New courses

The Department of International History will be introducing the following new courses in 2022/23. They are available for selection starting in September 2022.

HY336 - The United States and Nuclear Weapons from the Manhattan project to the end of the Cold War

Professor Matthew Jones

This course looks at the way nuclear weapons and the challenges they have posed have influenced the course of American foreign and defence policy, strategic thinking, and domestic politics, as well as wider trends in society and culture, from the instigation of the Manhattan project – the US programme to develop an atomic bomb – to the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s.

HY4B1 The Vietnam Wars, 1930-75: Regional and International Perspectives

Professor Matthew Jones

The purpose of this course is to place the wars in Vietnam in a fuller regional and international perspective in order to understand their course, outcomes and consequences. Hence, this will involve not just studying the internal dynamic of conflict within Vietnam, as first French colonialism was met with nationalist and Communist resistance, and then from c. 1958/9 when insurgency in the southern part of Vietnam eventually triggered wholesale US intervention, but the involvement and interests of other major powers, including the Soviet Union and China.

HY4B3 - Half Unit in Lent Term - Citizenship in 20th century political thought: intellectual history in case studies

Dr Dina Gusejnova

The history of citizenship has often been linked both to the western Canon and to the rise of liberal democratic states, a connection which is itself the product of a particular lineage of teaching political philosophy and theory. This course will challenge students to re-examine this association in a critical light by revisiting changing conceptions of citizenship in twentieth-century European and global history. We will begin with two prominent critiques of the European tradition of political thought, which were launched in the wake of the First World War.

HY4B4 - Half Unit in Lent Term - Maritime Asia in Transition, 1405-1839

Dr Ronald C. Po

The subject of this course is the history of maritime Asia, particularly East and Southeast Asia, from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. If there is something we could refer to as a transition, would it be one related to a shift from being a not-so-maritime Asia to a relatively more-maritime Asia, or vice versa? Are there any fundamental differences between the conception of a maritime Asia and of a maritime Europe? These questions sound teleological in that the people of the time would hardly have made these enquiries. In the present century, however, it is imperative that we ask these questions in order to better situate Asia, especially during the early modern era, within a broader global context.

HY4B5 - Half Unit in Lent Term - Queer Early Modernities

Dr Nailya Shamgunova

This module introduces Masters students to the meanings of queerness in the early modern period. They will meet lesbian nuns, gender nonconforming soldiers, samurai besotted with their male beloveds, powerful eunuchs, and famous castratti. They will learn how different cultures understood gender and sexuality, and what happened when those cultures encountered each other. The course engages with a wide range of textual and visual sources, including autobiographies, illustrated satirical pamphlets, sermons, conduct books, legal and medical texts, illustrated poetry volumes and objects relevant to gender and sexuality.

HY4B6 - Half Unit in Michaelmas Term- German Transformations since 1990

Visiting Professor Constantin Goschler

Following German reunification in 1990, both Germany and its role in Europe have undergone substantial changes in the past 30 years. The course will bring together political, economic and social history in a transnational perspective and thus place the neoliberal and human rights agendas of the first decade of the post-cold-war era within a common interpretative framework.

HY487 - Half Unit in Lent Term - Islam, State and Conflict in Southeast Asia

Dr Kirsten E. Schulze

This course looks at the role of Islam in conflicts Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Myanmar in the twentieth century. It starts with a historical introduction on the Islamisation of Southeast Asia and the entry of the European colonial powers. Each country case study also includes a brief analysis of the relationship between Islam and the colonial state before moving into a broader discussion of the interplay of the interplay of Islam and nationalism in the Muslim-majority states of Indonesia and Malaysia as well as the Muslim-minority states of the Philippines, Thailand and Myanmar.

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