Public History and Cultural Heritage (M.Phil. / P.Grad.Dip.)

Students take a core module — Remembering, Reminding and Forgetting: Public History, Cultural Heritage and the Shaping of the Past — which runs across both terms.

A suite of term-long electives is available on substantive themes. Electives offered in recent years include: Saving the Past; Choosing your pasts: the historian and the archive; History, Memory and Commemoration; ‘The Rise, Fall, and Recovery of the Irish Big House, c. 1700 – the Present’; Gender, Art and Identity; Consuming History: Media, Markets and the Past.

A three-month internship, located in one of our collaborating institutions, runs throughout the second term.

Practitioner workshops are also held in the second term and provide an opportunity for national and international ‘public historians’ to discuss their work with the class. In any given year, this may include novelists, artists, museum directors, or heritage and tourism policymakers.

The course concludes with the production of a dissertation or major project 12,000-15,000 words, supervised by a member of staff.