MA Cultural History: The University of Manchester

Course description

The MA in Cultural History represents a unique chance to evaluate history now.

Influenced by diverse ideas, from cultural studies to feminism and contemporary social theory, the discipline of history is currently being broadened, deepened, but also questioned. The MA programme in Cultural History equips students to take stock of these changes, and perhaps to go on to pursue new and exciting histories at PhD level.

This programme exploits their noted research strengths in the new cultural history, to provide an advanced introduction to its potentialities and to the debates it has generated. A theoretical and historiographical introduction to these is provided by its core course unit, 'History and Postmodernism'. This unit examines the so-called postmodern turn in contemporary social and cultural theory in the past two decades, which has posed a radical challenge to the practices, approaches and epistemology of the discipline of History. Through the controversies it has unleashed new types of histories have emerged which critically engage with postmodernism broadly conceived. Students on this programme often choose options in English Literature or Social Science.

Module details

Typical course units include:

• Research Training
• History and Postmodernism
• The Humanitarian Subject
• The (IR)resistible rise of the American empire, 1941-1955
• Colonial Modernity and the Public Sphere
• Foucault
• Is America Postcolonial?
• The New Worlds Encounter with Europe
• Men, Masculinities and Social Change
• The Enlightenment and its Critics
• Language, Gender and Feminism
• Death and the Visual Culture of Modernity
• Ethics, Politics and the Body
• Major Issues in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine; and
• Supervised Reading.

Entry requirements

Academic entry qualification overview: An Upper Second class honours degree, or the overseas equivalent.

English language: Non-native speakers of English should have at least a score of IELTS 7.0 or TOEFL 600 (paper based) or 250 (computer based).