably those held by the University’s Special Collections at The Keep) to understand how the methodological approaches discussed during the course may inform the way historians address their sources. This is also an opportunity for you to familiarise yourself with some of the more practical and quotidian aspects of conducting research with primary sources.
We designed the assessment exercises for this module to provide you with the training necessary to devise and research your MA dissertation topic.
Empire, Science and the Environment
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1
Human Rights in History
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
Interest in human rights has exploded in recent years, and has emerged as one of the most prominent international trends following the end of the Cold War. The early 1990s sparked renewed debate about the role and mission of the United Nations as a global mediating force in matters of war and peace, and human rights became for many a new yardstick with which to assess post-Cold War international politics and proper state-formation. Yet this idea of what Hannah Arendt has called 'the right to have rights' is a relatively recent historical development.
This module endeavours to trace the origins of human rights as a modern political ideology from the French Revolution to the present day. You will explore the extent to which the idea of human rights underwent radical transformation over the 19th and especially 20th centuries, entangled as it was in shifting notions of civilization, empire, sovereignty, decolonisation, minority protections and international justice. You will focus on how human rights fundamentally arose as a direct response to the legacy of man-made mass death associated with World War I and World War II, and in particular to the Third Reich's genocidal politics and destruction of unprotected civilians. What is more, you will also pay particular attention to how these new norms of justice were globalised over the course of the second half of the century. Just as non-Europeanists interpreted Wilson's notion of self-determination in broad ways to suit various emancipatory causes beyond Europe in the interwar years, rights activists from India, South Africa, the American South and later Eastern Europe seized on human rights after 1945 as something that went far beyond simply internationalising American New Deal policies. From this perspective, this module aims to locate the history of human rights at the very heart of the broader story of modern moral politics and changing international perceptions of the relationship between law and citizenship, war and social justice.
Religion in Contemporary History
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
Secularisation was supposed to be a one-way street – at least according to Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Around the globe, struggles for emancipation and visions of modernity and progress were generally harnessed to the secular. In this module you'll reconsider this perspective, asking to what extent – as these emancipation struggles began to out of steam – religion helped to re-establish a sense of community and belonging in increasingly fractured societies, providing a language for an alternative utopia.
This module seeks to examine the ways that religion has been a consistent force in contemporary history by looking at key themes and moments across the globe:
- the pitfalls of secularisation and the return of religion
- the relationship between religion and the state – from the postcolonial promise to "Islamic State"
- the practice and performances of everyday religion
- the relationship between religion and globalisation (fundamentalism international).
The China Dream: Intellectual Discourses of Modernity from the late Qing Dynasty to the Present
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1
The origin and development of the 'China Dream' is one of the most debated topics in modern and contemporary Chinese history, politics, and economics.
This module offers a unique perspective to better understand the 'China dream' through the lens of Chinese intellectual history. More specifically, we will analyse and discuss the major historiographical debates surrounding the following four topics:
- the Chinese intellectual foundations, and the impact of Western ideas
- the relationship between intellectuals and the State in modern China
- the role of intellectuals and the relevant intellectual debates in the post-Mao era
- the emergence of the 'China Dream' from a historical perspective.
The People’s Heritage
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1
For the last two generations, the study of British history at Sussex has been concerned with the lives and experience of ordinary people.
This module builds upon this longstanding tradition. It is not a survey course and is not intended to be a comprehensive history of Britain in the twentieth century. Each week we will take a key theme, but the exact direction of the seminar will be the decision of the class, and you'll be free to explore that theme in whatever context you wish.
This means that reading lists will only be set one or two weeks in advance, as they will depend on your interests. It also means that reading lists should act only as a starting point for your own further research. The key themes we will explore are: democracy; poverty and inequality; gender; national identity; war and memory; popular culture and the State.
Sussex historians have long made key contributions to the development and study of people’s history.
J.F.C. Harrison was at Sussex from 1970 as Professor of Social History. His The Common People (1984) is a long-period survey that is focussed on the lives of ordinary people who were still very much left out of history when the book was written.
Asa Briggs, vice-chancellor of the university from 1967-76, was one of the most important figures in the development of social history.
Several Sussex historians were influential in conception and production of History Workshop in its early days: Stephen Yeo, Eileen Yeo and, Alun Howkins. The study of local and community history was pioneered by Stephen Yeo through Brighton-based QueenSpark Books.
One of his early graduate students was Alistair Thomson, who has become one of the leading oral historians of his generation.
Dorothy Sheridan, who originally studied at Sussex in the 1960s, has been a key figure in both the Mass Observation Archive and the Mass Observation Project since she began working at the archive in 1974. She is well known for her work on wartime’s women’s lives, on theories of life history writing and on the archive itself.
Other Sussex history graduate students of the 1980s went on to make significant contributions in this field, notably Penny Summerfield with her work on gender, memory and oral history. Selina Todd also completed her PhD at Sussex. Her book, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010, was published in 2014.
The emphasis on people’s history continues at Sussex today. The work of all the historians of twentieth-century Britain currently working at Sussex, Hester Barron, Martin Francis, Ian Gazeley, Claire Langhamer, Lucy Robinson and Clive Webb, is closely connected to the lives, experiences and cultures of ordinary people.
Violence in Contemporary History
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1