The Research Seminar involves students studying a particular topic in small seminar groups of no more than 15 students and some of the teaching may also be...

The Research Seminar involves students studying a particular topic in small seminar groups of no more than 15 students and some of the teaching may also be organised around independent study and one-to-one tutorials with the seminar leader, who will be a specialist in the area of study. The seminars focus on the examination of a specific set of source materials organised around a topic, and are designed to develop students’ capacity to work independently and to use primary and secondary sources in the construction of a historical argument, including writing and speaking for non-academic consumption ('public history'). Students then go on to identify a research topic they are passionate about within the broader subject area, ultimately producing a research essay and a public history piece for examination.

More information about the Second-Year Research Seminar can be found on the History Department's website.

To study the entanglements of art and ecology today is to think in a condition of emergency. Yet these pressures likewise require us to understand...

To study the entanglements of art and ecology today is to think in a condition of emergency. Yet these pressures likewise require us to understand environmental crisis as the result of a cumulative, extended history—one in which art and visual culture have shaped and reshaped understandings of the natural world and the place of human life within it. This seminar addresses art’s enduring involvement with the environment in a capacious historical and geographical framework, with a focus on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Rather than focus upon the ways in which art has depicted ‘nature’ or the environment, it will instead probe the ways in which different aspects of ecological thinking (about materials, about geographies, and about communities) have put pressure on form and artistic process. It will place a dual emphasis both on reading key theoretical texts on ecology, environmental history, and their political dimensions, and on surveying broadly recent ecologically-focused art history. Visits to museums and galleries in London will form an integral part of the module.