Applied History is one of the two specialisations within our History master. This study highlights how long-term historical developments in contemporary history influence today’s society. The programme focusses on practical skills, such as analysing, presenting, and debating and learn digital and analogue research methods.
Scroll down to have a look at the study programme for the academic year 2023 – 2024.
During the master specialisation Applied History, you will learn digital and analogue methods to collect information. You will be trained to interview people, but teachers will also introduce you to methodologies of the so-called digital humanities. Just like other historians, you will be taught how archives, museums and libraries can help you to find information on your topic and you will know how to critically engage in debates on contemporary and historical problems. After this master programme, you possess the right skillset to analyse and tackle contemporary challenges from a historical perspective.
Course overview
Below you can view the study programme for the year 2023-2024. The master specialisation Applied History can be followed full-time or part-time. When you study part time, you have to obtain the same amount of studypoints. The courses are spread over two years. If you want to learn more about a specific course or want to see the current time table, you can enter the course code in our university's Course catalogue.
Study programme full-time
Term 1
Student workload: 5 EC
This course introduces students to digital humanities methodologies which are becoming more prominent than ever in historical practice, and the humanities in general. Students will learn how to work with big data and they will familiarise themselves with several digital techniques such as data visualisation, data scraping, distant reading and quantitative analysis of qualitative sources. Although these skills offer a world of new possibilities, digital methods need to be approached with a critical attitude. The easy access of large amounts might obscure the problems associated with the use of digitised data. Students will be introduced to R Studio to familiarize themselves with scripts to analyze large amounts of texts.
Student workload: 5 EC
This course will teach students how to work with primary sources to uncover recent history. Oral history and interviewing will be a core skill in this course. The aim is to bring students in contact with refugees and migrants to record life histories. Students will learn how they how they have to conduct interviews in a professional and critical way without neglecting the emotional and ethical dimensions of such a conversation. They will discover the theoretical and practical dimensions of an oral history project during lectures and field work. The second part of the course will teach students how to analyse and map photographs in an urban context. Pictures can show how marginalised groups made use of public space and how their representations can be distorted by the gaze of dominant groups in society. The students will also make an attempt to use GIS software to place these photos in urban space.
Student workload: 5 EC
The past is not simply gone. It permeates people's lives through memory and imagination, and offers an orientation in time. Telling stories about what happened in the past plays a key role in the construction of personal and collective identities. Historical narratives fuel calls to action of social and political movements. Tragic stories of historical injustices support calls for reparations or for emancipation. Governments go to great lengths to control historical narration and interpretation to legitimize the political entities they govern, or to legitimize their policies. Also individuals historicize their own lives through narration in order to deal with expected and unexpected challenges and opportunities. We will study several cases, such as the narrative scripts of historical reconciliation committees, the politics of descent in political speeches, and the destruction of cultural heritage.
Term 2
Student workload: 5 EC
In this class, we investigate the making of heritage in both informal and formal settings. The focus will be on processes of heritagization of everyday material culture. Both in the academic field as in the wider heritage domain, there has been a growing interest in the culture of everyday life and ordinary things. Historians and ethnologists study the generational transmission and appropriation of repertoires of everyday material culture, and many museums develop exhibitions on everyday practices, displaying ordinary objects. The findings of historical and ethnological research, exhibition projects and educational programmes will be confronted with each other and discussed in a broader cultural context, with the aim of coming to a better understanding of different forms of heritage making.
Student workload: 5 EC
This course starts from societal challenges in the contemporary global world. It is a course in Applied History and teaches students how students can use history to solve so-called wicked problems. The Sustainable Development Goals identify a couple of such problems which will be studied later on in this course from a historical perspective. The starting-point is the seminal History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage. Two concepts will help students to understand how historians can help to solve wicked problems such as gender equality, climate change, poverty, hunger and world peace. Historical analogies show how people in the past dealt with similar problems, while path-dependent evolutions make clear that it will take a radical change to alter deep-rooted historical developments. This course starts from historical reasoning but combines this with case studies about sustainable development.
Student workload: 2,5 EC
Students have to participate in a research workshop to prepare their final master project. The final project can be a policy paper, a documentary, an exhibition proposal or a regular historical thesis. The research proposal coaches the students during the entire length of their project. Students have to present about their progress. They can choose from:
- Histories of Creativity and Innovation (CH4139)
- History of Cultural Difference (CH4133)
- History, Memory and National Identity (CH4134)
- Port Cities and Maritime History (CH4137)
- The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (CH4136)
- Power, Politics and Sovereignty (CH4142)
Term 3
Student workload:10 EC
Students choose two electives, an elective and a short internship, or a long internship.
Possible electives:
- Elective from Arts and Culture (5 EC)
- Heritage and Fashion (5 EC): The fashion industry is a paradigmatic sector of post-industrial economies, whose products increasingly rely on symbolic and aesthetic considerations as well as on local heritage and specificities. The fashion industry revolves around a myriad of key locations around the world, yet this has been the case for an extended period of time. A polycentric geography of fashion emerged, integrating traditional supply chains with digital technologies. Some luxury brands, such as Louis Vuitton, are even engaging with blockchain to prove the authenticity of their products. Topics covered in the course, among others: place, space and heritage in the fashion industry, storytelling, craftsmanship, temporary fashion clusters, and policies for fashion. In particular, storytelling appears to be an important tool for the fashion industry due to the necessity to differentiate the various products or brands and to add emotional value to them. Heritage and tradition are at the core of storytelling. Even new fashion products and brands are imbued with a historical flavor and sense of legendary quality, with the help of storytelling and revived craftsmanship. Given the rise of sustainability concerns, storytelling and craftsmanship, and in general heritage, are gaining momentum for the fashion industry and other creative industries too.
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- Global Environmental Politics (5 EC): Global environmental dangers are seen by many as the greatest threat to the survival of humanity. How has this link between the environment and human society been constructed over time? What are the proposed solutions to this problem, and how have they been framed, debated, and contested? Giving historical perspective to the environmental issues we face today, this course will cover topics such as energy politics, global environmental governance, and advocacy politics. Focusing on contemporary history, we will discuss questions such as: What were the political implications of moving from coal to oil as energy sources and what consequences might a move to renewable energies entail? How has the relationship between the human and non-human world evolved and should non-humans have political representation? What role did advocacy politics play in the development of our current environmental governance structures and can green consumerism be an effective solution to climate change on a global scale? In doing so, the course will provide you with an understanding of the following three core themes: 1) how ideational and material factors have interacted to shape our understanding of the environment; 2) how individual actions and social structures inform environmental policy at the local and global levels, 3) how historical legacies of colonialism, race, gender, and economic inequality intersect to inform our current perspectives on global environmental politics.
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- Short Internship: During the Master’s program, students have the opportunity to explore a professional field of interest by means of a Research Internship. Arrangements have been made with around 20 national and international archives, museums, research institutes, educational organizations and business companies for research projects which students may select as the subject for their Master’s thesis. The final product may be a publication, an international workshop, website, object analysis or exhibition storyline. This research activity covers 18 working days. Some internships are linked to the research of a master thesis.
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- Long Internship: Students also have the opportunity to do a long internship of at least 36 working days. This gives them the opportunity to build a strong relation with the expected working field after their study. It is also possible to combine this long internship with the final master project. A long internship offers interesting possibilities but it has the disadvantage that students have no room for an elective.
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Student workload: 2,5 EC
Students have to participate in a research workshop to prepare their final master project. The final project can be a policy paper, a documentary, an exhibition proposal or a regular historical thesis. The research proposal coaches the students during the entire length of their project. Students have to present about their progress. They can choose from:
- Histories of Creativity and Innovation (CH4139)
- History of Cultural Difference (CH4133)
- History, Memory and National Identity (CH4134)
- Port Cities and Maritime History (CH4137)
- The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (CH4136)
- Power, Politics and Sovereignty (CH4142)
Student workload: 10 EC
The final project can be a policy paper, a documentary, an exhibition proposal or a regular historical thesis. Students have to write a concise academic paper of 10,000 words to substantiate their final project if this has not the form of a regular thesis.
Term 4
Student workload: 10 EC
Students finalise their project in this term. The final project can be a policy paper, a documentary, an exhibition proposal or a regular historical thesis. This project is based on the research paper written in term 3. However, students can also choose to write a traditional academic thesis of 20,000 words on an applied history topic.