History

This course offers a reinterpretation of contemporary French history, drawing on the insights of women's and gender history, a field that has developed over the past 40 years. Major periods in French history are revisited from the perspective of women, spanning from the French Revolution in 1789 to May 1968, from industrialization to the tertiarization of society, and examining the evolution of the family and issues related to sexualities. Historical overviews are provided to illuminate current debates within feminist circles and society concerning gender-related questions. By reinserting women into historical narratives, major political (access to citizenship and suffrage), economic, and social (access to work and professions) timelines are re-examined. Significant attention is paid to the historian's sources—from written documents to everyday objects—to write a history of women on the following themes: women's bodies, their place in the family, at school, at work, and in the public sphere.

This course examines the political system established at Rome by Octavian at the end of the Roman "Republican" period which is normally known as the "Principate" or "High Empire" until the reforms of Emperor Diocletian and the Edict of Milan which granted the Christians freedom of religion.  Students look at the tensions and development in the structures of the state in this period, the role of the army and foreign policy, life in the provinces of the empire, and social issues including religious practices and the rise of Christianity.

For the past two centuries, historians have focused their work on understanding the political, economic and social developments that created the modern world. Debates over the growth of trade, the development of institutions, the causes of war and ways to achieve peace, the creation of health systems, and the evolution of ideas formed the basis of the field. History, for most of history, was considered a purely human endeavor. In the past few decades, however, climate change and human impact on Earth's biosphere have demonstrated that this framework is incomplete. Humanity has always been part of and dependent on the non-human world and now, as the Anthropocene debate suggests, the human race is undoubtedly a major cause of changes to Earth systems. The future of humanity and the planet can no longer be separated, which forces us to reconsider the role of non-human environments in the development of modern human societies. To do so, this course relies on the tools of environmental history, a relatively new and rapidly growing historical subfield that studies the human relationship with the natural world. Each session addresses a specific feature of our modern era through an environmental lens, including globalization, industrialization, empires, warfare, food production, and energy use. Sessions are a combination of lectures, source analysis and group discussions. At the end of the course, students are familiar with the broad themes of the environmental history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are able to apply this historical methodology to their own interests.

British living standards have stagnated for almost fifteen years, and on present trends will be the same as Poland's by 2030. What has gone "wrong" with the quality of Government in Britain? What errors and mistakes have its governments made? What lessons can be learned for other nations? Is relative British decline reversible? This interdisciplinary course draws on intellectual traditions in history, political science, economic history and economics to explore how the Academy explains the perpetual British crisis, drawing on the course leader's research in modern British history and politics at the University of Oxford. Its method is case study-based, beginning with the First World War (the conceptual, introductory topic) and passing through other "failures" of the British State since 1914, including Appeasement; the Suez Crisis; Concorde, the Community Charge (the "Poll Tax"); Rail Privatization; the Iraq War; and the Great Financial Crisis of 2007/8. An overview of "public policy failure" literature is integral to the course.

The course begins with a theoretical review of the concepts of nationalism and communism – the predominant ideological concepts of twentieth-century Central Europe, i.e. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. This is followed by study of the origins, development, and present-day heritage of nationalism and communism in the region. The topics described and problematized include concrete manifestations of nationalism and communism in Central Europe, such as the creation of new nation states after World War I, the introduction of communist regimes after 1945 and the impact of these regimes on political, economic, social and cultural development. The course is concluded with a general discussion of the heritage and consequences of nationalism and communism in present-day Central Europe.