History

This course examines 20th century Australia from the time of Federation to the Apology in 2008. 20th century Australia was a period of vision and revisioning, a time of grand schemes and grand failures, and of intense questioning around notions of identity, place, race, and nation. This course examines the events that Australians lived through and the issues that preoccupied them, their cultural lives and the myths, legends, visions, and prejudices through which Australians imagined themselves and others. Major topics include: Federation, World War One, the Depression, World War Two, immigration, the Petrov Affair, Vietnam, the Dismissal, Mabo, the Tampa, and the Apology. These events become sites for analyzing concepts of nation, the politics of race, ideologies of domesticity and the family, social movements, the impact of modernity, the cinema, the experience of the cities and the bush, and importantly, Australia's place in the region and the world.

Power of great empires was always based on their economy. Sustainable economic growth is therefore crucial for keeping the political influence as well as for ensuring the prosperity for its inhabitants. Economic power and prosperity of the past empires were often threatened by similar economic policy failures as we know today: fiscal crises, inflation, extensive regulation, or institutional mismanagement. Course lectures provide an overview of the economic policy and institutional failures that led to economic decay of the selected past European powers. Lessons from history are compared with the current situation in Central Europe. Students widen and apply acquired knowledge to current economic issues. This course combines application of basic Institutional Economics and International Political Economy.

The course teaches students about the function of intelligence in the 20th and 21st centuries, and promotes reflection on the nature of scholarly work. The connection between scholars and the spies is not just a fanciful one dreamed up by novelists. During the world wars and the Cold War, academics swelled the ranks of Anglo-American intelligence organizations. Early pioneers of intelligence theory and practice, were also distinguished scholars. By learning about the problems of gathering evidence, interpretation, analysis, presentation and distribution of intelligence, students also learn to be better War Studies students. 

This course offers a study of the history of gender equality in the contemporary age. Topics include: liberal feminism and suffragism; socialism and feminism; totalitarianism and the role of women; the sixties and feminist struggles; feminist antinuclear movements in the eighties; feminism today; feminism in Spain.

Many historical figures and phenomena that Czechs know well may remain a mystery to foreigners because of the lack of context. These omnipresent fragments of history are shared by members of the society and are usually modified by various ideological and political intentions, which eventually results in the creation of a national myth/myths. This course focuses on various forms of myths: pre-Christian (arrival of Czechs), Christian legends (St. Wenceslas), folk tales, the “national” myth of the Czech National Revival, modern state-forming myths (Czechoslovak legionnaires) and urban legend (the Springman), and connects them also to various traditions, such as folk traditions throughout the year, as well as traditional skills like beer brewing, fish farming, etc. Students engage in a historiographical and partially also anthropological analysis and interpretation of selected past events. To decipher how they came into existence, it is necessary to understand their historical context and the way they were understood and explained by contemporaries, the way they were interpreted by their followers, the way they were used, misused, and imposed by politicians. Moreover, the course discusses the role paradigm shifts played in these processes and closely examines and critique some of the relatively well-defined pillars of public knowledge and collective identity.

This one-semester course introduces students to world history since the end of the Second World War, looking beyond Eurocentric perspectives and taking a global approach. World history is both a way of thinking about, approaching and doing history, as well as a way of understanding the history of the world. The course traces the history of globalization in this period: the expanding processes of economic, technological, social, cultural, and intellectual change, and the increasing but still uneven integration of different parts of the globe into these processes since 1945. Students explore a diverse range of grounded perspectives on everyday life across the globe in this period, considering the different historical scales (communal, regional, national, transnational, global) on which human lives were lived and shaped. The course also examines the key historical processes and events of the period: the 1960s, the Cold War, emancipations and decolonisations, student protests, consumerism, poverty, political ideologies and alternative futures, thinking beyond dominant Western narratives. Energy, natural, and environmental resources and catastrophes and the challenges of planetary sustainability form an additional strand of historical structure and historiographical discussion.