Modern European History 1850 to the present
Oxford has a unique concentration of academic expertise in modern European history, with the largest number of permanent postholders working in the field of any university in the western world.
It has particular strengths in cultural, intellectual, transnational and social history. But above all it encourages diversity and asking new questions, from how peasants told folk tales in nineteenth-century France to the emotional commitments of activists in the 1968 protest movements on both sides of the Iron Curtain; from the rise of liberal humanitarianism in the mid-nineteenth century to the persecution of gay men sent to the Soviet Gulag; from the persistence of religious belief in the French Third Republic to the nature of patriotism in Nazi Germany. In this spirit, Oxford encourages graduates to follow their own intellectual interests within the degree and equip them with the best supervision and skills to do so.
Course Organisation
Alongside the Theory and Methods course, students spend their first term studying Sources and Historiography. While the Theory and Methods course focuses on key approaches relevant to all areas of historical scholarship, the aim of the classes in Historiography is to acquaint you with some key approaches, such as the oral history of protest movements, the subjective experience of war and violence, and photographs as a form of global politics, which provide modern European historians with a critical theoretical framework for their own empirical research. There will be five classes on Historiography in the first term, for which there will be some assigned reading. There will also be opportunities for you to consider the application of particular theories and methods to topics of special interest to you. Great emphasis will be placed upon class discussion, and on the creation of an intellectual community among students.
Additional Skills training is provided in order to help you identify and gain basic familiarity with key sources and resources relevant to your specialist research period. Students are encouraged to improve their knowledge of European languages via the courses run by the Oxford University Language Centre and attend appropriate Library/IT introductory sessions and sessions organised by the Oxford University Computing Service on text analysis software or statistical packages.
In the second term, students take one of a wide portfolio of Option courses. Those particularly relevant to Modern British and European History typically include:
This course explores transforming norms related to gender and travel mobility in Europe from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century. It is organised thematically, pairing a main topic and different analytical lens every week, and is also structured within a loose chronological frame. Overall, the course explores how travel changed for Europeans between 1880 and 1950, paying particular attention to the experiences had by women as well as by individuals who expressed their gender and/or sexuality beyond the dominant binary and heterosexual norm. The overarching aim of the course is twofold. First, it seeks to demonstrate the varied ways in which incorporating gender into the study of history makes available a more nuanced understanding of societies in their entirety, both past and present. Second, the course probes the ways in which individual mobility – both geographic and symbolic – can point to broader historical developments and changes, thus reminding us of the fact that society itself is never static. A thread that lies at the centre of both these ideas and that further ties the course together as a whole revolves around the self-fashioning of identities, the narration and publication of personal experiences, and the opportunities and limitations for individuals to go “off-script” and live against the grain. In addition to underlining a gendered perspective, the course draws on cultural history, on a history of subjectivities, and on a transnational approach.
We will meet weekly during Hilary Term for seminar discussions. Students should prepare for each session by reading the recommended literature. The “core reading” is all available online, whereas the “further reading” is available either online or through the Bod. The “stories” readings incorporate individual examples related to the weekly theme, including literary, travel-, and life-writing. Students are encouraged to look for further such texts if they wish. Finally, designated students will present at the beginning of each session. A sign-up sheet for presentations will be circulated in January in advance of the start of term.
This option approaches the history of 20th-century Europe by testing the concepts of national, transnational and international history and their possible interactions. It will not compare the history of individual European countries, but rather explore how notions of regional, national, transnational and international history have been used to organize and interpret the history of 20th-century Europe. While the course is firmly rooted in the empirical history of Europe and its relationships to the wider world in this period, it will foreground questions of interpretation. These will include exploring the scope and limits of approaches to political, economic and social history based on concepts of the national, transnational and international, and assessing the advantages and disadvantages of destabilizing the dominant conventions for writing the history of Europe in the last century. The course is intended both for students who want an introduction to this history and for those who want an opportunity to extend and reconsider their existing knowledge of it. Among topics that may be covered are:
- The History of a Transnational Continent
- Political Geographies: Regions, Nations, Empires
- Internationalism and Rights
- Varieties of Political Representation
- Consumption Regimes
- Boundaries and Identities
- Environmentalism and Transnationalism
- International wars and Civil Wars
Everyone is familiar with the iconic images of young men throwing stones at riot police in Paris in May 1968. But what was the significance of these images, what was their place in postwar politics and culture, and how did what was happening in Paris relate to developments in Great Britain, Europe and the United States?
This option will explore a number of interlocking themes using conceptual, comparative and transnational approaches, and a range of documentation, including memoirs, oral testimony and film. These themes will include:
- the concept of generational revolt/conflict, and whether this is a helpful way of understanding cultural and political changes after 1945
- the youth culture which developed in Britain, Europe and the United States after the Second World War around music, fashion, drugs and attacked on the conventional nuclear family, and the notion of cultural or lifestyle radicalism
- the political radicalism which exploded in Europe around 1968, in the context of wider struggles such as the Cold War peace movement, the Civil Rights movement in the USA, the Algerian and Vietnam Wars, revolution in Latin America and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, asking what the relationship was between political and cultural/lifestyle radicalism
- the link between faith and political radicalism, since many political radicals came from a religious background – Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim – and recast their religious aspirations in political guises
- the issue of violence and non-violence, civil disobedience or armed struggle, hotly debated in radical circles as alternative ways of achieving their ends, and how different approaches were adopted in different contexts
- the sexual politics of young people in Europe and America, especially the emergence of feminism and the gay rights movement
- ways in which transnational connections were made between activists in different countries, from study abroad to revolutionary tourism, and from political exile to the work of political intermediaries
- the significance of these years of revolt, explored through the subsequent trajectories of activists and how they remembered this moment, both individually and collectively, in a variety of media.
How have people understood the self in the past? How have they conceptualized emotions? Is there a self before 1700? How do different cultures conceive of the self and how do they understand spirituality? What is the relation between the individual self and the collective? This course seeks to understand ways of approaching the self and psychology in different times and places. It also seeks to explore ways of incorporating subjectivity and emotions of people in the past in how we write history; and to question the sociological, collective categories of analysis that historians often employ. Each session will take a particular example of a cultural context and explore how historians could write the history of subjectivity. The sessions will draw on different types of source material – diaries, letters, visual sources, material objects, travel writing, memoirs, court records, micro-historical material, oral history – and consider the problems and possibilities they offer. Four of the sessions will be on the early modern period; four will be on the modern period; however, in their assessed essay, students may concentrate on either the early modern or the modern period. The course deliberately bridges the early modern and the modern because the historiography itself does. This enables productive comparisons.
Massacres of cats, heretical millers, village fraudsters and globe-trotting prophets: these have all been the subjects of ‘microhistory’ at one time or another. Yet despite the increasing use of the term in recent publications, it is not clear that historians are always writing about the same thing when they write about ‘microhistory’. What might the study of small, seemingly insignificant details, people and places reveal about larger historical trends, events and debates? This option will provide students with research training through the intensive reading and discussion of a number of outstanding examples of the 'micro-historical' study of individuals, families, communities, incidents, processes, rituals and more. The readings will begin with a collection of theoretical and methodological reflections on microhistory in week 1 before proceeding to the close study in weeks 2-6 of examples of the genre from around the world. These examples will come mainly from the literature on early modern Europe, which has had an influential role in the tradition of microhistory, but we will also consider examples from late medieval, American, and modern history (according to student interests). Among the questions we will consider, we will pay particular attention to the issue of sources and their potential in the hands of imaginative historians as well as how microhistories relate to alternative analytical and narrative techniques. We will explore what can be revealed by microhistory that is not available through other methods when it comes to the study of, for example, religion, the state, political culture, bureaucracy, warfare, rural life, and conversion. For the Option Essay, each member of the class will write a microhistorical study of a subject of his/her choosing (agreed in discussion with the instructor). This might be, for example, a microhistorical reading of an individual source, or a methodological essay exploring what microhistory offers for the understanding of otherwise relatively inaccessible aspects of the past. In doing so, students will gain direct experience of research, analysis and interpretation linked to their own interests.
This course is an introduction to the history of warfare since ca.1780, taking the emergence of revolutionary warfare and the military divergence between Europe and the rest of the world as its starting-point. The course is organised both thematically and chronologically. Students will be asked to assess whether the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries saw the emergence of a new epoch in warfare, one marked within Europe by the emergence of mass conscript armies, and beyond it by a recent but rapid European military divergence from the rest of the world. They will explore the topics of war and empire – wars of colonial conquest in Asia, America and Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries – and be encouraged to explore whether this was enabled or facilitated by the developments of the military revolution. They will explore the distinctive forms and functions of warfare which emerged in the 19th century, notably the relationships between war and the various nation-building projects at the time, and the racialized violence of colonial warfare. ‘War and Technology’ will look at how certain types of technological advance – notably rifled weaponry, steam-powered, iron-hulled armoured warships, and later air power and land armour – transformed the way wars were fought, and the international relations surrounding them, while also exploring the role of medical science in warfare. The topic of Life, Death and the experience of war will ask if historians can recreate the subjective experience of the battlefield, and the medical and psychological consequences of warfare. ‘Total War’ will explore the total mobilisation of societies to meet the demands of 20th-century warfare, focusing on the First and Second World Wars.
Throughout the degree, students work towards a dissertation. Recent topics have included:
MSt: Free French Pilots' Memories of the Second World War; The Censorship of Queer Culture in inter-war Britain and Weimar Germany; Spanish anarchists; The rescue of Danish Jews and political negotiation with the Nazi occupiers; Myth, theory and anti-democracy in George Sorel’s writings
MPhil: Popular perceptions of Garibaldi in Sicily; German Spa town as a Russian-European cultural meeting point, 1814-1914; Writing life stories in Moscow's institutions for homeless children and youths in the early 1920s; Veterans of the Great War in interwar Czechoslovakia; Red terrorism in the 1970s in Italy and Germany; The Emotional Experience of Fleeing France during the Second World War; The Belgian Congo at War, 1940-1945.
Faculty and Research Culture
Oxford History brings together the largest number of historians of modern Europe in the world. It has particular strengths in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offering coverage of western and eastern Europe, culture and politics, national and international history. Among those currently in post at Oxford are:
More information on our academics and their subjects, please search within our people section.
Faculty Research Seminars like the Seminar in Modern European History (Michaelmas Term) and the Modern History Seminar (Hilary Term) bring together academic staff, doctoral and master’s students on a weekly basis to hear a wide range of speakers and are an important part of the research culture at Oxford. There is also an in-house Modern European History Graduate Workshop run by and for graduates across the year in which work in progress is presented and discussed in an informal atmosphere. In addition, Students can also benefit from the lectures, events and seminars held under the aegis of its specialist research research centres, such as:
