Taught courses
You will take several courses across two semesters of teaching, including two compulsory courses and a range of optional courses.
Core courses
You will take two compulsory courses, which will provide a general introduction to graduate study in history and give you the opportunity to develop your research skills.
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 |
|---|---|
| Black Activism in Britain since 1800 | 20 |
| The Politics of History in the Arabic-Speaking World (c.1750-Present) | 20 |
|
Islamic Africa (online course) |
20 |
|
The Cold War in Latin America |
20 |
|
The Sixties in the United States |
20 |
|
Race, Religion, and Ridicule: The American South from Reconstruction to World War II |
20 |
|
The Dark Side – Tourism and Difficult Heritages |
20 |
|
An Uncertain World: The West since the 1970s |
20 |
|
Freedom and Coercion in the Making of the Atlantic World |
20 |
|
Thinking with Things: History and Material Culture Studies |
20 |
| Literature and History in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland | 20 |
| Medieval Men and Masculinities | 20 |
| Propaganda in Renaissance Scotland | 20 |
| Constantinople: The History of a Medieval Megalopolis from Constantine the Great to Suleyman the Magnificent | 20 |
| The Global Renaissance | 20 |
| Slavery in the British Atlantic World, 1650-1834 | 20 |
|
The Scientific Revolution in Global Perspective |
20 |
| The European Enlightenment, 1670-1820 | 20 |
| The Material Culture of Gender in Eighteenth Century Britain | 20 |
|
Edinburgh's Slavery Connections: Research Seminar |
20 |
| History as Romance, Profession, Critique: Theory and Scholarship in the West, 1835 to 1985 | 20 |
| Gender, Crime and Deviancy: Britain c. 1860-1960 | 20 |
| Revolutions in Modern Europe | 20 |
|
Gender and Empire: Contested Meanings and Divergent Practices |
20 |
|
American Borderlands: Histories of the Western Hemisphere |
20 |
|
An Unhappy Valley: Mau Mau, culture and colonialism in Kenya's highlands ca.1895-ca.1964 |
20 |
| Conservatism in the United States, c.1930-c.1990 | 20 |
| War and Identities in Twentieth Century Britain and Ireland | 20 |
| Thinking the 20th Century - Hannah Arendt and the breakdown of European Civilization | 20 |
| Cinema and Society in South Asia, 1947-Present | 20 |
| The United States and the Cold War | 20 |
|
China's foreign and security policy: a twentieth-century perspective |
20 |
| The Civil Rights Movement | 20 |
| Citizens and Subjects: concepts of citizenship in modern African intellectual history | 20 |
|
Contemporary Scotland |
20 |
| Genocide in Contemporary History | 20 |
|
Narrating Native Histories |
20 |
|
A Cultural History of Photography |
20 |
| The Crusades: Thirteenth Century Crossroads | 20 |
| The Sources of Medieval History | 20 |
| Introduction to Contemporary History | 20 |
| Medieval Men and Masculinities | 20 |
| Myth and the History of Scholarship in Early Modern Europe | 20 |
| Themes in American Historiography | 20 |
| Anthens of the North: The Scottish Enlightenment | 20 |
| The British Empire in Political Thought | 20 |
| Debating Marriage between Antiquity and the Middle Ages | 20 |
| Studying Women in Late Medieval England: Sources and Approaches | 20 |
| Directed Reading & Research (Semester 1) | 20 |
| Directed Reading & Research (Semester 2) | 20 |
| Currents of Radicalism, 1776-1848 | 20 |
|
The Demise of the Slave-Holding American South, 1846-1877 |
20 |
You may also be able to select from relevant courses from the Online MSc History programme.
Teaching and assessment
The courses are mostly taught in small-group seminars. Most courses are assessed by means of an extended piece of written work. Some courses also 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 History. We expect the 2024/25 programme structure to be available from May 2024.