Historical skills courses

These offer training in a variety of specialised skills used by historians in the course of their work.

  • Summer School in Local History

     25-27 June 2012
    The Institute of Historical Research is delighted to announce its inaugural three-day non-residential summer school in local history, to be held at the Institute from 25-27 June. The school is open to all those keen to expand or update their skills in local history research. It will introduce you to the most up-to-date methods, sources and successful approaches to the subject through an exciting programme of lectures and workshops.

  • Spring school in oral history (FULLY BOOKED! Sorry, registrations for the Spring School are now closed)

    26 - 28 April 2012
    This inaugural Spring School in Oral History will be devoted to all types of research in interviewing and oral history. The programme addresses six major areas: memory; experience; representativeness and generalisability; the researcher’s habitus; re-use of recordings; outputs and impacts. The final day will include best practice in teaching oral history.

  • Explanatory paradigms: an introduction to historical theory

    Wednesdays, 2 May - 11 July 2012
    A critical introduction to current approaches to historical explanation, taught by Professor John Tosh, Dr John Seed and Professor Sally Alexander. The contrasting explanatory frameworks offered by Marxism, psychoanalysis, gender analysis and Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative form the central discussion points of the course, equipping students to form their own judgements on the schools of thought most influential in the modern discipline.

  • Textual Analysis with Computers

    Two-day course: 12 December 2011 and 13 January 2012
    Researchers in the social sciences and humanities are increasingly using computers to manage, organise and analyse non-numerical data from textual sources. This one-day workshop introduces historians to this rapidly growing field and will furnish participants with a good working grasp of the NVivo 7 software package and its uses for all historical research projects.