Convener: Associate Professor L van Sittert

Course entry requirements: At least two of HST1004F, HST1005F, HST1010S, HST1013F or HST1014S (or their Plus equivalents if taken in 2015 or earlier), or by permission of the Head of Department.

This course critically engages some of the key conceptual and methodological issues concerning the nature of the historical discipline and its modes of writing and enquiry. It explores different traditions of narrating the past, examines certain major formative moments in the life of the modern historical discipline, and analyzes different critiques of the historical knowledge as well as the reconfiguring effects they have had on the discipline. In exposing students to diverse styles and approaches of doing history, this course points at some emergent fields of historical enquiry and reflects on the complex relationship between the academic discipline and its popular and public variants.