Welcome to your International History course

The History and International Studies team at Staffordshire University have a long tradition of innovation in distance-learning provision at HE level. On your MA, you will get to know your tutors and fellow students really well, and we in turn will come to know you, your interests and aspirations, and we will support you through your studies. Class sizes will be small to ensure deeper feedback and engagement with your work.

You will be asked to devote a lot of time and effort to your studies in order to get the outcome you want. Assessments will be wide-ranging and will require ambition, meticulous planning and extensive self-management. Much of the learning on the MA will be done independently, with time spent researching, reading and note-taking alone.

All required tutor-led activities will be asynchronous, meaning you will never be asked to log into Blackboard at a particular time or on a particular day. This is to accommodate the various time zones of our diverse international cohort of students, who will be joining in from across the world; in recent years we’ve had students logging in from places including Hong Kong, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada, as well as the UK.

Module leaders on this MA are given a lot of independence to provide teaching in a way that suits them, their students and their subjects best. This means that module content can vary considerably, from recorded lectures and podcasts to carefully structured reading, optional seminars or one-on-one meetings provided online. Please don’t expect exactly the same learning experience on every week of every module, this would not benefit you and would in any case quickly become tedious. Get to know each module carefully as it starts, and if you’re ever unsure, contact the module leader, they will be eager to help you.

In your MA in International History, there will be a heavy emphasis on crafting historical narratives yourself rather than relying on those of others. This means familiarising yourself with the raw material of academic history: primary sources.

If you’re looking for preparatory activities before the course starts, we recommend experimenting with some primary source use. Getting to know what’s available online will help you with your assessments in the coming academic year, and will encourage you to think creatively and innovatively about what counts as ‘evidence’ in history.

Please take a look at this excellent example of an open-access digital archive that contains key written documents from the twentieth century. What does it contain? What does it miss out? What can be said about history using its contents? 

Of course, primary sources come in various forms. In your first core module, we will be making use of The British Library’s superlative Listening Project digital archive of interviews. You may want to listen to this wonderful conversation between two brothers, Tawona and Ernest, about their move from Zimbabwe to Glasgow, to train your historian’s ear: 

What you will be doing and learning will depend on what pathway you will be taking through the MA.

If you have chosen our core MA International History you will be reviewing some of the core concepts of the discipline one week at a time, beginning with subjects like Nationhood, Imperialism and Migration.

If you have chosen one of our subject-specific pathways, you will be delving into the history of Russian security, Chinese civilisation or state-run intelligence services.

All students across the course will also be learning about the core skills of the historian from an advanced postgraduate perspective, beginning with the use of state documentation but quickly moving on to more unorthodox evidence-types such as correspondence, speeches and artistic output.

If you are not familiar with our pathway system, please don’t worry, it’s a fairly new development within our department. Please contact the Course Leader, Dr Alun Thomas (alun.thomas@staffs.ac.uk), and he will elaborate on your options.

All students across the course will start by learning about the core skills of the historian from an advanced postgraduate perspective, beginning with the use of state documentation but quickly moving on to more unorthodox evidence-types such as correspondence, speeches and artistic output.

What you will be doing and learning later on in your MA will depend on what pathway you will be taking. If you have chosen our core MA International History you will be reviewing some of the core concepts of the discipline one week at a time, beginning with subjects like Nationhood, Imperialism and Modernity. If you have chosen one of our subject-specific pathways, you will be delving into the history of Russian security, Chinese civilisation or state-run intelligence services.

Pathways do not diverge for part-time students until the beginning of their second year, so there is no rush to choose a pathway now. However, if you would like to talk through them at this early stage, please contact the Course Leader, Dr Alun Thomas (alun.thomas@staffs.ac.uk), and he will elaborate on your options

Essential equipment and facilities include:

• A desktop or laptop computer
• A reliable Broadband internet connection
• Access to Staffordshire University’s Virtual Learning Environment ‘Blackboard’
• Access to your Staffordshire University e-mail inbox
• Access to key Staffordshire University websites
• Access to the Staffordshire University online Library Portal for the Library Catalogue and links to e-Resources (such as subscribed e-books and journals)

Desirable equipment and facilities include:

• A headset for listening to audio content
• A microphone for creating audio content
• A webcam
• Access to Microsoft™ Office 365 products (such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, etc.) which are provided by the university
• Access to remote tutorials and Webinars (primarily using Blackboard Collaborate online videoconferencing)

Software you will need to have on your computer includes:

• Web browser (Google Chrome tends to work best with Blackboard)
• A Word-processing programme
• Adobe Acrobat – for reading on-line documents and electronic journals – this can be downloaded for free

You will need to be a proficient computer user, though technical help will be available if you have trouble with specific applications or tasks. The amount of time you will need to spend connected to the internet per week will be very variable. Most weeks it will be several hours. You can also download all the reading onto your own home computer and safely store it for future use.

Download software