2024/25

Drug History for Beginners

This 30 CATS undergraduate final-year Advanced Option explores the history of the body in Soviet Russia from revolution to the collapse of the USSR, in light of revolutionary claims that socialism would bring about ‘a higher social-biologic type, or if you please, a superman’. We will consider the utopian visions of the ideal socialist body, as they were disseminated in propaganda, literature and art. We will trace the means by which the Soviet state sought to bring these visions to life – through healthcare, education and physical culture – and how Soviet citizens responded to the new social, emotional and sensory regimes of the body. Yet we will also consider how ideological understandings of the ideal socialist body intersected with the messy realities of the physical in Soviet Russia, and consider the ways in which questions of sexuality, degeneration, disability and disease were reconciled with the dreams of a revolutionary utopia.

Seminars will draw on a range of sources, including programmatic texts by key theorists of the revolutionary body, films, literature and the visual arts, works of popular science and personal memoirs. The history of the Soviet body is a fast-growing field in the humanities; this module will allow students to engage and be part of this developing field, and to contribute to our understanding of Soviet history as an embodied experience.

This 30 CATS undergraduate final-year Special Subject module introduces students to the Nazis’s project to murder Europe’s Jews and other minorities during the Second World War. The primary focus is to study these genocides and to deepen your understanding of events and experiences, as well as to introduce you to different scholarly interpretations and themes. The other goal of this module is to study the origins and implementation of the Holocaust from the contrasting perspectives of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. We will explore the issues of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, age, identity, and ethical choices. This module considers how violence and trauma are narrated, remembered, and reflected in testimony, film, and literature. In the seminar, we will discuss narrativity and issues of memory, artistic representation, and also the application of historical theories.

The seminars requires close study of scholarly literature and published primary sources. You will be reading a lot, and you must ensure you read and think about the assigned readings before each seminar so that you can participate in the discussion. In addition to the 'essential' readings, at least one reading from those listed as 'recommended' is strongly encouraged each seminar as well (at the very list skim for the main points).