Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish

In this year-long module you will progress to B1/B2 on the CEFR scale and HSK 4/5 for Chinese.

By the end of the year, you’ll be able to understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in fields of specialisation. You will be able to interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity with native speakers, including facilitating intercultural encounters.

You will be exposed to a wide range of authentic materials in the target language, varying in terms of content, format and register aimed at broadening and deepening your understanding of different aspects of modern society, politics and culture, global issues and institutions.

The study of the cultural, social and historical context is embedded in the language learning within overarching themes. You will begin with a focus on issues relating to people, power and places, and move on to exploring centres, peripheries and mobilities.

Please note: Italian is not available for students taking a joint degree with a language and a non-language subject.

French, German, Italian and Spanish

Progress to B2 level on the CEFR scale by the end of the year. You will develop a range of oral, aural, written and reading skills in an integrated way that embraces techniques of linguistic mediation and the plurilingual contexts of each language. By the end of the year, you’ll be able to understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics and interact with native speakers in a range of situations. You will be able to produce clear, detailed texts on a wide range of subjects including explaining viewpoints on topical issues.

The study of cultural, social, and historical context is embedded in the language learning within overarching themes. You will begin by exploring social justice and move on to studying cultural translation.

Please note: Italian is not available for students taking a joint degree with a language and a non-language subject.

Who makes History? What drives them to investigate the past? You’ll meet the women and men who have helped shape the discipline of History, delving into their life and works. How did their experiences and opportunities shape their careers and what questions spurred their curiosity? How did they find the sources they would need, and what methods did they use to analyse them?

In exploring their stories, you’ll ask how the place, time and society in which they lived opened opportunities or created obstacles to their careers, how they collaborated with other scholars or carved roles in learned societies or public debate. And you’ll ask why some historians have been heralded as ‘great’ – their names famous, their books widely read – and why others are consigned to the footnotes of the historical profession, their endeavours in the archives unrecognised. What makes a pioneering historian?

Explore the two things that make us human – body and mind. Historians once regarded mind and body as the same across time and place. But more recently, historians have challenged this assumption, showing that changing societies have led people to experience mind and body in radically different ways.

You will explore patterns of continuity and change from the medieval to modern periods by investigating key themes such as:

• How ideas about mind and body have impacted gender, race and social class
• Violence and injury
• Sexuality and gender identity
• Changing experiences of disability and transformations in attitudes to healthcare

You’ll build the skills to historicise mind and body through innovative methodologies such as:

• Disability studies
• Histories of health and medical humanities
• Gender and sexuality studies
• Histories of clothing and bodily adornment
• Interdisciplinary approaches including osteoarchaeology
• Recent developments in material culture
• The study of lived experience

What does it mean to die? Is it frightening? Will I see those I love again? What does it mean to kill, whether an enemy, a friend, or myself? Death is a universal human experience but, as you’ll discover, how we confront it has varied across history.You’ll explore varied experiences of death, from end-of-life care to execution, and from battlefields to pandemics.

Religion can shape beliefs and customs, from the theology of the afterlife to funerary rituals and the treatment of the corpse. Yet at the margins have always lain a shadowy world, where the restless dead return, the living seek to summon the departed, and the despairing take their lives.

You’ll discover the different means of investigating death, from the chronicles that describe the walking dead, to the archaeology of burial practice, and from murder trials to palaeogenetics, unlocking the passage of disease.

Explore the links between humans and their environments around the world from the medieval period to the modern era. Examine how people have understood nature and their place within it over time and across cultures, investigating climate change, environmental disasters and massive landscape transformations.

You’ll situate the natural world as both an agent of change and a system that humans can alter on many scales, developing skills in navigating complex human-environment interactions. You will encounter a range of sources, from texts to images and environmental data, and learn how to analyse them, including through digital methods.

With these skills, you’ll explore regional case studies of environmental impacts on humans and human alterations of the environment, from the impact of warming periods and the Little Ice Age to the transformation of colonial landscapes, the exploitation of forests, minerals, and water and the effects of urbanization.

How do people share ideas? Who controls information? What technologies make communication around the world possible? From medieval to modern history, knowledge and ideas have been written, printed, hidden, copied, gossiped about, archived, and destroyed.

You’ll examine cultures of information and misinformation around the world. Circuits of information have been cultivated in state and religious institutions, social networks, mass media, and, more recently, the internet. From espionage to scandals and fake news, you’ll ask who is shaping information, with what tools or media, and with what political, ethical, social, and economic motivations and consequences.

You’ll study how ideas are transmitted, for example in songs, slave networks, books, laws, maps, advertisements, newspapers, and letters. You’ll build critical skills in assessing provenance and context of information, past and present, preserved and lost, digital and analogue, true and false.

To what rights are humans entitled? How are those rights balanced with the rights of other organisms and the environment? How are they balanced with the needs of societies and governments? The protection of human rights has been used to justify international conflict and military intervention to save lives, yet human rights critics have argued that they are a form of cultural imperialism limiting the sovereignty of local populations.

You will explore the codification of rights, from Magna Carta and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the Geneva Conventions, and how questions of rights have manifested in movements for decolonisation and self-determination, debates on the use of capital punishment, and campaigns for gendered, disability and same-sex relationship rights. You’ll also explore how societies have considered rights in relation to landscapes, from the right to roam to the protection of spaces, from medieval forests to the creation of national parks.

Encounter changes in society, culture, and politics in multilingual contexts, across time and across the planet, as well as relevant ideas and analytical terminology, such as ‘world’, ‘global’, and ‘planetary’.

You will approach planetary histories of societies and cultures by exploring the relationship between:

• Culture, language, and power
• Language histories
• Histories of translation and multilingualism
• Cultural encounters
• The global histories of the study of languages

You will draw on a variety of cultural texts, including films, novels, plays, poetry, songs or graphic novels.

You will develop your skills and use of terminology in whole cohort workshops and plenaries. In smaller groups, seminars you will study specific geographical areas, regions, and languages. You will develop the skills you need to study literatures, cultures, and societies and to research and write your final year dissertation or project.

Spend an academic year abroad engaging with the communities of the relevant language (s) studied. This can be at a partner university, working in industry, with an NGO or other charitable projects, in an entrepreneurial activity or teaching English as a foreign language. A combination of activities is also possible.

If you have educational needs, you may complete the year with online work or placement based in the UK if the work utilises the language you are studying.

You design your Global Engagement Year during your second year, supported by a series of workshops and one-to-one sessions with a pre-departure supervisor. Once abroad, you will remain in contact with the supervisor and produce a reflective portfolio in the language(s) studied as you progress.

Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish

Progress to B2 level on the CEFR scale and HSK 5 for Chinese in this year-long module. You will develop a range of oral, aural, written and reading skills in an integrated way that embraces techniques of linguistic mediation and the plurilingual contexts of each language. By the end of the year, you’ll be able to understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics and interact with native speakers in a range of situations. You will be able to produce clear, detailed texts on a wide range of subjects including explaining viewpoints on topical issues.

The umbrella theme of these modules is ‘self, body and other’. You will begin by exploring linguistic roots and variations and then move on to focus on the body. In terms of translation, you will pay particular attention to texts that embrace feminist, queer and disabled identities.

Please note: Italian is not available for students taking a joint degree with a language and a non-language subject.

As an advanced undergraduate historian, you’ll identify a historical topic that excites you and where you can make your own contribution to historical understanding, gaining the satisfaction of forging your own research project.

To guide you throughout, you’ll be allocated an expert historian as your supervisor, with whom you’ll meet regularly to discuss your choice of topic and research design, your hunt for primary sources and your analysis of secondary literature. With their support you’ll research and write a dissertation: a written research project exploring a challenging historical problem.

Research for dissertations involves building systematic understanding of your topic and engaging with the latest research, forming critical evaluations of historians’ arguments and deploying the skills you’ve been developing so far in source analysis to identify and address historical problems. You’ll hone your expertise in building a sustained interpretation and writing effectively and engagingly to inform and persuade.

Explore the history of South Asia from the abolition of sati to the death of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. You will consider the social, cultural and political histories through which the idea of India was expressed and contested.

You will examine the debates and rebellions through which the European colonial project was resisted and South Asian identities were expressed and cohered. You’ll begin by considering how, in the nineteenth century, the translations, interpretations and classifications of subcontinental history, society and language were created.

How were ideas of identity, community and freedom formed in response to and against the incursion of European power in the region? Subsequently, how did the idea of the nation coalesce into something beyond Empire to create not one, but two nations: India and Pakistan?

Soviet history is often told through the prism of totalitarian oppression, but beneath layers of state control a vibrant dissident movement was active. In this module, you will explore the breadth, depth and complexity of the Soviet dissident movement and critically analyse the impact that they had on the wider world.

You will explore the nature of political life in the Soviet Union, ranging from the labour camps under Joseph Stalin, to the use and abuse of psychiatry under Nikita Khrushchev and the silencing of dissidents under Leonid Brezhnev. You’ll also consider the role dissidents played in the collapse of the Soviet regime and the position of dissidents in contemporary Russia.

By focusing on political dissidents in the Soviet system, you will critically assess how totalitarian governments function, how opposition movements operate and how the international community responds to this persecution.

Explore the history of Victorian Britain and its global encounters through the prism of the body.

Embodiment was central to the way Victorians thought about themselves and others. From sexology to racial science and from sport to war, Victorians sought to make sense of their complex and globalised world by reading character from the body, ascribing values, both positive and negative, to the bodies of others, be they colonial subjects, the working class or queer men.

By studying the history of the body, you will gain new insights into this fascinating period of British history as an age of both remarkable optimism and profound anxiety. Drawing upon a rich and evolving historiography, you will engage with cutting edge and inclusive scholarship that considers how the body became the locus of profoundly unequal power relations and a vehicle for deep-seated prejudices that continue to shape our world today.

Gain an in-depth understanding of this dark chapter of Spain’s history. On the 17 July 1936, a group of military generals launched a coup against Spain’s democratically elected Second Republic. The following three years witnessed a bitter struggle to determine the future of Spain. The Spanish Civil War has been dubbed a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Second World War. General Francisco Franco relied on Hitler and Mussolini to defeat his domestic opponents, while the Republic received support from Soviet Russia.

Yet the conflict had important local dimensions. Spanish socialists, communists, anarchists, liberals and feminists fought to the last against Franco’s ‘Nationalists’. Following his victory in 1939, Franco outlived his international fascist allies by decades, the legacies of which remain keenly present within present-day Spain.

Drawing on diverse primary sources—including autobiographies, oral histories, films, songs, and political speeches—on this module you will develop advanced skills of historical analysis.

With the blurring of the Home and Battle Fronts in Britain in the Second World War, the conventional wartime gender contract — in which men fight to protect the vulnerable at home and women keep the home fires burning — was challenged. In this module you will examine how war was experienced by those who conformed to and those who challenged gender norms, by those included in the war effort and those who stood outside it.

You’ll consider different categorisations of experience (military/civilian; home front/ battle front; male/female) and how historians have grappled with key concepts including the People’s War and hierarchies of service. Through a wide range of primary sources, including autobiographical materials, poems, photographs, films, parliamentary minutes, newspapers, posters and cartoons, you will seek to understand individual and collective experiences of the war and their gendered dimensions.

Examine how cogent issues in crime, justice and punishment have been treated historically from the eighteenth century. Taking advantage of online historical datasets, including Digital Panopticon and Old Bailey Online, you will be introduced to the vast range of historic criminal justice records.

On the module, the classroom becomes the archive. You’ll get hands on with primary sources evidencing the social and cultural history of modern Britain, and act as Digital Detectives to gather evidence to unlock the world of Victorian crime and punishment.

By using digital approaches to this evidence, you will be able to navigate a history from below and explore the impact of crime and injustice on diverse social groups including women, the working classes, migrants and youth. You’ll explore historical experiences of crime, justice and punishment both at scale and at the level of the individual in its fullest evidential context.

Uncover the origins of modern consumer society in Britain. In the century from the abolition of advertising tax in 1853 to the birth of commercial television in the 1950s, advertising became a pervasive feature of modern life, and Britain became a nation of consumers. Through a range of sources, including press reports, social surveys and – of course – advertisements, you’ll investigate the impact of new shopping environments like the department store and the supermarket, and the rise of ethical consumerism.

Advertising is political, and you’ll also examine how it helped Britain win two world wars and market the Empire to its citizens. By the end of the module, you will understand how advertising sells us much more than simply clothes or food, how it shapes the way we view gender and race and how it creates support for a market economy based on the principles of freedom and choice.

The Vikings inspired both fear and fascination in medieval times, and they continue to exercise a powerful hold on the modern imagination. In this module you’ll explore the Viking Age in the Irish Sea region, from the first Viking raids to the emergence of the kingdom of Man and the Isles, a ‘sea-kingdom’.

You’ll have the opportunity to develop an in-depth understanding of compelling texts such as chronicles and sagas, as well as non-textual material including sculpture, coin hoards and place names. The field is flourishing, and you’ll also have access to plenty of secondary literature. You will learn about political history, the economy, culture, gender and status amongst other themes. There will be some focus on the prolific evidence from north-west England, including artefacts in local museums and impressive stone monuments. You’ll participate in at least one field trip within the region.

Explore British foreign policy and the country's broader engagement with the wider world throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Considering broad debates concerning the decline of British power during this period, you will investigate the central themes that defined Britain's overseas policy in this era, including the impact of the World Wars, the loss of Empire, the 'special relationship' with the United States, and European integration.

In exploring these themes, you will consider how people from a variety of different perspectives (British and foreign, politicians, journalists, novelists, activists) conceived of Britain's world-role since the First World War.

In order to incorporate this variety of perspectives, you will draw on a large range of sources, including newspaper articles, novels, poetry and films, as well as traditional archival sources like official government documents, diaries and memoirs.

Explore the development of the Italian cities across one of the most significant periods of medieval history. Between 1100 and 1350, northern Italy was divided into sixty ‘city-states’ governed by their citizens through assemblies and shared public office. Italian merchant-bankers grew so rich that they lent money to kings and popes, and used their wealth to transform cities into works of art, encouraging a period of cultural flourishing later called the Renaissance. But beyond this splendour lay a darker reality of economic exploitation, political exclusion and violence that eventually proved fatal for this system of self-government.

In this module you will explore themes such as coexistence and violence, participation and exclusion, law and good government. You’ll examine sources ranging from legal documents to frescoes, and from literature to architecture. Meanwhile, you’ll ask a question that remains important today: what does it mean to be citizens in a plural and increasingly unequal society?

Today the claim that God designed everything in the universe has given way to the theory of evolution. The usual story of this change is one of conflict between science and religion. But we will challenge the popular narrative.

You will reconsider the rise and fall of the idea that nature was the work of a divine designer, focusing on the period 1450-1800. As well as trying to understand why the design argument became so important in the early modern period, you will seek to understand why it fell out of favour during the 18th century - long before the theory of evolution. But you will not simply be studying the history of ideas. To understand how early modern science changed, you will study a wide range of practices - from intellectual disciplines like philosophy, rhetoric and theology, to material practices including chemistry, architectural design, archaeology, and art.

The thirteenth century brought rebellion against a tyrant, then a revolution: a party seized power from the king to govern England. This period is hailed as the foundation of democracy – but the reality is darker. Religious leaders were empowered to punish kings, rebels fought as crusaders, and people killed and died for a political cause.

You’ll explore events including the making of Magna Carta, the 1258 coup, and the Battle of Evesham that ended England's First Revolution. You’ll meet queens like Eleanor of Provence, leading knight William Marshal, and Pope Innocent III; tyrannical and hapless kings; Simon de Montfort, the revolution's leader; and the low-born people who flocked to his banner.

You’ll investigate their stories through letters, testimonies, and eye-witness accounts, and challenge historical interpretations of this era. What moves women and men, poor and rich, to risk their livelihoods, take life and give their own to decide who rules?

Colonisation fundamentally transformed Jamaica’s paradisical environment. In this module, you will gain a detailed understanding of how this process occurred. You’ll begin by studying how the first colonists comprehended the New World environment and the importance of that environment for shaping settlement. You will then study how settlers exploited the Jamaican environment using enslaved African labour.

In the concluding section, you will examine how colonists sought to mitigate the devastating effects of plantation agriculture through nascent environmentalism. You’ll study this fascinating history using a diverse array of primary sources and by reading deeply in environmental history. In the assessment, you will be able to undertake your own research in environmental history. You will emerge from this module with a detailed understanding of Jamaica’s natural history and the field of environmental history more broadly.

The English East India Company (founded 1600) was the most famous corporation in world history: its business connecting the British Isles across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. It was a protagonist of globalisation.

In this module you’ll discover how historians have debated what the Company represented. It did much to stimulate global trade, but was it a private business in the modern sense? It ruled British territory on behalf of the British state, but was it a state in its own right?

You will gain a broad and systematic understanding of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century British, Indian, and global history; and develop expertise in and experience of deploying established techniques of analysis: from cultural, art, political, parliamentary, global, economic, constitutional, gender, and business history. Making use of primary and secondary sources, you will be challenged to digest and critique the latest research in this area.

Undertake an extended, in-depth individual project that will typically taking one of the following formats: a discursive dissertation; a translation dissertation; or dissertation by practice.

Indicative topics for discursive dissertations:

• The role of languages and cultures in tackling global challenges
• Language and technology, or future language pedagogies
• Futures of translation and interpreting

Indicative topics for translation dissertations:

• Conventional or creative translation project with critical translator’s commentary. Theories and practices may include eco-translation, AI and machine translation, or creative-critical translation

Examples for the “by practice” route:

• A policy report based on working with minority language communities in the local area
• Creative work: creative writing in the target language or multilingually; a short film; an installation, etc.
• A portfolio of teaching materials

You will be given feedback and supported through work-in-progress workshops.