Approaches and Methodologies courses

These courses aim to broaden doctoral students’ intellectual mastery and teaching capacity by exploring large methodological or historiographical domains. They are organised around readings and discussion. Further details can be obtained by emailing the course hosts indicated.

Gender and history

Presented by Dr Hester Vaizey and Dr Bianca Gaudenzi. Tuesdays 5.00-6.30 in Michaelmas term 2011, fortnightly commencing 18 October. Seminar Room 11, Faculty of History

These classes are designed for MPhil/PhD students who are interested in exploring gender history in greater depth. Classes will be organised around discussion of some of the most recent historiographical contributions, which will be pre-circulated before each class. The seminars will address important questions in this field, from basic issues such as the nature and reasons behind the development of gender history to an exploration of the historiographical benefits and challenges of using this approach on an empirical basis. The classes will examine the shifts in gender roles across time by exploring the construction both of femininity and masculinity and will analyse its practical implications through the convenors’ own research experience.

Course outline

Please email Dr Vaizey (hlv20@cam.ac.uk) if you are interested in attending. Include your name, year of study and background.

Critical readings in modern British history

Presented by Professor Peter Mandler and Dr Jon Lawrence. Thursdays, 4.00, seven seminars over Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms 2011-12 commencing on 1 November. Gonville and Caius College.

This reading seminar is designed for PhD students in modern British history and related fields who want to have the opportunity to lift their head up from their specialist research and consider the shape of the whole field, with a view to their future as teachers and colleagues.  Emphasis is placed on the widest possible perspectives and on in-depth discussion.  It is therefore meant to complement the research seminars where scholars present their own work.

Classes will be organised around the discussion of recent important texts in modern British history.  Discussion will be introduced by formal presentations by seminar participants, which will put the selected texts into their wider historiographical context, thus giving a sense not only of where the field is today but where it has come from.  The seven sessions will range from the early modern to the later twentieth century, and will engage with a wide range of sub-disciplines, including economic, political, cultural, imperial and social history.

To sign up, email Peter Mandler (pm297@cam.ac.uk) by Tuesday 18 October.

Reading and self-narrative

Presented by Dr Ulinka Rublack. Thursdays 9.00-11.00am, six seminars over Michaelmas, Lent and Easter terms 2011-12, commencing on 20 October. Room E11a, St John's College.

This series is intended for postgraduates who work with different kinds of self-narratives - from diaries to court trials. We will discuss current methodologies and focus in particular on Carol Gilligan's 'Harvard Listening Guide Method'. This was first developed to analyse interviews but can be adapted to other types of evidence. We will discuss participants projects and their methodological challenges and possibilities in detail. Those wishing to participate should email Dr Ulinka Rublack (ucr10@cam.ac.uk).

What is world history?

Presented by Dr Tim Harper, Dr David Washbrook and Dr Joya Chatterji. Fortnightly on Mondays in Lent and Easter Term 2012 commencing 23 January. Seminar Room 5, Cripps’ Court,  Magdalene College. The first class will be introductory.

Please contact Dr Harper (tnh1000@cam.ac.uk) for futher information.

Towards a global intellectual history

Presented by Professor Chris Bayly and Dr Shruti Kapila. Tuesdays, 4.30-6.00 (unless otherwise stated in course outline) in Lent term 2012. Seminar Room, Centre of South Asian Studies, top floor Alison Richards Building (new building opposite the History Faculty).

This seminar course will explore the emergence, relevance and transformation of the key concepts and ideas that were fundamental to the making of the modern world. The power of ideas will be contextualised within imperial, trans-national, and global contexts.

This seminar course is experimental, designed to investigate ways in which the classic strengths of European and North American intellectual history might be turned outwards to help us understand how western concepts of state, society and politics were received and transformed in other parts of the world during the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also considers how Asian and Islamic ideas of good government and virtuous polity were themselves adjusted to global modernity and came, in turn, to influence western debates on these issues. The themes to be discussed range widely, from liberalism, to religion, freedom, race and notions of empire. In view of our own knowledge, Britain and India will bulk large in presentations and readings, but we are keen to attract interest from those concerned with the intellectual history of Europe, the Americas, Africa and other parts of Asia. The idea is not systematically to ‘cover’ the various regions of the world, but to open up methodological issues.

The course consists of eight hour-and-a half seminars in the Lent Term. Each seminar will begin with about 30 minutes of presentations by the course organizers or invited speakers, followed by short statements by other participants and a general discussion. Short reading lists of primary and secondary material are provided for each session. The course is designed to interest anyone concerned with intellectual history, world history or historical argument and practice. It is intended particularly as a contribution to graduate training, but undergraduates with related interests, especially those preparing dissertations, post-doctoral researchers and senior members are welcome to attend.

Key questions: Some of the other questions and themes would be: is liberalism a universal? Is the demise of religion in modernity overstated? In what sense was ‘empire’ an ideological formation? Does ‘modernity’ always take a national form? How did the twentieth century produce a theory and politics of the global? Is internationalism overstated?

Recommended Overviews:

• Cambridge History of Political Thought, 18^th, 19th and 20 century volumes
• C. A. Bayly, Recovering liberties. Indian thought in the age of liberalism and empire; preliminary versions of earlier chapters available on line: Wiles Lectures, 2007 ‘Liberalism at large: South Asia and Britain 1800-194. Web link: www.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/wiles.html
• ‘An Intellectual history for India’, special issue, Modern Intellectual History, April 2007 ed. S. Kapila.
• Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, 1983
• D Brading, The First America (later chapters)

Students are advised to read the journal Modern intellectual History and other journal especially looking out for articles by David Armitage, Samuel Moyn, Jennifer Pitts, and a second special MIH Forum August 2010 edited by Kapila and Devji.

If you are interested in attending there is no need to register, simply turn up at the organisational meeting 4.30pm on 17 January 2012 in the Seminar Room, Centre of South Asian Studies, Alison Richards Building (new building opposite the History Faculty).

Course outline

Theory and cultural history: what is the social?

Presented by Dr Lawrence Klein and Dr Renaud Morieux. Tuesdays, 7.00pm, four sessions in Lent term 2012 plus one prior meeting for organisation and information. Boardroom, Faculty of History.

The starting point for this course is the historiographical narrative in which the rise of ‘cultural history’ from the 1980s  challenged the assumptions, categories and understandings of ‘social history’ as it had been practiced in the preceding decades.  ‘The primacy of social explanation’, ‘a materialist model of social determination’, ‘the causal sovereignty of the economy and material life’  (to quote Geoff Eley) all came under sceptical scrutiny as historians devoted more attention to human experience in history (people’s feelings, perceptions, ideas, discourses, images and so forth  -- that is, the entire domain of representation – as well as those practices constituting ordinary and not-so-ordinary everyday life).  In other words, the idea of ‘the social’ seemed to have come unstuck, authorizing fresh and urgent debates about a series of questions (not exactly new):

• how is human experience related to its material settings?
• how is the individual related to the general?
• how are texts related to contexts?
• how is human agency related to structural constraint?
• how are events articulated with larger narratives and/or larger structures?
• how is change to be described and accounted for?

Such questions entailed efforts to rearticulate the possibility and nature of historical generalization and explanation.

One goal of this course is to examine the debates emerging from the (putative) conflict of ‘social history’ and ‘cultural history’, in which, for some, the very possibility of historical explanation seemed to be under attack.  However, another goal is to examine some of the approaches to ‘the social’ that have become prominent in the context of and in response to this perceived crisis.  These include efforts to relate representation to its setting as well as such approaches as micro-history, prosopography, and network analysis.

The course is not organised as a systematic treatment, and there will be no lectures.  In conversing about these issues, the convenors regard themselves as equal participants with those taking the course. It is essentially a reading group.  Students will be expected to make a commitment to the entire series and to participate in the discussion.

Readings will be moderate in length and available through the UL’s electronic resources or on Camtools.  Though these debates have been informed by theoretical reflection from a range of disciplines, the reading list will largely consist of writings by historians:  some primarily conceptual in nature, others illustrating historical practice.  Some of the writers likely to be included are:  Roger Chartier, Geoff Eley, Eric Hobsbawm, Patrick Joyce, François-Joseph Ruggiu, William Sewell,  Gabrielle Spiegel as well as writers on micro-history (such as Carlo Ginzburg) and network analysis (such as Bruno Latour).

Both doctoral and MPhil students are invited to participate. A schedule and bibliography will be available at the beginning the course.

There will be four semi-weekly meetings  in Lent (Tuesdays at 7 pm) after an initial meeting for information and organisation.  The dates are:

1. Meeting for information and organization - Tuesday, 17 January 2012
2. The crisis of ‘the social’ - Tuesday, 31 January 2012
3. Situating texts:  representation - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
4. Microhistories and macrohistories - Tuesday, 28 February 2012
5. Networks and prosopographies - Tuesday, 13 March 2012