History

Students engage with the cultures and histories of Scotland through a multi-disciplinary perspectives offered by archaeology, Celtic languages, history, and literature all with the common question of how Scottish society has interacted with the outside world. Students consider how Scotland’s migratory, economic, intellectual, and cultural links overseas as well as its own distinctive experience of globalization influenced the development of a range of other societies while simultaneously transforming the country’s own domestic character and culture. This central theme of both influencing and being influenced by links with the outside world enables students to assess the global history of a non-US society in a multi-disciplinary way. In doing so, this course demonstrates how humanities-based disciplines explore the mutually influencing nature of the global, the national, and the local.

The course provides an introduction to the phenomenon of globalization from archaeological and historical perspectives. Topics covered include conditions and driving forces for the globalizing processes, the exchange patterns of the “pre-European” world, the European expansion from the 15th century, cultural encounters and hybridity, merchant capitalism and the East India trade, slavery and plantations, and the life of the non-articulate groups of humanity. Special emphasis is on ecological globalization and the threat to the global heritage caused by climate change.

Reflecting the increased focus on social and cultural themes in Irish historiography, this course addresses the ways in which historians are tackling a broad range of societal questions.  What characterised peoples’ family, working, and social lives? How did people interact with the apparatus of the state and of religious bodies? How did the evolution of media affect daily life? What forces and ideas shaped the provision of education and welfare? What impact did emigration have on both host and home societies? Key to the course is an understanding of what differentiated experiences; how did gender, class, geography, and moral/status hierarchies of different kinds shape individual lives? It also places the social history of Ireland in comparative and global contexts, in order to question ideas of Irish insularity and exceptionalism.

This course provides a study of the development of the international economy and the interaction between economic actors and agents from a historical perspective. It examines the different economic causes, effects, and policies related to the movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas in market integration, as well as the processes of economic specialization, convergence and divergence in history. Topics covered include: the first globalization of the 19th century (1820-1913); withdrawal and rupture of international integration (1914-1945); reconstruction of the international economy and second globalization; the world economy at the beginning of the 21st century.

This course presents a historical and contemporary study of European integration and the role of the European Union in global politics. Some of the key concepts explored include Europeanization, Atlantism, supranationalism, intergovernmentalism, sovereignty, integration, interdependence, globalization, security, conflict and cooperation. Topics also include: the European Union as a global actor; the academic study of European integration; Europe after the end of the Second World War; birth and evolution of Atlanticism; the Soviet sphere of influence; dissension in bipolar Europe; Europe in the 1980s; the first European Community; the failure of the political and military community; Gaullist approach to European integration and the enlargement of the EC; reformulation of the European map and the creation of the European Union; the Common Foreign and Security Policy; the EU in a globalized world; the impact of the Lisbon Treaty on EU foreign policy; challenges of the future. Assessment is based on participation, a midterm exam, three short essays, and a final exam.

The debate between Enlightenment and Romanticism has an enduring impact on discussions of today in art, politics, science, human identity, and social values. The Western world is hardly understood without knowledge of these two decisive periods. This course is a systematical introduction to these two, formative, opposed intellectual traditions. First, a historical context is presented to the political and ideological ambitions of the Enlightenment (enlightened despotism, Voltaire at the court of Frederick the Great, censorship and the diffusion of the Enlightenment). Secondly, the opposed approach to "Nature" is introduced; the influence of Newton, the rise of modern science, the Encyclopédie vs. Romantic science (e.g. Goethe’s criticism on Newton’s Theory of Color) and the role of the arts in the new approach to nature (such as landscape painting and romantic poetry). Then, the changes in the visual arts illustrate continuity and discontinuity in cultural history (Romanticism and Neo-Classicism). In the fourth place, human subjectivity in the Enlightenment (based on Lockean psychology and Self-love) is confronted to new approaches to the romantic soul (the unconsciousness, irrationality, Weltschmerz). This is also discussed with an analysis of the classic movie DANGEROUS LIAISONS (Stephen Frears, 1988). Finally, discussions about morals and politics are presented (Rousseau, the Social Contract, the slogans of the French Revolution vs. Romantic values concerning the State and personal relationships like love and friendship, nationalism).