University of Cambridge, Pembroke College

A research project that assigns students to expert professors in their proposed research topic. The course takes the students' research capabilities to a more professional level. This can be most closely compared to what is called a supervised research project in the USA.

Every war story, according to Leo Tolstoy, begins with the disclaimer that war cannot be understood by those who have not witnessed it for themselves – yet the story is always told anyway. Since the earliest works of art and literature, war has been a persistent topic and a prevailing theme, but it has also presented a challenge for artists and writers: while culture cannot resist representing war, war often seems to resist being represented. This course asks why war has seemed to hold such a challenge for representation in art and writing, and how artists and writers have attempted to overcome this resistance to image-making and storytelling. Our primary focus is on literary works that offer rich and evocative writings of modern warfare, but students begin by paying brief attention to earlier works of literature, as well as some visual pieces, that set the scene for our cultural understanding of warfare today.

In 1800, two empires dominated the region of the Middle East: the Ottoman and Qajar Empires. Today, there are seventeen nation-states in the Middle East. How and why did this happen? This course serves as an introduction to the history of the modern Middle East with an emphasis on developing an understanding of how the region we call the Middle East came to take its current shape. Students explore the encounter with European modernity and subsequent European imperialism, modernisation efforts, responses to colonialism, the rise of new ideologies such as nationalism, and the role of religion in politics and political discourse. The course focuses on the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Turkey, and the Middle East in the 20th and 21st centuries.