Third Year Module
Module Leader: Dr Louise Carter
Rationale and Content:
This module offers students the opportunity to explore the ways in which ideas about gender influenced the conflicts and imperial adventures that Britain pursued between 1760 and the 1930s. The module will consider how ideas about gender were utilised to propel and legitimise Britain's martial and imperial projects, yet simultaneously also had the potential to undermine these very ventures. Did the loss of the American colonies provoke a gender panic? Why were British women so integral to the debates surrounding the Indian Mutiny? Did emigration offer British men a chance to prove their masculinity? To what extent did the Boer War serve as a catalyst for increasing female public agency? How did experiences of shell-shock and disability influence ideas about masculinity after the Great War? What do contemporary debates about gender reveal about the aspirations, assumptions, hopes and fears of British society as it engaged with war and empire? This module will consider such themes, as well as the roles that actual men and women played in imperial and martial endeavours at home and abroad. The module will take a chronological path from the 1760s to the 1930s and will consider topics such as propaganda, consumption, slavery, migration, sexuality, pacifism and heroism. Students will be encouraged to assess the benefits and limitations of analysing war and empire through a gendered lens, and to evaluate the fresh and vibrant historiographical debates on this topic. The course will also provide students with the opportunity to critically evaluate and assess a range of visual and textual primary sources.
Learning and Teaching Strategies:
This module will be delivered through a combined weekly lecture and seminar plus tutorial support. Where appropriate supporting resources will also be made available online. Seminar sessions will be designed to encourage student participation and will support students in strengthening their skills of presentation, discussion,argument and debate,and in evaluating, interpreting and using secondary and primary sources.
Assessment:
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Module
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Mode
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Weighting %
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Length
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Submission Date
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Gender, War and Empire
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Individual oral presentation (with handouts)
Document commentary
Essay
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10%
40%
50%
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20 minutes and handouts of not less than 2 sides of A4
2,500 words
3,500 words
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As scheduled
Week 6
Week 12
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Recommended introductory reading:
Philippa Levine, (ed.), Gender and Empire, (2004).
John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire, (2004).
Further Reading:
Kathleen Wilson, Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, (2002).
Clare Midgley, (ed.), Gender and Imperialism, (1998).
Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire, (2006).
Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain, (2008)
S.R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War, (2002).
Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War, (2008).
Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War, (1999).
Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia, (1996).
Mary A. Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India 1883-1947, (2002).
Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, (1990).
Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780-1870, (1992).
Alan Forrest, Jane Rendall and Karen Hagemann (eds.), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 1790-1820, (2008).
Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire, (2006).
Kathleen Wilson, Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, (2002).
Phillipa Levine, The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset, (2007).
Sarah E. Stockwell, The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, (2007).
Gerard J. De Groot and Corinna Peniston-Bird, A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military, (2000).
Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, (2001).