Cultural History, Memory and Identity MA (PGCert PGDip)

International equivalencies

We can help you meet our English language or academic entry requirements.

Why study with us?

• Chance to specialise through one of three pathways: Cultural Memory; Making Histories – Public History and Heritage; or Race, Nation and Ethnicity

• Practical emphasis on the skills and methods involved in the making of new historical accounts and representations

• Lecturers with expertise across cultural, social and political history, cultural studies, literary studies, film and visual studies, and the history of ideas

• Interdisciplinary approach informed by cultural and critical theory

• Close relationship to the University of Brighton's Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories

• Flexible modes of study for students with personal or professional commitments

1: Cultural Memory

The Cultural Memory pathway explores distinctive approaches to questions of history making, historical consciousness and the cultural significance of the past, as developed in the recently emerged, interdisciplinary field of memory studies. It focuses on the social, cultural and political processes that produce a sense of the past for particular societies and social groups, and on the relationship between these collective, public dimensions of remembering and forgetting and the domain of personal memory. It develops a critical investigation of the key concepts and theories that define cultural memory as a new object of study, with central themes and issues that include:

• the representation of the past, and of the past-present relationship, in diverse cultural practices and forms (oral, textual, visual and digital)
• the role of cultural memories in the formation of beliefs, ideologies and identities
• conflict over the significance of the past
• the relation between memory and politics
• the relation between cultural and psychological dimensions of memory
• memory and place
• cultural memories and historical truth
• the ethics of remembering and forgetting.

These general, critical concerns are brought to bear in the study of cultural memories, particularly in socio-historical contexts, and of specific practices and representations of memory in diverse sites, forms and media.

The pathway begins by introducing the field of memory studies as well as key concepts, theories and methods in the study of cultural memory. It does so thematically by focusing on studies and debates mainly concerned with the cultural memory of war; the importance of cultural memory to national identities; and cultural memory in regard to racial or ethnic oppression and persecution. On this foundation, the pathway continues by developing more detailed investigation of particular contexts and cases, such as the memory of the Holocaust and the relation between cultural memory and conflict resolution in the Irish Troubles.

Modules

• Cultural History: Concepts, Theories and Methods
• Cultural Memory in Ireland: Conflict Resolution and the Irish Troubles
• Holocaust Memory
• Research Methods
• Research Project
• Optional module

Oil painting showing numerous people on The Level during Brighton Pride (Christine Jones, 2002)

2: Making Histories

The Making Histories pathway critically examines the fields of public history and heritage in a variety of contexts and through analyses of cultural sites and forms. Key concepts and critical frameworks are introduced, applied and critically assessed in relation to three specific case studies. Following introductory reading that lays the foundations for subsequent critical engagement, the first case study is the city of Brighton and Hove. Students examine specific public history sites in the city, the representation of the city in film, fiction and in oral history and web based community histories.

The second case study explores transatlantic slavery within the context of public history and heritage by drawing on examples from Britain, France, the USA, the Caribbean and Africa. It critically examines Britain’s recent public engagement with this history by contextualising, historicising and analysing the Bicentenary of the British Slave Trade in 2007. The complex relations between the public history of transatlantic slavery and commemoration are then examined through an investigation of memorials, museums, tourist sites and the Atlantic wide reparations debate. The last part of the case study explores the representation of slavery in film, autobiography and imaginative fiction. Throughout, the making of public history is considered as a means through which identities are understood and expressed, and also as a contested realm of social and political struggle.

The third case study focuses on the complex relationship between history, public history and the heritage industry concerning the Second World War in Britain. The first area considered is the archive, with students drawing on material collected by and held in Mass-Observation as a means of analysing the production of a public history of the war both at the time and since. The second area of focus is the representation of the war through museums and memorials, with students considering site specific instances of the memorialisation and museum representations of the war in Britain, linking these, where appropriate, to the concept of a ‘heritage industry’. Finally, students consider the Second World War as an object of both commemoration and consumption, considering the relationship between acts of commemoration and the ‘selling’ of the war, both through ‘dark tourism’ and commodities.

Modules

• Making Histories: Making the History of Brighton and Hove
• Slavery in the Atlantic World
• Britain in the Second World War
• Research Methods
• Research Project
• Optional module

Image courtesy of Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove

3: 'Race', Nation and Ethnicity

This pathway focuses on the relation between the historical processes that have produced imagined communities of ‘race’, nation and ethnicity (as these intersect with other factors, including class, gender and locality) and the cultural processes and forms in which these formations and identities have been represented. It investigates how collective experiences, myths and memories are drawn upon in narratives that construct the histories, identities and destinies of racial, national and ethnic groups, which in turn underpin those groups’ ideological and political claims.

The pathway begins by examining the historical formation and cultural representation of British national identity in relation to racial and ethnic others, with a particular emphasis on histories of migration and empire. It introduces key theoretical paradigms that underpin historical accounts of the significance of migration and empire for cultural constructions of Britishness, and develops methods for the critical investigation of history-making practices in terms of ideology, cultural representation and identity-formation across various sites and forms – visual and linguistic.

History making and identity formation are also analysed in relation to imaginative geographies of nation and diaspora, involving cultural perceptions, significances, images and memories pertaining to places of origin, belonging, journeying and settlement. Case studies are likely to focus on the British ‘island story’ and its critique and transformation; Islam and the Middle East in British cultural imagination; and Jewish migrant cultures in Britain. This work provides a foundation for more detailed investigation of these themes in particular historical contexts, such as the ‘Atlanticist’ diasporic cultures resulting from European slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean, and in particular forms of representation, such as the colonial and postcolonial novel in English.

There is also scope for primary research into local areas using archives, collections and the resources of local communities.

Modules

• Constructions of Britishness: Histories, Cultures and Identities
• The Making of the Black Atlantic: Transformations of History, Representation and Identity
• Memory and Identity in Postcolonial Cultures: Fictions and Histories
• Research Methods
• Research Project
• Optional module

Image courtesy of Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove

Staff profile

Dr Lucy Noakes

Course leader

Dr Lucy Noakes is a cultural and social historian with specific interests in war, memory, gender and national identity. She has worked on the ways in which we remember the past, both at an individual level and at the level of established history. Her publications include War and the British: Gender and National Identity 1939-1991.

Other teaching staff include:
Anita Rupprecht, Graham Dawson, Cathy Bergin, Peter Jackson and Anthony Leaker.

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