Learning Outcomes:
Students will develop critical thinking skills, advanced writing skills, presentation skills, and research skills. They will deepen their knowledge about historiography and approaches to historical research. Through an investigation of broad questions concerning the practice and theory of the historian's craft, students will learn about conceptions of time, literary approaches to history, comparative history, global history, the objectivity and subjectivity of history, and the challenge of classifying history as a science. By engaging with existing historiographical debates and by rehearsing debates in class, students will gain confidence in mixing and matching different approaches to investigate different questions.
Indicative Module Content:
1. What do we choose to remember and what to forget?
2. Is history a science?
3. What is time?
4. Is history a story?
5. Why do historians compare?
6. Can history be objective?
7. Are humans the only agents of human history?
8. Why do we need historians?
9. How different is women's history from men's history?
10. Whose history is it?
11. How far is global?