History (Taught)

This Masters offers courses across all periods from medieval to late modern, focusing on Scotland, Britain, Europe and America with increasing global perspective. You’ll study historical skills and methods and produce a research dissertation based on primary sources. Our excellent research directs our postgraduate teaching so you'll explore cutting-edge topics with leading experts in their fields.

WHY THIS PROGRAMME

• Glasgow offers exceptional resources for the historian, including our university museum, The Hunterian, Scotland’s oldest public museum with over a million items, and our library, one of Europe’s oldest and largest university libraries, with extensive collections from the medieval to the present.

• The Hunterian provides access to primary source materials in fields such as fine art, numismatics and ethnography, while the library offers collections like the Baillie Collection, which contains printed medieval and modern sources on Scottish, Irish, and English history.

• You will have the opportunity to develop research skills across a range of themes, including gender, slavery, war and strategic security, cultural and political history, material culture, and transnational developments, with a wide range of optional courses allowing you to follow your own interests.

• You are also encouraged to approach your subject matter from an interdisciplinary perspective, with all of the benefits of studying at one of the world's top 60 universities for arts and humanities (THE World Subject Rankings).

PROGRAMME STRUCTURE

You’ll take:

• One core course

• Five optional courses

• You’ll also produce a dissertation.

Semester 1
Core Course
Doing History: Sources and Skills for Historians

Optional Courses
You can choose courses from within History to suit your own interests:
Issues, Ideologies And Institutions Of Modern Scotland
The Global History of Inequalities
Resistance to Slavery from 1700 to 1900
Crusading Warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1096-1291
A 'New Form of Slavery'?: Indentured Labour in Post-Slavery Caribbean Societies, c. 1836-1917

Semester 2
Optional Courses
You can choose courses from within History to suit your own interests, including:
Scottish Radicalism 1848-1950
Medieval Palaeography: An Introduction to Reading Medieval Documents
Military Scotland in the Age of Proto-globalization, c.1600-c.1800
Qualitative Approaches to the Study of Political Violence
How Wars End
Games and Gaming History
With the permission of the programme convenor and subject to availability, your options may also include courses from other subjects.

Please note the availability of a particular course depends on student numbers and patterns of staff leave. Not all courses will be available every year.

Summer: April to September
DISSERTATION (MSC HISTORY)

Teaching and Assessment

Teaching is mainly seminar and discussion-based, in small classes. Technical skills are taught through lectures and workshops associated with the core course, while the conceptual foundations for gender history are taught through the weekly seminars. Independent and self-reflective critical work is fostered through written assignments and seminar presentations, culminating in the dissertation.