Tip: Do some homework first, and your conversations with faculty and other mentors will be more fruitful. You'll not only get invaluable advice, but these conversations will also help your mentors to write stronger, more specific letters of recommendation.
Read how best to ask for letters and to prepare for an informational interview with a mentor. Skip to main content. Looking for translations? Try our unofficial guide to decoding British degrees. Some master's programs, like almost all doctoral programs, involve only research. Any of these described as "research" degrees work the way a doctoral degree does, but involve a smaller research project and fewer years to complete it.
How to decide among the various options? MSt programmes are academically rigorous postgraduate programmes, usually undertaken over two years. They incorporate a significant taught element, and a research project and associated dissertation. Taught elements are normally broken down into discrete modules and research projects may be work-related, if appropriate.
MSt programmes are not simply full-time programmes studied on a part-time basis. They are specifically designed as part-time programmes, to be flexible and accessible to accommodate the needs of working professionals.
The modular structure of consolidated teaching blocks enables those living further away from Cambridge, including international students, to undertake an MSt. This option offers the opportunity to engage with a range of exciting new scholarship on the Enlightenment, covering the period from the second half of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century.
We shall cover Enlightenment both as an intellectual movement and as a social phenomenon, examining how thinkers across Europe engaged with new publics. For the first four weeks we shall explore the major interpretative issues now facing Enlightenment historians, including:.
During the second half of the course, participants will be encouraged to set their own more precise study agenda, related to the topics of their course papers. They may explore in more detail the intellectual content of Enlightenment, its various contexts, its social framework, and its impact, within and across national and political frontiers. Topics which might be studied at this stage are:. Participants will also be encouraged to attend the research-oriented Enlightenment Workshop, which meets weekly in Hilary Term.
Creating the Commonwealth looks at the intersection of religion and politics in the work of three of the most important early modern intellectuals: Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Grotius argued that political communities could be built upon principles which all human beings held in common, while allowing scope for different kinds of churches and religious groups. We will consider how he made this case, drawing upon classical, historical and religious arguments.
Hobbes was a follower of the Grotian project, in that he recognised the foundational importance of natural law principles. But Hobbes was also critical of the thought that the Grotian scheme might be sustainable without a radical reconstruction of the natural law ideas that Grotius had proposed, and in the seminars on Hobbes we examine the character of his controversial response in De cive and Leviathan. Turning finally to Locke, we examine a thinker dealing with the legacy of the ideas of Grotius and Hobbes, and examine the ways that he sought to mediate their influence in the political theory of the Two Treatises of Government and his powerful work on religious toleration.
Studying these three thinkers together reveals the dialogical features of some of the most important texts in the western intellectual tradition, and casts new light upon some of the ideas regarded as foundational to modern political thinking.
This paper will appeal particularly to those students who wish to pursue research in modern British and Irish history but also to those who wish to study the challenges faced by multi-national states in a comparative perspective. We have strong research and teaching interests in English, Irish and Scottish history in the Faculty, and would like to draw together those students who wish to specialise in the national histories of the United Kingdom and in the comparative history of the British Isles.
This paper allows to draw on our expertise in these fields and to expose graduate students to new scholarship in this area. Each student will be expected to lead class discussion at least once during the term. The case studies will form the basis of class presentations. Given the breath of this paper, we will encourage students — particularly those presenting their research at each class - to select a variety of case studies so that a diversity of experiences from around the British Isles may be discussed.
The field of this paper is the history of 19th and early 20th century Europe and America, as seen through the eyes of leading political and social theorists. The central intellectual tradition represented here is that of 19th century European liberalism. It is central because it enjoyed an undoubted cultural hegemony — although Anglophone liberalism, a rather different set of ideas, also comes into view. This major tradition is represented above all by Hegel, Durkheim and Weber. Standing outside it there were of course a number of alternative points of view: most obviously radicals, romantics and socialists who dissented from, but inevitably engaged with, the hegemonic liberal position, as well as the semi-detached Anglophone tradition already noted.
Notwithstanding the hiatus inflicted by Fascism, Nazism and world war, and later talk ca. The period covered in this course remains the starting point for an understanding of modern social and political theory. So far as the method of study is concerned, the paper is designed for theoretically concerned historians rather than pure theorists. This historical approach should not be seen as anti-theoretical — quite the reverse — but it should be understood as a distinctive and as we like to think more accurate, more realistic and lifelike path to theoretical understanding.
Its outer limit is the understanding of the place of ideas and intellectual tradition within societies taken as a whole, i. However, its pragmatic starting point is the study of individual texts and authors deemed to be of outstanding merit and rich in meaning. The class programme tries to capture both the macro- and microscopic perspectives. The overall aim of the course is to gain a broad understanding of the subject as a whole : let us elevate our sights just as the thinkers under study would have expected us to do.
In the last three weeks of term you are then required to write one essay of , words, when class meetings are intended to service the needs raised by essay-writing. The title of the essay must be submitted to, and agreed with, the course convenor by the end of 6th week of Hilary term; the essay must be submitted on Monday of 9th week.
Of these subject areas at least one must be taken from Continental Europe. This course makes no linguistic requirement, and the use of sources in translation is entirely legitimate.
However, command of a European language or languages will expand the range of materials open to you, while awareness of linguistic difference is at all times a fundamental datum of historical study. This option paper equips students with the interdisciplinary methods to rethink familiar themes in early North American and U.
Our focus will be on processes of colonisation, knowledge production, and resource extraction. We will read both classic and new work in order to trace historiographical developments and identify important research questions. Proceeding chronologically, the paper will, for instance, examine ecological change and the commodification of nature within narratives on European colonisation of the Americas; the ecological impacts of indigenous and Euro-American empires; historical practices meant to manage scarcity and promote sustainability; and the ideas about natural abundance and wilderness that have shaped American society.
In this effort, we will operate on both large and small scales. Analysis that draws on the natural sciences, historical geography, and economics helps to understand great shifts in American environments and economies, while work that draws more from the theoretical tradition of science and technology studies engages closely with lives ranging from sixteenth-century enslaved pearlfishers to nineteenth-century immigrant miners.
Time and acceleration are among the defining features of the long nineteenth century. They are also, in fundamental ways, interlinked. As the pace of life quickened due to a series of technological innovations among which the telegraph and the railways take pride of place the need for shared time conventions whether regional, national, or global and for greater accuracy of timekeeping, grew accordingly.
The spread of a world time standard has commonly been portrayed as a logical, and even an inevitable, by-product of modernization.
Yet, there is a crucial difference between the two; and this difference will likely be the deciding factor in which degree is best for you.
The degrees target two different professions; an MSc a profession in industry and an MPhil a profession in research. To make this possible, the degrees set out to provide you with a unique set of skills and specialised knowledge. As an MSc is aimed at those wishing to develop a career in industry, it focuses on providing practical knowledge which has uses within the workplace.
Therefore, while theoretical-related concepts may be taught, they will form a small part of your learning material with the focus instead on practical topics. For example, a civil engineering student may undertake an MSc in Construction Project Management ; here, topics from resource planning to cost and risk management would be covered. Finding a PhD has never been this easy — search for a PhD by keyword, location or academic area of interest.
Unlike an MSc, which although may contain research-based components depending on the university, an MPhil is almost always a research-only degree. As a result, the degree is mainly undertaken by those who wish to pursue a research-based profession.
As discovered earlier, an MPhil may also be undertaken as a precursor to a PhD by those who wish to have a career in advanced research or academia.
0コメント