Faculty of History

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To many in Cambridge, the History Faculty is simply 'that building' on the Sidgwick Site. But James Stirling's pioneering modernist design is now thirty years old. This summer sees the culmination of a two-year rewiring programme, which permits a dramatic expansion of the IT facilities.

Teaching History

In October, Dr Vic Gatrell will start a new course entitled The Politics of Laughter. English satirical prints of Hogarth, Gillray and others will be used to explore social values and political commentary in the period 1730-1840. The heart of the course is an online data base of some 1,300 images prepared with the help of the Faculty's computer officer.

Innovative teaching takes many forms. Twice a week the Faculty Board Room echoes to the sounds of grand opera as Professor Tim Blanning relates Richard Wagner's music to the dynamics of modern German history, treating the composer as social critic and not just creative genius.

In another popular third-year course, Professor Peter Clarke explains the political economy of Thatcherism with videos of Commons debates as well as the memoirs of the Iron Lady and her more brittle ministers. And in The Vikings in Europe, 800-1100 Professor Rosamond McKitterick provides the obligatory blood and guts while also using chronicles, coins, and archaeology to examine the more constructive side of the Norsemen.

These are just a few of the courses on offer in a Faculty whose teaching (unusually among British universities) ranges over two millennia, from Roman slavery to the revolutions of 1989, and spans the globe from Africa to Japan, as well as being one of the leading centres for studying the history of political thought.

Making history with the new faculty brochure Photo: Design studio

Writing History

As befits a research university, teaching often flows out of scholarship. Demographic historian Dr Simon Szreter has been awarded an ESRC research fellowship, allowing three years to further his project on sexuality and marriage in Britain between the world wars.

But, in a Faculty that includes nearly 60 permanent academic staff and another 30 College lecturers, Szreter's work represents only the tip of the iceberg. One recent book is Professor Chris Bayly's Origins of Nationality in South Asia. Contrary to those who consider Indian nationalism to be a imported European ideology, Bayly shows how it grew out of traditions of good government that were deeply rooted in the Indian past. In Women's Crimes in Early Modern Germany Dr Ulinka Rublack uses the evidence from trials for theft, infanticide and sexual improprieties to illuminate women's experience in the era of the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. Another 1999 volume is entitled From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World. This has been edited by Dr Betty Wood in collaboration with visiting Pitt Professor Sylvia Frey of Tulane - one of several US universities with which the Faculty's American historians have been building closer links.

Managing History

The Faculty is the one of the largest in the humanities, responsible for 600 undergraduates and nearly 500 graduate students.

The current Chair, whose term ends in September, is Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith. A leading authority on the Crusades, who has still found time to teach a very popular course on the subject, he has applied himself with a mixture of crusading zeal, byzantine skill and mendicant charm to guiding the Faculty through an overhaul of its organisation, a review of its syllabus and a restructuring of graduate programmes. During his tenure a new Faculty brochure has been produced to help promote contacts with schools.