Key information
- Duration:
- 1 year full time, 2 years part time
- Start date:
- September 2018
- Apply by:
- 1 August (International), 1 September (UK/EU)
Our innovative and thematically diverse MA focuses on key themes in the history of Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East from the late 19th century onwards.
Some of the themes that you may explore are:
- the emergence of modern human rights
- religious conflict
- the relationship between empire and environmental change
- historical explanations for the extraordinary violence that afflicted the world in the first half of the 20th century.
You receive an introduction to historical methodology and practice (notably the ‘cultural turn’ in historiography since the 1970s) and how they might be used in devising and researching an individual research project.
You can take part in our world-leading work on contemporary Britain. Our approach places everyday experiences within their social, cultural, economic and political contexts. For this, we draw on the unparalleled resources of the Mass Observation Archive.
By immersing yourself in the field’s literature and integrating the historical perspective with that of other social sciences, you leave equipped to undertake doctoral research of the highest quality and significance.
Why choose this course?
- 90% of our History environment was classified as conducive to producing research of world-leading or internationally-excellent quality in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014).
- We are home to a number of innovative research centres, including the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, the Centre for Intellectual History and the Centre for World Environmental History.
- You’ll have access to an impressive range of archives including the internationally renowned Mass Observation Archive.
Our experts
Dr Anne-Marie Angelo
Lecturer In American History
Research interests
African American history, African diasporas, American History, Archives, black British history, Cultural History, history of creativity, Middle East and North Africa, Migration, Photography History, Theory and Practice, postcolonial studies, race and ethnicity in global perspective, Television History, Theory and Criticism, Transnational history
Dr Hester Barron
Senior Lecturer in History
Research interests
childhood, class, coal mining, Education, History, labour, parenting, Politics, Second World War, society, twentieth century
Prof Robert Cook
Professor of American History
Research interests
History, Political History
Dr Vinita Damodaran
Professor of South Asian History
Research interests
Climate change, Energy, environmental history, Global history, indigenous peoples, Mining, South Asian history
Dr Tom Davies
Lecturer in American History
Research interests
'race' and class, African American history, American History, American Studies, History
Dr Jim Endersby
Reader In The History Of Science
Research interests
charles darwin, darwinism, history and sociology of experimental organisms, history of botany, history of evolution, history of genetics, History of Science/Medicine/Technology, history of taxonomy and classification, History of the 19th and 20th-century life sciences, Hugo de Vries, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Oenothera Lamarckiana, science fiction, The Mutation Theory
Prof Martin Evans
Professor Of Modern European History
Research interests
European history
Prof Richard Follett
Professor Of American History
Research interests
African American history, African diasporas, African History, American History, Atlantic History, Brazilian History, Caribbean History, Historical Demography, Latin America, Plantation Societies, Public Health (Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries), Race Relations, Slavery, Sugar, Transatlantic Slave Trade, USA, West Africa
Prof Martin Francis
Professor of War and History
Research interests
Comparative History, Empire, Feature Film, gender, Male and Female Fashion, Modern British history, Second World War
Prof Ian Gazeley
Professor of Economic History
Research interests
Food Consumption, Household Budgets, Living Standards, Nutrition, Poverty and inequality, Skill Differentials, Wages
Prof Tim Hitchcock
Professor Of Digital History
Research interests
Cultural History, Digital history, Digital Humanities, Economic And Social History, Gender and Sexuality, History of London, oral history, Social exclusion
Dr Hilary Kalmbach
Lecturer in Middle East History
Research interests
Cosmopolitanism, Cross-cultural interactions, Cultural History, Digital history, Egypt, Gender and Sexuality, Global history, Global Islam, History, History of Gender, Islam, Islamic Studies, Middle East and African history, Middle Eastern and African Studies, Religious History, Syria
Prof Claire Langhamer
Professor Of Modern British History
Research interests
history of emotion, history of love, Modern British history, social and cultural history
Dr Maurizio Marinelli
Senior Lecturer In East Asian History
Research interests
Beijing, Chinese History, Chinese Politics, ecological civilisation, Europe and China relations, Global history, Hong Kong, Intellectual History, Tianjin, Urban China, Urban geography
Dr Iain McDaniel
Senior Lecturer In Intellectual History
Research interests
Caesarism, democracy, Eighteenth-Century History, History of Political Thought, Intellectual History, Nineteenth-Century History, Republicanism, Scottish Enlightenment
Dr Jacob Norris
Lecturer in Middle East History
Research interests
Global history, Imperial/Colonial History, Middle East and African history, migration studies, palestinian history
Dr Gideon Reuveni
Reader in History/Director of the Centrefor German Jewish Studies
Research interests
Judaism
Dr Katharina Rietzler
Lecturer in American History
Research interests
20th C history, American History, charity & philanthropy, Diplomacy & International Relations, History of international law, history of the social sciences, history of think tanks and expertise, International History, International Organization, International theory, Liberal internationalism, Postcolonial/Decolonial theory, Transnational history
Prof Lucy Robinson
Professor in Collaborative History
Research interests
Alternative Spiritualities/New Religious Movements, British party politics, Cultural History, Digital history, Economic And Social History, Gender and Sexuality, Memory, pedagogy, Popular Music, Social identities, Trauma, War and the media, War Studies, Youth
Prof Darrow Schecter
Professor of Critical Theory and Modern European History
Research interests
Critical Theory, critique of instrumental reason, Foucault, Gramsci, legitimacy, Libertarian socialism, Pasolini, systems theory
Dr Claudia Siebrecht
Senior Lecturer in History
Research interests
History
Prof David Tal
Yossi Harel Chair In Modern Israel Studies
Research interests
arms control, disarmament, Israel-Palestine, Political History
Dr Christopher Warne
Senior Lecturer
Research interests
Cultural History, European history, Everyday Life, Youth
Prof Clive Webb
Professor Of Modern American History
Research interests
Anglo-American relations, Political violence, race and ethnicity
Dr Gerhard Wolf
Senior Lecturer In History
Research interests
antisemitism, European history, German history, Migration, population policies, race and racism, state violence, War and violence in international politics
Course enquiries
+44 (0)1273 678001
hahp@sussex.ac.uk
Find out about the School of History, Art History and Philosophy
Dissertation
- 60 credits
- Summer Teaching, Year 1 credits
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 credits
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
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
This module focuses on the impact of European scientific ideas on environments and people in a globalising world. We use botany as a specific area of specialisation.
From the 18th century, at the botanic gardens in Kew, Chelsea and Edinburgh, men trained in the empirical processes of observation, comparison and evaluation. They gathered comprehensive collections of native and exotic plants for microscopic examination. Botanists in particular believed that their technical skills would allow them to rectify imbalance of resource access by transferring certain natural productions from one region to another, and acclimatising them in new environments. Botany and power intertwined as nations endeavoured to guard their precious treasures.
The race to harvest the resources of the tropics was part of this part of this story. This had mixed implications for regions such as India and Africa in the 19th century. Environmental transformations followed in the wake of botanical exploration. Plantation economies such as tea, coffee and rubber, along with forest reserves, had a negative impact on many societies and communities. Resistance to forest reservations by indigenous communities followed.
As indigenous and tribal knowledge became downgraded, the maximising cultures of capitalism were also restrained by early colonial environmentalism. This built on scientific ideas of dessication, drying up and fears of famine.
The relationship between Science, Environment and Empire was ambiguous and you will explore it in this innovative module. You'll study how historians have addressed questions such as:
- the utility of science to the practice and maintenance of empire
- the diffusion of knowledge
- the mutual influences of the metropole and the 'periphery'
- the role of umbrella organisations such as botanical gardens, the Royal Society, British Association, and so on.
Human Rights in History
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
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. It 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. It 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 Reichs genocidal politics and destruction of unprotected civilians.
What is more, the module will pay particular attention to how these new norms of justice were globalised over the module of the second half of the century. Just as non-Europeanists interpreted Wilsons 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 credits
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).
Resistance and the Archive
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
Resistance is a concept that cuts across historical approaches and applies to a range of contexts. As a consistent thread tying human action and interaction across time and place, it has left a variety of historical and material traces.
Drawing on the resources of the Archive of Resistance Testimony at The Keep in Falmer and other key digital archives, this module addresses various historic forms of resistance. It also looks at how archival traces can be analysed in imaginative, comparative and innovative ways, enhancing your understanding of that variety.
The China Dream: Intellectual Discourses of Modernity from the late Qing Dynasty to the Present
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
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 Century: Britain 1900-2000
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
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
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
This module analyses the changing nature of violence in the twentieth century.
It considers ways in which the logic of violent systems such as concentration camps represented a radical new departure, both in terms of the practice and aims of violence.
As such the module will explicitly challenge essentialist notions that interpret certain regions or certain societies as inherently violent or indeed see history as one undifferentiated story of violence.
The module therefore focuses on:
- the political, social, cultural and technological dynamics that led to new forms of mass killing in the twentieth century
- the spaces where these new forms of killing took place, exploring violence in relation to geographical, physical and bodily space, and using the notion of imagined spaces to explore how violence was legitimised and represented in media spaces, in particular photography, posters and films
- the consequences of violence in terms of how individuals and societies came to terms with these violent practices.
Violence in Contemporary History
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits