Dr Leighton James is a historian of late eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, with a particular interest in the social and cultural history of the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic epoch.
He is a founder member of the Society for the History of War (SHOW) and of the Research Group for the Study of Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory (CRAM).
This module introduces you to a diverse range of methodological approaches that underpin the discipline of history at an advanced level. You will explore how historians construct knowledge about the past, examining key debates around evidence, interpretation, narrative, and the politics of history-writing. You will engage critically with a variety of methods, including archival research, oral history, microhistory, cultural and social history, postcolonial and decolonial approaches, gender analysis, and digital history. Through seminar discussions and a series of mini projects, you will develop a sophisticated understanding of the strengths, limitations, and ethical implications of different historical methodologies. The module also supports the development of research design skills in preparation for independent dissertation work. Finally, the module will encourage you to think reflexively about your own role as researchers and to consider how methodological choices shape historical narratives and their relevance to contemporary global challenges.
This module is the exciting culmination of your Masters¿ degree in History. In this module you have the opportunity build on the analytical and research skills developed in Part I of the programme to produce a 20,000-word dissertation on a historical research topic of your choice. Working under the guidance of an academic supervisor, you will identify and refine a research question, critically evaluate relevant primary and secondary sources, and construct a coherent, well-substantiated historical argument. The project reflects an advanced level of conceptual understanding and methodological rigour, characteristic of independent postgraduate research.
This module offers you an in-depth engagement with key debates, theories, and methodological approaches that have shaped the discipline of history from the Enlightenment to the present. It is designed to provide you with a critical understanding of historiography as both a body of scholarly literature and a dynamic, reflexive practice central to historical inquiry. Through a close reading of foundational texts, schools of thought, and recent historiographical interventions, students will interrogate how historians construct arguments, use evidence, and navigate epistemological challenges. You will engage with topics such as empiricism, Marxism, the Annales School, postmodernism, gender and postcolonial critiques, microhistory, memory studies, and global history. Emphasis will also be placed on the ethical and political dimensions of historical representation and the role of the historian in public discourse. By the end of the module, you will be expected to demonstrate an advanced conceptual grasp of historical theory, critically assess differing historiographical traditions, and apply these insights to their own research practices. The module fosters independence of thought, originality in interpretation, and methodological self-awareness.
During this module you will be guided through the process of formulating a viable, original, and academically sound research proposal in the discipline of History. You develop your own research project idea with the guidance and support of your supervisor. Through a combination of seminars, independent research, and supervisory meetings, you will engage with historiography, methodology, source evaluation, and research ethics. By the end of the module, you will have produced a fully developed research proposal suitable for submission to support an MA dissertation.
This module offers you the opportunity to explore a specific theme in depth through a structured series of small-group tutorials. The tutorial format encourages independent thought, close reading, and intensive engagement with both primary and secondary sources. You will produce written work for discussion in tutorials and refine your analytical skills through sustained dialogue with your tutor, thereby deepen your critical thinking, research, and communication skills in a collaborative learning environment.
In 1500, European exploration and colonisation of the rest of the world was only in its infancy. America, two continents North and South, had been unknown to Europeans until just eight years previously. Most of it was still unmapped by Europeans, as were large parts of the rest of the world. By 1800, on the other hand, it was possible to construct a recognisable modern version of a world map. Europeans had explored, colonised, and resettled huge swathes of America in the first instances. They had killed or displaced millions of Native Americans in the process, wiping out whole civilisations, and they had enslaved 12 million or more Africans in that same process, inflicting immense damage on African societies. Europeans were in the early stages of colonising large parts of Africa and Asia too by 1800. And yet, advances in science had transformed human understanding of the universe, of the world, and indeed of ourselves. This was connected through the Renaissance in art, culture, and politics as well as science, to enormous changes in the structure of polities and societies. The early modern era perhaps saw the invention not only of modern empires, but of large, centralised modern states. Also, the Renaissance and then Enlightenment changed the way people and states interacted. Arguably, the early modern period represents the transition period between an era of medieval hierarchy and the origins of modern social and political democracy. Essentially, the aim of the module, through your lectures, seminars, and independent reading and thinking, is to give you a sense of the connections between these places and their histories, highlighting that the increasing inter-connection between them is itself a feature of the early modern period. You¿ll also get a broad sense of how the world as a whole changed between 1500 and 1800.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of a western European civilization, characterized, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, by capitalist economics, liberal politics, and the dominance of a middle class that celebrated morality and science. In the twentieth century this civilization faced unprecedented challenges from new political ideologies, and from a working class demanding the right to govern in its own name. The result was an eruption of violence not seen on the continent for centuries; in its wake, the Cold War divided the Europe with an Iron Curtain, and saw the continent become the client of two world superpowers ¿ the USA and the Soviet Union. This team-taught module relies on the specialist knowledge of its tutors to examine economic, political and social themes in the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe.
How do historians study the past? Why do their accounts of the past differ, and why do they change over time? This module will help you to understand the various concepts, methods, and approaches that academic historians use when writing history and generating historical explanations. By the end of it, you will understand how and why professional historians disagree on many topics, and you will be equipped to evaluate competing interpretations of the same past events and processes. The module also trains you in the fundamental skills required to study history as an undergraduate, and gives you an opportunity to learn more about the interests and expertise of the history staff you¿ll be working with at Swansea. It will help you make the transition from being taught history at school or college to studying history at university, and it will introduce you to the many different kinds of history you can explore in the course of your degree.
This module will provide an overview of the history of British politics, society, culture, and the economy from c. 1800 to the present, from a national and international perspective. The lectures and seminars for this module will give students the opportunity to engage closely with events, processes, and people - both male and female, from diverse ethnic backgrounds - who contributed to the making of the modern British state and society, and who defined Britain¿s relationship with the wider world. We will discuss the transformative impact of warfare, Empire and colonialism, industrial and technological change. We will also consider the significance of race, class, and gender, and how they relate to national sentiment and social and political emancipation movements in Britain and beyond.
The purpose of the module is to encourage you to think more deeply about how historians work and, in particular, about how we as historians can locate and use primary historical sources effectively as a means of interpreting and understanding the past. During the module we will learn about the survival of historical evidence, how it is organised and made accessible to historians to undertake their research, and how to effectively locate and interpret it in your studies. We will consider how the process of doing historical research changes over time, in particular with the impact of recent developments like digitization. At the core of the module will be the work you undertake with others in your seminar group using a range of primary sources which your seminar tutor will introduce to you. As part of the module assessment you will also undertake your own primary source based research project using items from these collections. The module is designed strengthen your analytical skills and to help prepare you for the more extensive uses of primary evidence which you will encounter in final year special subjects and dissertation.
The History dissertation is a free-standing, 40-credit module that runs across both semesters of Level Three. Candidates conduct research upon a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of staff teaching for the degrees in History, and concerning a topic that falls within staff research and teaching interests.
The Seven Years War was the single most important conflict in the eighteenth century, before the struggle against Republican France. It was truly a global conflict as rival armies and navies confronted each other in Europe, the Americas and India. Not only did the conflict mark the apogee of the first British Empire and confirm the rise of Prussia to Great Power status; it was also a major contributory factor in the American and French Revolutions. The belligerent states were forced to mobilize themselves to an unprecedented extent and attempted to promote a sense of national identity and patriotism in their subjects through the media.
This module offers an introduction to current debates in heritage and public history and a chance to develop practical skills in the communication of history to broad audiences. It will provide an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between academic study and the past as portrayed by, with and for the public (or publics). You will explore case-studies in heritage from around the world. Why have museum presentations of history proved so controversial? What is the role of heritage in national and community-building? There will be opportunities to try out a variety of practical techniques in historical communication, and to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. You will familiarise themselves with current policy contexts for heritage and public history, and will acquire valuable skills for careers in the heritage sector and beyond.
Using an intersectional framework, this module will introduce you to the historical construction of gendered violence and the various contemporary forms of gender-based violence, their prevalence, and impacts and consequences. It will focus on the current empirical evidence base and conceptual frameworks relating to different forms of GBV, including emergent online forms such as Tech-Facilitated Sexual Violence (TFSV ¿ e.g., revenge porn, deepfakes and cyberflashing) and extreme misogyny. You will explore different forms of Gender Based Violence and key issues related to each, such as Domestic Violence and Abuse (including coercive control), sexual violence, so-called honour-based violence and abuse, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, human trafficking, and femicide and the potential issues and barriers to support and justice. You will directly engage with empirical work examining GBV in social and cultural contexts, such as sport, schools and universities, and the nighttime economy, and critically assess current legislative and policy approaches to tackling GBV. You will learn how to synthesise this wealth of evidence in relation to the field of harms in order understand why these forms of gendered harms occur what is working to tackle them.
This module examines military conflict through the dual lenses of culture and technology. Because the field is vast, our approach is organized around key questions that allow us to move across historical periods, analytical levels, and disciplinary boundaries. We will explore how cultural values and technological innovations have shaped not only the conduct of war but also how societies understand violence, power, and leadership. Readings will range from historically grounded analyses to contemporary accounts of soldiering, allowing us to interrogate how narratives of conflict are created and sustained. We will begin with foundational debates on war, violence, and human nature: why do humans wage war, and why societies fight the way they do? Is war primarily a cultural or political activity? Can the pursuit of peace itself give rise to war? How do societies become militarized¿and to what ends? Another central concern will be the role of technology: how has it influenced strategy, policy, and the experience of warfare? To what extent does technology determine victory in modern conflicts, and how transformative are new military technologies in practice? Our case studies will move from the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century to insurgency and drone warfare in the twenty-first, tracing continuities and ruptures along the way. By the end of the module, you will be equipped to engage critically with historical and contemporary debates on the interplay of culture, technology, and war¿and to reflect on what these debates reveal about humanity, violence, and the future of conflict.
