The Intellectual strand offers an interdisciplinary approach to Intellectual History, with chronological and global reach. Graduate students have the opportunity to study thinkers and ideas from the fourth to the twenty-first centuries, in diverse transnational geographical contexts. The course is designed to encourage students to work in and between areas such as Global Intellectual History, the History of Scholarship, the History of Science, the History of Art, Historiography and the History of Political Ideas, to name but a few. In the core course you will have the opportunity to experience and to combine a variety of approaches to Intellectual History in creative and innovative ways, and in doing so help to shape the future of this dynamic and exciting field.
Oxford is home to one of the largest communities of intellectual historians in the world, with expertise in every major area of Intellectual History. These scholars are supported by world-class libraries (the Bodleian, the major resource for intellectual historians), museums (the Ashmolean Museum and the Museum of the History of Science), centres, institutes and dedicated Intellectual History lecture series (the Berlin and Carlyle Lectures), and are engaged in exciting projects to create major digital resources in the field (Cultures of Knowledge).
Through the core Historical Methods classes, you will be introduced to the philosophical background and methodological approaches to Intellectual History. You will study a combination of key thinkers (central figures might include, for example Michel Foucault, Arthur Lovejoy and Quentin Skinner) and new approaches to the discipline (for example, comparative, feminist and global intellectual history).
