Module Catalogue 2024/25

Pre Requisite Comment

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Co Requisite Comment

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Aims

This module aims to introduce students to the global history of the circulation of ideas from the Ancient to the Modern era. By employing a global framework, it stresses how ideas have been exchanged across space and time, in Africa, Eurasia, Australasia, and the Americas. It will be an opportunity to introduce interdisciplinary methodologies that will allow the students to uncover ideas that are not always preserved in written archives. Drawing on expertise from across the school of HCA, instructors will outline methods to understand the global history of ideas, with the help of interconnected case studies of thinkers and movements. By encouraging students to thinking globally, the module invites them to see familiar ideas in a new light and recognise the importance of unfamiliar ideas, at home and abroad.

The module aims are:
- To introduce them to key ideas and concepts, as well as the evolution and circulation of these ideas over time.
- To challenge students to think about approaching history through ideas.
- To encourage students to define key political concepts and engage with those concepts through important texts.
- To provide a global analytical framework that emphasizes interconnection, circulation, dialogue, and comparison.

Outline Of Syllabus

The circulation of ideas has occurred for as long as human populations have migrated or traded with each others. This module will include a selection of broad themes, with specific case studies dependent on research lead teaching.
-       Time and notions of the past
-       Writing and other forms of knowledge transmission
-       Nature
-       The World
-       The Human
-       The Sea
-       Disease
-       Law
-       The Nation
-       Peace
-       Insiders and Outsiders including Race
-       Genders
-       Power
-       Science

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

Students will be introduced, through a selection of themes, to the diversity of approaches and methodologies of global intellectual history. We will discuss how ideas and concepts have been traveling from one region to another, and how they have been inevitably transformed and sometimes lost in translation. This module will build pathways into the second-year modules and will constitute foundation for research in chronologically and geographically diverse areas. We will also consider how a post-colonial approach to global intellectual history may look like. Students will be able to critically evaluate ideas and concepts introduced in the module, and to construct their own arguments based on the critical use of evidence.

Intended Skill Outcomes

Through scaffolded written assignments, students will develop critical thinking, reading, and writing skills.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Students are expected to come to class having completed the assigned reading in order to fully participate in active learning, led by in-classroom activities. Seminars are spaces for students to workshop specific case studies, to develop competencies in the multidisciplinary methodologies, as well as analytical skills described in the module aims.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

This module adopts an outcome-based assessment model. This course uses scaffolded written assignments to build critical writing skills, ease with the material and capacity to conduct historical research. Each written assignment will gradually require increased skills, allowing students to improve throughout the semester. The first essay introduces the skill of crafting an argumentative thesis statement. The second essay develops the ability of the student to use multidisciplinary methods and sources. The third essay builds on the argumentative and methodological skills of the first two essays, by asking students to make an argument about a specific case study. The final essay asks students to trace a global concept across time and space, thereby inviting them to demonstrate the knowledge they have acquired in the course and the skills they have developed in the first three essays.

General Notes

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