Historical Studies

The Department of Historical Studies has a longstanding commitment to creating and developing innovative and sustainable linkages between teaching, research and social dissemination of academic knowledge. TheHistorical Studies program is offered byUniversity of Cape Town.

Much historical research at this University has predictably been on the South African past, including the city of Cape Town and its rural hinterland. This Master's degree in Historical Studies is delivered at the University of Cape Town .

Key Facts

In recent years, research interests of both staff and students have remarkably extended to other parts of Africa and the world at large, including the nature of South Africa’s and Africa’s relationship with the Indian, Atlantic and Antarctic worlds. Therefore we particularly encourage proposals for research with a comparative or transnational perspective. Increasing collaboration between the Department of Historical Studies at UCT and several academic institutions abroad is opening up exciting sites and styles of research, enabling our students to speak simultaneously to local and global audiences.

No wonder that the Department has played a consistently leading role in generating internationally recognised historical research of excellent quality and thereby training students for careers both within and beyond academia.It patiently and systematically trains graduate students in the art of writing empirically solid, conceptually alive and socially relevant histories through a diverse but balanced platter of coursework, a series of lively seminars, workshops, conferences, and colloquia, and intimate and meticulous supervision of primary research.

Courses include:

• Advanced Historical Methods and Approaches
• History in Public Life

• A History of Violence: Perspectives from the Global South
• Histories of Land and Labour Struggles in South Africa
• Theory and Method in Histories of Medicine, Health and Healing
• Themes in Contemporary South African Rural History