CULTURAL HISTORY

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Withington

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above.

Overview

This course offers students an opportunity to study the role of women and men in the culture and society of England, Scotland and Ireland. The course is taught in ‘reverse’ chronological order, beginning with the period after women won the vote and ending with the middle ages. In each chronological segment the same key themes are addressed, normally including family, work, health, politics, knowledge and belief. In addition, students will be introduced to relevant aspects of art and material culture. Throughout, women’s role in society will be analysed by comparison with the role of men in society.

3 x 1-hour lectures per week; 1 x 1-hour tutorial per week.

Examination (50%) and continuous assessment (50%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above.

Overview

Topics from the history of science, ranging from Antiquity to the 17th Century, with particular emphasis on the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of 1500-1700. The course offers two complementary perspectives: (i) an introduction to the history of science in an intellectual, social and cultural context, focusing on Newton, Copernicus, Galileo and their contemporaries; and (ii) an introduction to central themes in the philosophical understanding of science and its methods, illustrated with reference to Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes and other.
2 one-hour lectures per week and 1 one-hour tutorial per fortnight.
1 one-and-a-half-hour written examination (60%) and continuous assessment (40%) of which written work (30%) and tutorial assessment (10%).

Credit Points

15

Course Coordinator

Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above.

Overview

Topics from the history of science from the 18th Century to the present day including: science in the Scottish Enlightenment; the chemical revolution; the contexts for and consequences of Darwin’s theory of evolution; the history of psychology; and ethical issues in contemporary science. The course follows on from HS 2002 and pursues many of the same approaches. However, HS 2002 is not a pre-requisite for this course.
2 one-hour lectures per week and 1 one-hour tutorial per fortnight.
1 one-and-a-half-hour written examination (60%) and continuous assessment (40%) of which written work (30%) and tutorial assessment (10%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Withington

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above.

Overview

The course examines key approaches to culture developed from the mid-19th Century to the present day. It explores the work of European theorists, art critics, and cultural commentators in the context of their own time, and considers their significance within cultural history. The authors examined shed light on issues ranging from the social meaning of literature and art, the place of the sacred, and the relationship between culture, economics and power to the rituals and symbols used in everyday life. We begin with the Pre-Raphaelites and conclude with post-modern thinkers of the late 20th Century.
2 one-hour lectures, 1 two-hour seminar per week.
1 three-hour written examination (50%), and continuous assessment (50%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Withington

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 3 or above.

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.
2 one-hour lectures and 1 two-hour seminar per week.
1 three-hour written examination (50%) and continuous assessment (50%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

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.
2 one-hour lectures, 1 two-hour seminar per week.
1 three-hour written examination (50%) and continuous assessment (50%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to students in Programme Year 2 or above.

Overview

The course places the history of medicine in 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.
3 one-hour lectures and 1 one-hour tutorial per week.
1 two-hour written examination (50%) and continuous assessment (50%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students.

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).
2 two-hour seminars per week.
Continuous assessment (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr L Bourdua

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students.

Notes

This course will be available in 2001/02 and in alternate sessions thereafter.

Overview

This interdisciplinary course will focus on the material culture associated with the sick, the dying and the dead in the European Middle Ages. Some of the inherited artefacts and goods under study will include the medieval hospital and its liturgical and medical paraphernalia, literary responses to disease such as leprosy and the black death, cemeteries, tombs, visual and written accounts of funerals. The course will also draw on anthropological studies of ritual and rites of passage.
2 two-hour other classes per week. Field work - a variety of formats for small group work - seminars, projects etc.
Continuous assessment: 2 essays [essay one (25%), essay two (30%) (2500 words each)], class participation (5%), 2 hour class examination (40%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr B Marsden

Pre-requisites

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.
Dissertation (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr P Withington

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students.

Notes

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.
2 two-hour seminars per week.
Continuous assessment (100%).

Credit Points

30

Course Coordinator

Dr D Simonton

Pre-requisites

Available only to Senior Honours students.

Overview

This course will cover the period from early modern Europe to the present by examining a number of recurrent themes. These will include courtship, marriage, motherhood, work, power and status. Medical, artistic, cinematic and popular journalistic images of women will be explored, as will the interplay of gender and women’s status in culture and society and the role of feminism and feminist theory. The course is taught from the perspective of women as actors in the past, studying the ways in which women have created their own culture in the face of a largely patriarchal European society.
2 two-hour seminars per week.
Continuous assessment (100%).