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Welcome to our Advent Calendar inspired activities
Take a few steps with us into the festive - sometimes you may get to jump ahead, but mostly no sneak peaks.
We hope you stay curious and open new doors!
Drama is the most public literary form - at many points in history the most immediately engaged in social change. Dublin's Abbey Theatre, Cape Town's Space Theatre, and New York's Cherry Lane Theatre are among the many sites that have played a major part in defining national identities at times of crisis and have been platforms for protest.
This module looks at major English-language plays written since the beginning of the twentieth century. We shall examine theatre in Ireland, South Africa, and the USA to investigate some of the ways writers have dramatised political, racial, class, and gender issues and have tried to foster a sense of community and intervene in history. Developments in theatrical form will be studied as vehicles for ideas. The work of designers, directors, and actors will be considered alongside the texts. At the heart of the module is the shifting relationship between theatre and social change.
SYLLABUS
TERM 1
Ireland
Week 1: Introduction. Types, Stereotypes, Myths and Two Histories of Ireland. Dion Boucicault, The Colleen Bawn (1860); W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)
Week 2: Sean O'Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman (1923) and The Plough and the Stars (1926)
Week 3: Frank McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1986) and Sebastian Barry, The Steward of Christendom (1995)
Week 4: Anne Devlin, Ourselves Alone (1985) and Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats (1998)
Week 5: David Ireland, Cyprus Avenue (2016)
Week 6: Reading week
South Africa
Week 7: Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972); The Island (1973)
Week 8: Athol Fugard, Statements After an Arrest (1972); 'Master Harold'... and the Boys (1982)
Week 9: Mbongeni Ngema, Sarafina! (1985), Janet Suzman, The Free State: A South African response to Chekov's The Cherry Orchard (2000)
Week 10: Mongiwekhaya, I See You (2016)
TERM 2
USA
Week 1: Eugene O'Neill, The Hairy Ape (1922) and All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924)
Week 2: Arthur Miller, The Death of a Salesman (1949) and Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
Week 3: Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Week 4: Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)
Week 5: James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); Amiri Baraka, Dutchman (1964)
Week 6: Reading week
Week 7: Ntozake Shange, for colored girls... (1976); August Wilson, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1982)
Week 8: Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Millennium Approaches(1991) and Tarell Alvin McCraney, The Brothers Size (2015)
Week 9: Anne Washburn, Mr. Burns (2012); Lynn Nottage, Sweat(2015)
Week 10: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (2014); Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton (2015)
PRIMARY TEXTS
It is essential for all students to bring copies of the week's readings (book, hardcopy printout, or laptop/e-reader) to seminar. Find more information here.
ASSESSMENT
TBA: watch this space over the summer
FILMS/VIDEOS
Recommended films/videos for context:
Term 1
- The Plough and the Stars (dir. John Ford, 1936)
- Michael Collins (dir. Neil Jordan, 1996)
- The Wind That Shakes the Barley (dir. Ken Loach, 2006)
- Bloody Sunday (dir. Paul Greengrass, 2002)
- Hunger (dir. Steve McQueen, 2008)
- The Biko Inquest (dir. Graham Evans, Albert Finney, 1984)
- Cry Freedom (dir. Richard Attenborough, 1987)
- Sarafina! (dir. Darrell Roodt, 1992)
- Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (dir. Justin Chadwick, 2013)
Term 2
- Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941)
- The Crucible (dir. Nicholas Hytner, 1996)
- On the Waterfront (dir. Elia Kazan, 1954)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (dir. Elia Kazan, 1951)
- A Raisin in the Sun (dir. Daniel Petrie, 1961)
- In the Heat of the Night (dir. Norman Jewison, 1967)
- Dutchman (dir. Anthony Harvey, 1966)
- Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee, 1989)
- Philadelphia (dir. Jonathan Demme, 1993)
- Cradle Will Rock (dir. Tim Robbins, 1999)
- Selma (dir. Ava DuVernay, 2014)
- Moonlight (dir. Barry Jenkins, 2016)
- Fences (dir. Denzel Washington, 2016)
Photograph: The National Theatre's An Octoroon (2018), Richard Davenport, The Other Richard/The Guardian
Example first-class essays
What Next?: A Future Beyond Postmodernity in Washburn's Post-Capitalist Realist America
2020/21 Proposed teaching timeslots available - *subject to change*
| DAY/TIME | |
| TUE - 2:00 - 3:45 | |
| TUE - 4:15 - 6:00 | |
This is a core module for English and Theatre Studies second-year students and open only to them.
Devices and silicon processing; ASIC (based on analogue/digital
VLSI) and MEMS design; silicon micromachining and other emerging process
technologies; system design methodology; device design styles: detailed
optimisation (cost and power), principles and applications. Examples will
include physical and chemical microsensors, MEMS and microsystems. Automotive,
environmental, industrial and healthcare applications.
Students are expected to solve problems taken from the recommended text-book (examples sheets and past exam papers).
Written Design Project: ASIC chip, MEMS or smart device to be designed and simulated with students working individually.
This module is intended to introduce students to the techniques and skills of textual analysis, and to develop their understanding and appreciation of cinema both past and present. It aims to introduce cinema through a range of critical lenses and frameworks, familiarising students with key formal strategies and critical concepts that are necessary for analysing films. It is designed to ensure that students are adept at examining the various visual, aural and narrative conventions by which they create meaning and how these meanings have been understood within the academic field of film studies.
The module is divided into four units across two terms. Unit one offers students various methods for developing and applying the critical vocabulary required to analyse formal elements of cinema; such as mise-en-scène, editing, staging, and composition. Unit two shifts to consider the variety of texts covered by the term cinema, including animation, experimental film, and documentary. In the second term, the module moves on to cover key theoretical concerns in film studies, including authorship, genre, and stardom. The remaining weeks draw on the skills and knowledge acquired across the course in order to engage with key issues of politics and representation in film.
Students will explore these ideas through a wide and engaging array of films from different countries and different periods in the history of cinema. By focusing on a range of films, this module will ultimately equip students with the necessary analytical skills to discover cinema’s richness, its complexity and its expressivenessThe aim of this module is to allow students to study a distinctive aspect of modern French politics. France has a history of violence in revolution, counter-revolution, coup d'etat, foreign occupation and protracted colonial wars, not to mention lower-level violence on the streets and in factories. We will look at some influential and important theories of political violence, including those of Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. We will also examine actual moments of particularly intense violence -- including Occupation and Resistance, 1940-1944; the Algerian struggle for independence, 1954-1962; and May 1968 -- and ask whether the contemporary French political scene is much less prone to violence than in the past. At the centre of discussion will be important contemporary questions such as: 'Is political violence always wrong?' and 'does liberal democracy represent an advance over other, more explicitly violent forms of political arrangements?'
This module intends to provide students with a basic knowledge of the ways in which architecture (as design, planning, and ideology) became one of the delegated fields in which a social, political, or cultural idea of the future could be articulated and implemented from the age of Industrial Revolution to the present day. The module will show how the ideas of theorists and visionaries ended up influencing the form of the everyday built environment around the world. The course will start by exploring the way that rapid urbanisation and industrialisation led many to seek alternative ways of living, whether by looking towards an idealised often-rural past. The module will cover many of the most influential and radical urban theorists of the last 200 years, and will show how their ideas informed the creation of new communities around the globe. It will end by asking how useful Utopian ideas are for solving the many challenges that face urban populations today.
This 30 CATS first-year undergraduate option module examines the history and politics of the modern Middle East through a series of questions and problems that have shaped its development. The module is divided into four sections. The first part of the module briefly questions the usefulness and origins of the term Middle East as a geographical area and unit of analysis. It raises questions about how historical and anthropological knowledge, western media, and academic scholarship in the social sciences have helped define the modern Middle East. The next section of the module offers a historical overview of the Ottoman past through the colonial and postcolonial periods, i.e. the period from the sixteenth century through the colonial period in the nineteenth century and to the present post-colonial period in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The module will then move to address more specifically some of the most important contemporary issues that have historically affected modern Middle Eastern politics along with the role of outside forces such as Britain and the United States. These include: the Arab-Israeli conflict; the history of oil in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran; the role of political Islam; questions of democracy, development, and human rights; the Gulf War, and the 2003 U.S. invasion/occupation of Iraq; the Arab Spring and the current war on terrorism.
The module is designed to be attractive to students interested in the histories, cultures, and societies of the Middle East, the history of empire, state formation, community and nation, and questions of democracy. It encourages students to rethink historical and political analysis. We will use a wide range of materials including diplomatic documents, short stories, scholarly texts, and photographs and videos, to explore the many different ways people in the Middle East have come to define and shape their world and also how outsiders have attempted to control and shape this world.
In the early twenty-first century, many commentators argue that European societies have broken politically, military, and culturally with a past long shaped by wars and military conflicts. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ensuing transatlantic dispute, many US conservative commentators argued with Robert Kagan that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus” (Of paradise and power. America and Europe in the New World Order, 2003). In this view, Europeans would now be both both unwilling and incapable of using war and military power to ensure their security. More recently, historian James Sheehan invited us to rethink modern European history as the painful, cruel, and costly process whereby European societies redefined their relationship to war as an instrument of policy (Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe, 2008). These debates, like the history of warfare, raise a series of ethical, political, and intellectual issues of continuing import and relevance.
This team-taught first-year optional module will introduce students to the history of war and conflicts in modern European history (1815-2015). It will consider how war, its conduct and experience, shaped states and societies in Europe. It will also investigate how the transformations of warfare reflected the evolutions of European societies.
The lectures will provide a brief outline of the military conflicts that shaped the experience of Europeans throughout the period. Most importantly however, in conjunction with weekly seminar discussions, they will help students understand how wars affected – and were transformed by – political ideologies and regimes, cultures, understandings of race and gender, economic systems and international relations and institutions.Today we are used to thinking of Germany as a peaceful, prosperous and stable democracy, at the heart of Europe politically and economically as well as geographically. But for much of its modern history the picture was very different. A comparative latecomer to statehood, in the 170 years of its existence as a nation-state Germany experienced a dramatic transformation from a maverick to a model state which took in war, dictatorship, occupation and division, as well as rapid industrial development (twice), a dynamic civil society and intense cultural and intellectual experimentation.
This 30 CATS optional second year undergraduate module examines the history of Germany from Unification in 1871 to the Berlin Republic of Angela Merkel. Students will consider the political, social and cultural history of modern Germany from a variety of historical perspectives in order to understand why in Germany the past is so important to an understanding of the present. We will look at the rise and fall of political ideas and regimes, economic developments, issues of citizenship and ethnicity, attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and how all these affected the lives of ordinary Germans. Along the way, students will have the opportunity to conduct their own research and write a piece of Germany's history.
Today we are used to thinking of Germany as a peaceful, prosperous and stable democracy, at the heart of Europe politically and economically as well as geographically. But for much of its modern history the picture was very different. A comparative latecomer to statehood, in the 170 years of its existence as a nation-state Germany experienced a dramatic transformation from a maverick to a model state which took in war, dictatorship, occupation and division, as well as rapid industrial development (twice), a dynamic civil society and intense cultural and intellectual experimentation.
This 30 CATS optional second year undergraduate module examines the history of Germany from Unification in 1871 to the Berlin Republic which came into being after reunification in 1990. Students will consider the political, social and cultural history of modern Germany from a variety of historical perspectives in order to understand why in Germany the past is so important to an understanding of the present. We will look at the rise and fall of political ideas and regimes, economic developments, issues of citizenship and ethnicity, attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and how all these affected the lives of ordinary Germans. Along the way, students will have the opportunity to conduct their own research and write a piece of Germany's history.
In the last sixty years, there has been an increasing interest in the history of Sub-Saharan African history before European colonial rule. In the 1960s, after African countries became independent, many scholars moved away from Eurocentric paradigms to explore the African past in order to enhance the historicity and agency of African societies, from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. This module seeks to study the African continent within the wider context of Global history, by studying Africa's place in the First Globalization (14th-18th c.).
Principal Module Aims
This module aims to introduce students to precolonial African history. It is centred on the themes of state formation and it places special emphasis on the connections between the African societies and the rest of the world.
Learning Outcomes
- Obtaining knowledge on the different networks in which African societies and actors were engaged
- Identifying major themes and methodologies in African Early Modern History
- Establish intellectual bridges between African and non-African historiographies
- Classifying the environmental, political and cultural diversity of Early Modern Africa
- Critically evaluate and interpret a variety of primary sources and historiographical traditions
- Developing research skills, historiographical engagement, presentation skills, and critical analysis through individual and group work
SEMINARS: Seminar groups will meet on Thursdays either from 9:00-11:00 or from 11:00-13:00 in FAB 3.25.
MOODLE: This module will use Moodle for a variety of activities -- like picking your student choice elements! -- and Talis for your readings. You will find our Moodle in your dashboards, and here.
ASSESSMENT
10% Participation: This will be assessed through weekly participation in module discussions. Students may request reasonable adjustments if needed (e.g., assessment via written or oral participation only if special/medical circumstances apply). Read more on our Departmental module page.
40% Applied Task: All students will identify and ‘curate’ (via a multimedia assignment equivalent to a 1000 word essay) an object or image which exposes or amplifies themes of the module. Required skills for this will be taught in the module, and for more information, see our 'Applied Task' page.
50% 3000 word Essay: Students may choose between writing a policy briefing on a topic related to the module OR a standard academic essay exploring a module topic.
Principal module aims
This module will build on the knowledge and approaches gained in Year One to:
Explore the ways in which states, societies and individuals have defined and observed 'normality', ‘health’, ‘disability’, and ‘abnormality’ in modern history;
Analyse how technologies of measurement and surveillance help to define both states and citizenship;
Examine how policy and politics respond to innovations in biomedical and technological understandings of our bodies;
Train you to use material and/or visual culture as well as textual sources from across science, technology, and medicine; and
Introduce you to key themes in the histories of medicine, technology, and disability. It will also complement the Year Two Research Project.
Learning outcomes
Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the history of key surveillance technologies and modalities;
Analyse and evaluate the impact of measurement on the generation of social and political norms;
Identify and evaluate the contributions made by historical and interdisciplinary scholarship to understandings of bodily surveillance as state-making;
Locate, research, and analyse physical objects and/or visual representations as primary source material to generate new ideas and interpretations of the past;
Communicate the findings of independent research, adapting it to the needs of diverse audiences (e.g., policy makers, journalists, community members).
Why is memory such an important component of our view of the past today? In what ways is the Hispanic world driving and shaping global memory discourses rather than simply responding to them?
This module focuses on the turbulent politics of the ‘long 1960s’ with the aim of introducing students to how radicals and rebels during those years saw small-scale distributed technologies as tools to reforge the public sphere, and to initiate a move away from the perceived authoritarian patterns operating within mass media societies. Students will be introduced to the interdisciplinary debates between sociologists, anthropologists, cybernetic theorists and computational scientists that fuelled post-war investigations into mass communications technologies. With this foundation, they will explore how these ideas translated into the techno-counterculture of Sixties America by examining the radical underground press, public access cable movement and the early computer hobbyist scenes. In this way, students will become familiarized with how interdisciplinary knowledge informed bedrock conceptions of digital culture, and will think historically about how once provisional and speculative knowledge has become part of our commonsense rendering of the present.
In order to fulfill these aims, students will work with digitized archives; they will combine historical methods with conceptual frameworks from media genealogy to critically assess the legacies of countercultural engagements in contemporary ideas and practices of digital media. Students will investigate the inter-medial pathways that radicals and rebels explored, and become conversant with the interdisciplinary media and communications theory underpinning the thoughts of key actors and groups during the long 1960s.
For further information please contact cim@warwick.ac.uk or go to https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/apply-to-study/cross-disciplinary-postgraduate-modules/im930-futures-post/