CULTURAL HISTORY

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P McCaffery

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above.

Notes

This course may not be taken as part of a graduating curriculum together with HS 2502.

Overview

The course involves an exploration of how modern systematic understanding of the natural and human world took shape. We will examine eighteenth-century faith in Reason and Progress, nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking and its impact, and late twentieth-century scepticism, placing them in a broad social and cultural context.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (50%) and continuous assessment (50%): tutorial participation (10%); 2 x 20000-word essay (15% and 25%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

To be advised

Pre-requisites

Students are not permitted to register for this course after the end of week 2 of teaching. Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above.

Notes

This course will NOT be available in session 2006/07.

Overview

Throughout the course, students examine patterns of continuity and change from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Topics include families and households; urban living; political cultures; status, taste and consumption; cultures of belief and learning; gender; popular and elite cultures; and Europe’s relationship to ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds. Whether this period of western history really was ‘a time of revolutions’ and saw the ‘birth of modernity’ will be critically addressed.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures and 1 two-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 three-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment (50%).

Resit: 1 three-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment (50%). NB: New in-course assessment must be submitted.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Professor D N Dumville

Pre-requisites

None.

Overview

The word 'civilisation' carries much baggage, and its supposed opposite, 'barbarism', almost as much. Both concept and history are studied here, with reference to primary sources of vary various sorts, from thire-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia to twelfth-century A.D. western Europe. Topics discussed include the wild man of the woods, the origins of civil institutions, social functions of rhetoric, social stress and systems-collapse in Antiquity, the two cities in mediaeval thought, the idea of novelty, and why Domesday was postponed.

Structure

1 one-hour lecture, 1 one-hour primary-source class, and 1 one-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 two-hour written examination (60%); continuous assessment (40%).

Resit: 1 two-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Smith

Pre-requisites

Students are not permitted to register for this course after the end of week 2 of teaching. Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above.

Notes

This course will be available in the first half-session of 2006/07.

Overview

The course places the history of medicine in a social and cultural context. It examines key periods and themes including: ancient, medieval and early modern medicine; astrology; the medical revolution; the medical Enlightenment; non-Western medicine; contagion, quarantine and trade; the humanitarian and vivisection movements; childbirth and midwifery; the anatomical body and representations of death; the social history of madness and the asylum; medicine in the twentieth century. Cutting across those topics, the course also addresses issues such as the changing status of women as healers, the secular versus the religious, medicine in film and photography, and the material culture of medicine.

Structure

3 one-hour lectures or 3 one-hour tutorials per week.

Assessment

1 two-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment (50%).

Resit: 1 three-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment (50%). NB: New in-course assessment must be submitted.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P McCaffery

Pre-requisites

Students are not permitted to register for this course after the end of week 2 of teaching. Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above.

Overview

In order to construct a general framework within which to set about understanding how people have found meaning in their lives, the course is based on five pervasive themes whose mutual relevance is explored through historical instances. They are: symbols; spatio-temporal orientation; growth and development; technology and collective or individual identity. Thus, the significance of technology is analysed in terms of what (for example) clockwork has symbolised, and how Western culture’s increasing reliance on accurate time-measurement has been associated with pursuit of greater economic rationality, which in turn affects people’s sense of who they are.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures, 1 one-hour seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 three-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment (50%).

Resit: 1 three-hour written examination (50%) and in-course assessment (50%). NB: New in-course assessment must be submitted.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

Students are not permitted to register for this course after the end of week 2 of teaching. Available only to students in Programme Year 4.

Notes

This course will be available in the first half-session of 2006/07 as CU 4026.

Overview

This course explores the cultural history of Victorian science and technology. No prior knowledge of science is required. First, it introduces some of the methods historians and sociologists have deployed in studying the cultural history of science. Then it goes on to consider a set of perspectives (including: cultural authority; space and architecture; religion and reform; the metropolitan versus the provincial; imperialism, science and (un)orthodoxy, and material culture) and case studies (including: mesmerism; Darwinian contexts and controversies; the social construction of technologies).

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment: 2 essays (each worth 45% of the final mark) and seminar contribution, including presentation (10%).

Resit (for Honours students only): Candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

To be advised

Pre-requisites

Students are not permitted to register for this course after the end of week 2 of teaching. Available only to students in Programme Year 4.

Notes

This course will not be available in 2006/07.

Students in Single Honours Cultural History may also take selected courses in Anthropology, History, History of Art and Religious Studies (see Cultural History Degree Regulations).

Overview

Intoxication is a fascinating and widespread form of human experience that is increasingly explored in cultural history and the social sciences. This course explores perceptions of ‘intoxicating’ substances – such as alcohol, natural and chemically produced drugs, and other means of access to altered modes of consciousness – in their cultural and social settings. Themes to be addressed include: mind and body; addiction; rituals of consumption; cultural creativity, difference and protest; social paranoia and political regulation; and healing. Sources range from historical case-studies, literature and art to contemporary media.

Structure

2 two-hour seminars per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: In-course assessment (100%).

Resit (for Honours students only): Candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P McCaffery and Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

As for entry into Cultural History Honours.

Notes

This course will not be available in session 2006/07.

Overview

What do we mean by "culture". How are we to study it historically? This course analyses some of the central aspects present in any human culture, and explores evidence on how these were subjectively experienced and reflected upon at differnt periods in the past. We look at a variety of cultural environments, mainly but not exclusively in Europe since the Middle Ages. What did medieval people mean, for instance, by "a good death"? Why did the Victorians think children should be "seen but not heard"? Other topics to be explored include gender relationships, religious beliefs and practices, art and communication, and efforts at understanding the physical environment.

Structure

2 one-hour lectures (Mon, Tue midday) and 1 one-hour lecture/seminar per week.

Assessment

1st Attempt: 1 three-hour written examination (50%), continuous assessment (50%).

Resit: 1 three-hour written examination (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr M O'Siochru

Pre-requisites

Students are not permitted to register for this course after the end of week 2 of teaching. This course is only available to Senior Honours Cultural History students.

Overview

This course will provide students with guidance through seminars and individual advice on writing a dissertation on a topic approved by the Co-ordinator of the Cultural History programme.

Assessment

1st Attempt: Dissertation (100%).

Resit (for Honours students only): Candidates achieving a CAS mark of 6-8 may be awarded compensatory level 1 credit. Candidates achieving a CAS mark of less than 6 will be required to submit themselves for re-assessment and should contact the Course Co-ordinator for further details.