Programme description

This programme will give you a comprehensive understanding of the increasingly global experience of humankind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This short video gives you an introduction to our MSc Contemporary History programme.

The second half of the twentieth century was witness to many of the developments that have shaped our contemporary world, from the crystallisation of the Cold War to the decolonisations that swept across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. At the same time, new forms of communication and transportation infrastructure transformed daily life, if in highly uneven ways. 

Drawing on archival documents, artefacts of material culture and audio-visual content, historians of the contemporary period enjoy access to a widened pool of primary sources to explore these themes critically and analytically.  With staff expertise across a broad thematic and geographic coverage, you have a unique opportunity to understand the present through the recent past.

Breadth of expertise

Students benefit from the experience and methodologically different approaches to contemporary history of over 40 internationally recognised experts. To name just a few, our staff specialise in:

  • political history
  • cultural history
  • social history
  • economic history
  • military history
  • colonialism and post-colonialism
  • gender history
  • intellectual history

In addition, students will have the opportunity to take appropriate courses in other Schools, e.g. those of Social and Political Science and of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Our staff specialising in contemporary history jointly cover not only every imaginable disciplinary approach to history, but also almost every geographical region on the globe, including Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

We are therefore in a position to deliver a programme that emphasises the increasingly inter- and transnational, and indeed global experience of humankind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will be able to study this unique period of history within a range of diverse topics, including:

  • the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries
  • civil rights
  • decolonisation
  • human rights and social memory
  • cinema
  • crime
  • gender
  • ethnicity
  • class
  • the digital world

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