University of Cape Town

MA Historical Studies

The curriculum will comprise two compulsory courses, two elective courses, and a minor dissertation (details below). Candidates will ordinarily complete the prescribed courses in the first year, and will be expected to complete the dissertation or equivalent within the following year. Students who have completed a course equivalent to HST5061H: Advanced Historical Methods and Approaches at the Honour’s or Master’s level may apply for exemption, but not credit, from this course. If such exemption is granted, the student must complete an additional elective course.

Core (Compulsory) Courses:

HST5061H Advanced Historical Methods and Approaches

Convener: Dr. B Kar

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme.

This course invites students to engage some of the key conceptual and methodological issues concerning the nature of the historical discipline and its modes of writing and enquiry. The course is organised around the notion of ‘archives’, which we understand in its many different registers, both as an institutionalised order of evidence and as a shorthand for an entire epistemological complex. Taught by a team of historians, anthropologists, literary critics and sociologists, this course aims at providing the students with both a critical understanding of conceptual issues and a hands-on experience of the so-called primary sources. We engage with governmental, oral, ethnographic, mnemonic, statistical, literary, visual, digital, material, sonic and somatic archives in this course, trying to introduce students to the emergent styles of historical enquiry and reflect on the complex relationship between the academic discipline and its several popular and public variants.

HST5060F History in Public Life

Convener: Associate Professor A Mendelsohn

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme.

History is thickly imbricated in our everyday lives. This course examines the multiple ways in which history is produced and circulates in public life. It does so by exploring how history manifests in different media, how histories of various kinds cross between distinct fields of public practice, and how they gain and lose appeal as their form and potency changes. The course will involve critical engagement with the idea of the production of history, as well as with theories of memory, publics, publicness, publicity, counter publics, the social imaginary of the public sphere and the role it is understood to play in a democracy, and the historicization of these concept qua concepts. Students will develop a theoretical understanding of how historical materials are made, assimilate into and mutate within the public imagination, and circulate in public life.

HST5011W Minor Dissertation (to be registered for once coursework is complete - usually in second year of programme)

Elective courses:

(Two courses to be chosen from the following)

HST5040F A History of Violence: Perspectives From the Global South

Convener: Dr A Sen

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme

Co-requisites: None

Can there be a history of violence if one takes structural violence as seriously as spectacular episodes? What does one do when one writes a history of violence? How can one begin to think of writing a history that can simultaneously approximate the experiential and the structural, the excess and the everydayness of violence? In critically reinterrogating the conventional distance between war and peace, this course will study different forms of violence that has produced the Global South in the form that we inhabit it. For us, the Global South is both a concrete political, geographical location as well as a conceptual analytic through which histories of violence shall be approached. In bringing together a representative sample of critical theoretical literature and specific histories of violence along lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and minority across the colonial worlds, this course will address the interconnected debates in the fields of epistemology, law, politics and economy.

HST5041F Histories of Land and Labour Struggles in South Africa

Convener: C Naicker

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme

Co-requisites: None

This course is designed to equip students to think beyond the narrow confines of South African nationalist historiographies of liberation. It focuses on the experiences and narratives of the working people who resisted, negotiated and, in some cases, successfully changed the oppressive system of racial capitalism in its different avatars of colonialism and apartheid. It offers a map of the history of labour struggles in the country in both unionised and extra-union forms. Critically reflecting on several key processes, structures and moments over the long twentieth century – from the creation of a racialized system of labour in the late nineteenth century to the present-day state of disarray in the labour movement and the new struggles for urban land and access to the city – this course introduces students to the many connections between the past and the present, the rural and the urban, and the formal and the informal sectors of economy. Students are encouraged to understand how this history offers an opportunity to think different trajectories of resistance and struggle, solidarity, negotiation and nationhood.

HST5042F Theory and Method in Histories of Medicine, Health and Healing

Convener: Dr M Mbali

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme

Co-requisites: None

This course aims to deepen students’ understanding of the changing social and cultural forms related to biomedicine, health and healing both in Africa and globally. The socially constructed nature of biomedicine and healing will be explored with reference to institutions, practices, policies, diverse ways of knowing and subjectivities around the body and health. The course will also analyze the intersections between the social and material aspects of health (such as political economies and bodily systems and processes). Epistemologies of biomedicine and health will be explored with reference to: diverse views of disease ontology; biomedical professionalisation and therapeutic diversity; and, histories of mental health. The politics of health will be examined in relation to epidemics, public health and health policy and activism. Patient-focused histories of medicine and healing ‘from below’ will also be central to the course, particularly those of: women; gender non-conforming and same-sex practicing individuals and groups; and disabled and racially marginalized people. Finally, students will be asked to engage with ethical issues in writing histories of medicine such as ensuring patient confidentiality and obtaining informed consent, addressing stigma and discrimination in relation to certain diseases and understanding healing traditions as described by historical figures on their own terms.

Oral History: Method, Practice and Theory

Con r: Associate Professor S Field

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme

Co-requisites: None

This course is aimed at both making the students acquainted with the growing historical literature across the world on the daily experiences and unspectacular practices, and teaching them the skills of formulating original research questions. Each year this course focuses on an object or a practice or a sentiment usually considered too ordinary, too universal and too familiar to be adequately or excitingly historical, and gradually unpacks the various histories unevenly woven into it. Through a systematic investigation of the experiential contexts and daily praxis, the students are encouraged to think imaginatively and across the boundaries of disciplines. In pointing the students towards the emergent approaches and sites of new research, the course also attempts to train them in moving responsibly and creatively between big theoretical questions and specific, concrete histories.

Writing and History

Convener: Associate Professor S Jeppie

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme

Co-requisites: None

Historians take for granted that we have to use sources, most often traces from the past in the form of written texts. But what is the history of writing itself? What are the histories of writing in various parts of the world? What are the connections between the articulation of language/s and the surfaces upon which they were inscribed and then moved and mobilized for a multitude of purposes? And beyond this what kinds of readings and traditions of slow and close reader philology, interpretation emerged to make sense of these written texts? What kinds of writing supports have developed and how has the codex become the norm (or not)? Until recently the dominant way of telling this story has been to focus on the origins of writing in Mesopotamia and then to move on to the growth of writing systems, some attention to book before printing (but mainly after the print revolution), and ultimately the emergence of philology as a largely western enterprise. In this course we explore this tradition itself. However, this course is not concerned with origins as much with multiple centres and multiple traditions of inscription on a variety of supports (stone, bamboo, wood, paper). We look at numerous scripts and the styles of philological engagement with written works which have their own presuppositions. This interdiciplinary course will appeal to students who are interested in history in the longer-term, material histories, book history, and world history through objects and intellectual history. This course is formulated in the knowledge that in recent years there has been a rise of interest in manuscript studies and philology.

Migrants, Diasporas and Minorities in the Modern World

(No red in 2022)

Convener: Associate Professor A Mendelsohn

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme.

This course explores the impact of modernity on the modern world through close examination of the experience of minority groups. This approach allows both for a clearer understanding of some of the key features of modernity, and for investigation of how minorities have formed and fared in different state formations at different moments in time. The course introduces students to the theoretical approaches and nomenclature developed in different disciplines to describe and categorize minorities, and interrogates the language and typologies used within academia and public discourse. Given the centrality of contingent and contextual factors in understanding the position of minorities in different societies, much of the course will explore case studies chosen to highlight the impact of place, politics, and change over time on the experience of minority groups. Seminar themes will include Minorities within Pre-Modernity; the nation and nationalism and the place of outsiders; Migration, Migrants and Race; Migrant minorities and the importance of historical context; Globalization, Transnationalism, Diaspora ; Multiculturalism, Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship; Historicizing Pluralism, Multiculturalism, and Human Rights; and Challenges to Multiculturalism and Pluralism.

Traumatic Traces: History, Memory and Beyond

Con Associate Professor S Field

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a Master’s programme

Co-requisites: None

This course traces the genealogy of the concept and theories of “trauma”. It will critique the clinical, popular, intellectual and political uses of the term from the late 19th century to the present. The course challenges students to be self-reflexive, critical thinkers, with the capacity to debate the “Trauma Question” and its implications for the emergence of memory studies, especially in post-conflict societies. We will also discuss the use of “trauma theories” in relation to debates around reconciliation, healing and reparations; and post-colonial critiques of trauma theories as Eurocentric and lacking in their account of race and cultural differences. Moreover, the “transmission of trauma” in family histories and the notion post-memory will be discussed. Finally, we discuss the “affect turn” and the historicizing of emotions and subjectivities as a move to resolve the conceptual problems posed by trauma theories. The course is open to MA and PhD students from across the Faculty, especially those who have a dedicated interest in the histories, memories and theories of violence and its legacies.

Themes in Everyday History

C Dr B Kar

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme

Co-requisites: None

This course is aimed at both making the students acquainted with the growing historical literature across the world on the daily experiences and unspectacular practices, and teaching them the skills of formulating original research questions. Each year this course focuses on an object or a practice or a sentiment usually considered too ordinary, too universal and too familiar to be adequately or excitingly historical, and gradually unpacks the various histories unevenly woven into it. Through a systematic investigation of the experiential contexts and daily praxis, the students are encouraged to think imaginatively and across the boundaries of disciplines. In pointing the students towards the emergent approaches and sites of new research, the course also attempts to train them in moving responsibly and creatively between big theoretical questions and specific, concrete histories.

HST5058S Themes in Contemporary South African Rural History

An elective offered by a cognate department may replace one or more of the listed electives, subject to approval by the Head of Department.