Taught courses
You will take several courses across two semesters of teaching, including two compulsory courses and a range of optional courses.
Core courses
There are two required core courses for this programme: two history skills training courses (20 credits each), one in each semester, which are taken by all MSc students in History in the school.
The compulsory courses for this programme are:
| Course name | Credits |
| Historical Research: Skills and Sources | 20 |
| Historical Methodology | 20 |
Optional courses
You will choose a further 80 credits from a wide selection of optional courses, subject to availability.
Option courses previously offered include those listed below. Option courses change from year to year and those available when you start your studies will be different from those shown in this representative list.
| Course name | Credits |
| The Cold War in Latin America | 20 |
| The Dark Side – Tourism and Difficult Heritages | 20 |
| An Uncertain World: The West since the 1970s | 20 |
|
The United States and the Vietnam War: Origins and Repercussions |
20 |
| The Sixties in the United States | 20 |
|
African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in Modern African History, c. 1880 to 1975 |
20 |
| Islamic Africa | 20 |
| Global Environmental History | 20 |
| Conservatism in the United States, c.1930-c.1990 | 20 |
|
Black Activism in Britain since 1800 |
20 |
|
An Age of Great Dreams: The 1960s in the United States |
20 |
|
Empire or Continent?: British Foreign Policy in the Era of the Great War |
20 |
| The Civil Rights Movement | 20 |
| Themes in American Historiography | 20 |
| The United States and the Cold War | 20 |
| War and Identities in Twentieth Century Britain and Ireland | 20 |
| History as Romance, Profession, Critique: Theory and Scholarship in the West, 1835 to 1985 | 20 |
| Cinema and Society in South Asia, 1947-Present | 20 |
| Genocide in Contemporary History | 20 |
| Thinking the 20th Century - Hannah Arendt and the breakdown of European Civilization | 20 |
| Citizens and Subjects: concepts of citizenship in modern African intellectual history | 20 |
| The British Empire in Political Thought | 20 |
| Revolutions in Modern Europe | 20 |
| Gender, Crime and Deviancy: Britain c. 1860-1960 | 20 |
| Contemporary Scotland | 20 |
| Gender in the History of the Americas | 20 |
| A Cultural History of Photography | 20 |
| China's foreign and security policy: a twentieth-century perspective | 20 |
| Cinema and Society in Britain | 20 |
| The Closest of Enemies: Cuban-American Relations 1898-2014 | 20 |
You may also be able to select from relevant courses from the Online MSc History programme.
Teaching and assessment
You will take a variety of seminar-style courses in small groups.
Most courses are assessed by means of an extended piece of written work, while some courses assess non-written skills.
Further information
You can see more details about the 2023/24 programme structure on the Degree Programme Table for the MSc in Contemporary History. We expect the 2024/25 programme structure to be available from May 2024.