Oxford History Students and Applicants

Hi - I'm considering applying for History & Politics next year. Just wondering about the workload - does anybody know roughly how many hours of lectures I'd have per week? And for tutorials? How many essays? Is there ever work other than essays? etc. etc...anything would be useful.

thanks!!

apologies if this is all mentioned on the faculty website - I couldn't find anything about how it actually works beyond just 'lectures and tutorials' etc...

Well as a straight history student...

Thanks very much. Good to know that the joint honours wouldn't be much more work - it sounds enough!

This might be a really stupid question, but does anyone know the dates which the terms 'medieval', 'early modern' and 'modern' encompass?

As far as I worked it out, Medieval is from about 300AD to 1400, Early Modern from 1400 to 1800 and Modern from then on. I saw it as Medieval: after the fall of Rome, Early Modern: from the Renaissance and Modern: from the French/Industrial Revolutions.

This is pretty much how I've always seen it, too.

x

Hi there

Can you remember from last year whether Michaelmas lecture lists are published in advance of start of term, and if so when might that be? Reason for my question is that I have permi to live out of college and the tutor is kindly going to do her best to hold my tutorial on one of the lecture days. It would just ease my study/travel/procrastinate/sleep logistics a little

Looking at previous lecture lists, the outline papers don't seem to vary much year by year (Monday and Wednesday at 12.00?). Do you think it's fairly safe to assume the same for the coming term?

Many thanks

No, if I remember rightly my lecture list arrived in my pidge during Freshers'... I think they need to confirm you've arrived before they send you it. That said, my Hilary/Trinity lecture lists arrived by e-mail, so there might be an online version around somewhere. In Michaelmas there's usually a lecture once a day Mon-Fri anyway, so you should be safe going by the previous years' plan Hope that helps!

Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, there is an online version but at present it still shows Trinity 2011 as the latest one. I'm starting in Year Two so unless I've miscalculated there are only two lectures per week (I'm BHIII btw) till Xmas; apparently no lectures for Disciplines this term?? Seems on the light side, even for History students

Oh, we don't have Disciplines lectures yet? That's a plus Might mean an easy Michaelmas then!

Do you know if there are lectures for the Tocqueville option because the Michaelmas lecture list for 2010 doesn't say there are any (http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/lecturelist/documents/MT2010AMENDED10-11-10.pdf) that seems weird to me. Unless it's because we're all going to French for historians instead? Do we just do the British paper and the approaches to History in Michaelmas?

I'm afraid I don't know anyone who did any foreign texts so I don't know what the plan is there, sorry. It is weird that you don't seem to have lectures for that... but then again that list is really stupid to navigate, we might both have just missed them. Yeah, MT is usually taken up by British history and half of Approaches, HT is General history and the other half, then TT is your Optional Subject. But if you're doing Tocqueville you won't be doing Approaches so I don't know what's uo with that... unless the foreign texts option is a shorter course, and can be squeezed into HT alone? That might be it.

(MT = Michaelmas Term, HT = Hilary term, etc, it's easier than writing them all out every time)

Thanks! I think they might be in Hilary instead from checking last year's HT lecture list so maybe that's it

There we go then, problem solved. What other modules are you doing, out of interest? (Sorry if I've asked you this before )

It was a tough call but I went for British 2 1042-1300. I just finished Tocqueville which was very hard and haven't picked anything else in terms of modules yet. I'm now moving on to British Medieval History books. Hello "The Struggle for Mastery"!

Ah, that's what I did - and I think I was the one who recommended people pick up 'The Struggle for Mastery' too. Really, it's indispensible, at least for the first part of the course, and it's always out of the bloody library... I would also say get 'The Three Edwards' by Michael Prestwich for the rest, that's also good. Those two books will see you through, I think 2/3 of my revision for that paper included reading one or other of them.

Hope you have a better time with Brit 2 than I had - medieval history isn't my thing, so I was taking it to get it out of the way, plus I didn't really know what I was doing yet Ah, early days!