Description: Introductory session where the lecturer will set out the course structure, requirements and assessment in detail. Students will also select the focus of their Diverging Perspectives assignment and discuss how the AI literature-search assignment and the methodological essay can be aligned with their thesis research. Students will then watch the classic film Rashomon (1950) by Akira Kurosawa – a profound exploration of contested memory and the impossibility of a single authoritative account of the past, questions that stand at the very centre of twentieth-century historiography. Reading: Syllabus; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: What do historians actually do when they "establish facts," and can they ever do so objectively? This session opens with a short lecture introducing the discipline's central methodological questions: the relationship between the historian and their evidence, the problem of selection, and the tension between history as science and history as interpretation. The core of the session examines the most famous debate on these questions in twentieth-century historiography: E. H. Carr's What is History? (1961) and its empiricist critique by Geoffrey Elton in The Practice of History (1967). Their exchange – over the status of facts, the role of the historian's present in shaping accounts of the past, and the question of determinism and moral judgement in history – introduced generations of students to historical method and remains the natural starting point for thinking about what historical knowledge is and how it differs from other forms of knowledge. Reading: Carr, Edward Hallett. What is History? With a New Introduction by Richard J. Evans. London: Macmillan, 2010: 1–55 ("The Historian and His Facts"; "Society and the Individual") Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: The seminar discussion will test Carr's and Elton's positions against each other and against the student's own assumptions about how knowledge is produced in their field. Reading: Elton, Geoffrey R. The Practice of History. 2nd Ed., With an Afterword by Richard J. Evans. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002 (Afterword by Richard J. Evans) Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: If the Carr–Elton exchange asked how historians establish facts, the debate that followed asked whether the historical fact survives as a category at all. A short lecture sets out the critique associated above all with Keith Jenkins: that the past and history are categorically distinct, that historical writing is a discourse produced in the present, and that claims to objectivity conceal rather than resolve the historian's position within it. Against this stands Richard Evans's defence of the discipline, which concedes much – the constructed character of narrative, the interpretive weight of the historian's questions, the absence of any view from nowhere – while insisting that evidence constrains interpretation and that some accounts of the past are demonstrably wrong. The session examines what remains of objectivity once its naive version is abandoned, and whether Evans's middle position is coherent or merely a compromise between two consistent extremes. Reading: Evans, Richard J. In Defence of History. New ed. London: Granta Books, 2000, chapter 8, "Objectivity and its Limits." Assignments/deadlines: Diverging Perspectives assignment due. Submitted via email or MyLearning by 23.59 CET on the day of the session.

Description: This session works through the implications of the dispute rather than restating it. Discussion begins from the Diverging Perspectives assignments submitted in the previous session: the two interpretations examined there are reread as a concrete instance of the problem debated in the abstract, testing whether the divergence is best explained by different evidence, different method, different questions, or the differing positions of the historians themselves – and whether it is in principle resolvable. The seminar then asks what follows for practice: on what grounds a scholarly community can reject an account as false rather than merely disfavoured, and how the empiricist position accommodates the fact that historians working from the same sources persistently reach incompatible conclusions. Reading: Students revisit Evans, chapter 8. Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: Fascism is the sharpest available test of the questions raised so far, because scholars have disagreed not only about its causes but about whether the term denotes a single phenomenon at all. The session traces the succession of interpretive schools: Marxist readings of fascism as the instrument of capital in crisis; the totalitarianism paradigm of the Cold War, which paired fascism with Stalinism and was later criticised as much for its politics as for its analysis; George Mosse's cultural turn, which took fascist ideology and self-understanding seriously as objects of study rather than treating them as propaganda concealing material interests; and the definitional debates around Roger Griffin's "new consensus" and the objections it has attracted. The point is not to arbitrate between them but to show how each school's conclusions follow from what it counted as evidence and which questions it thought worth asking. Reading: Paxton, Robert O. "The Five Stages of Fascism." The Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (1998): 1–23. Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: This session narrows from the survey to a single controversy that can be examined in detail: the question of whether German industrialists brought Hitler to power. The Marxist tradition treated business support as constitutive of fascism itself; Henry Ashby Turner's archival work on corporate records argued that large-scale industry funded the Nazis late, reluctantly and less generously than its rivals, and that the causal arrow ran the other way. Discussion examines what each side counted as evidence, why access to company archives changed the terms of the argument, and whether the dispute was ever purely empirical. Reading: Students who wish to follow the case further may consult Turner, Henry Ashby. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, introduction and conclusion. Assignments/deadlines: The topic of the final essay must be agreed with the instructor by this date.

Description: The past is everything that happened, history is the disciplined account historians construct of it, memory is what a society carries, transmits and uses. The session examines how these three relate and where they conflict. Pierre Nora's argument that modern societies build “lieux de mémoire” precisely because living memory has broken down sets memory and history in opposition: history, on this account, is what remains once memory is gone, and it works by suspicion of the very continuity memory supplies. Paul Ricoeur's position is less adversarial, treating memory as the ground of the historian's claim to represent a real past and history as memory's critical correction rather than its replacement. Against both, the historical-consciousness literature associated with Jörn Rüsen and Peter Seixas asks what the relationship is for — how societies orient themselves in time and what competence is required to move between remembering and knowing. Discussion establishes where these accounts genuinely diverge and where they are answering different questions. Reading: Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire." Translated by Marc Roudebush. Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: This session tests the previous week's positions against a case. Commemoration in Central Europe supplies material where the distinction between history and memory is not academic: the same events sustain incompatible public accounts, monuments are erected and removed within a single generation, and states legislate about the past. Discussion asks what Nora's diagnosis explains and what it misses when memory is not dying but actively manufactured, whether Ricoeur's account of history as memory's critic describes anything historians can actually do under such conditions, and what Rüsen's and Seixas's emphasis on orientation implies about the historian's public role. The second part of the session is given over to the individual oral presentation, delivered in class and followed by questions and feedback. Reading: No new reading, we will revisit Nora. Assignments/deadlines: Oral Presentation – delivered in class.

Description: For much of the twentieth century the most ambitious challenge to conventional historical writing came not from philosophy but from the social sciences. The session begins with the Annales school and Fernand Braudel's argument that political events are surface disturbances above slower structures — demography, climate, trade routes, mentalities — that move over centuries and constitute the real object of historical enquiry. It then turns to the cliometric movement in the United States, which pursued a different kind of rigour by applying formal economic modelling and quantitative data to historical problems, most controversially in Fogel and Engerman's work on the profitability of American slavery. Discussion examines what quantification makes visible and what it necessarily leaves out, whether counterfactual reasoning of the kind cliometrics requires is legitimate in history, and how a discipline decides that a method borrowed from another field has been applied well or badly. Reading: Braudel, Fernand. "History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée." Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32, no. 2 (2009): 171–203. Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: This session tests the previous week's methods against the student's own disciplinary training. Most social-science and professional disciplines make some version of the moves that the Annales school and cliometrics imported into history — classifying cases, inferring from aggregate data, reconstructing what caused what, weighing structural explanation against the actions of individuals — and the seminar asks what changes when those moves are applied to a past that cannot be observed again, sampled again, or interrogated further. Discussion covers the problem of the surviving record as a non-random sample of what once existed, the temptation to treat what happens to have been measured or preserved as what actually mattered, and the difference between an explanation that accounts for the evidence and one that merely accommodates it. Students are asked to identify where their own field draws the line between description and explanation, and whether that line holds when the object of study is past rather than present. Reading: No new reading, we will revisit Braudel. Assignments/deadlines: AI-Generated Sources and Historical Verification assignment due. Submitted via email or MyLearning by 23.59 CET on the day of the session.

Description: Generative language models have entered historical research faster than the discipline has worked out what they may legitimately be used for. The session distinguishes tasks where these systems function as a heuristic multiplier — orientation in unfamiliar literature, translation, summarisation, the generation of candidate lines of enquiry — from tasks where they cannot function at all, because a model that produces plausible text has no access to evidence and no capacity to verify what it asserts. Fabricated citations are treated not as a defect awaiting a technical fix but as a structural feature of how these systems generate output, and therefore as the point at which the historian's verification duty becomes non-delegable. The session then relates the problem to the questions raised across the course: what counts as a source, what authority attaches to a claim, and how transparency about method is maintained when part of the work has been done by a tool whose reasoning cannot be inspected. The second half is practical, working live with prompts and examining the results against catalogues and databases. Reading: Fox, Yaniv. Using Generative AI in Historical Practice. Cambridge_ Cambridge UP, 2026. Assignments/deadlines: None.

Description: This session is practical throughout. Working from the exercises Yaniv Fox sets out in his short book, supplemented by others adapted to the kinds of work historians actually do, students test generative tools against a series of concrete tasks and assess the results critically: extracting and structuring information from a text, translating and interrogating a source in an unfamiliar language, transcribing or summarising material, generating counter-arguments to a position the student holds, reformulating a research question, and probing where the tool's output is confident and wrong rather than merely vague. The point of each exercise is not the output but the diagnosis — what the tool did well, what it fabricated or flattened, and what the historian must therefore retain. Students are encouraged to bring their own prompts, tools and ideas, including experiments that failed; suggestions from the student's own field are particularly welcome, since the boundary between productive and misleading use is drawn differently in different disciplines and is best established by testing rather than by rule. Reading: No new reading. Assignments/deadlines: None.

Seminar: Concluding session drawing together the six topics covered during the semester. Students revisit the central question of the course — what historical knowledge is, how it is produced and on what grounds it can be defended — and assess how their own position has changed since the opening discussion of Carr and Elton. The session also reviews the completed assignments and considers which of the methodological problems examined during the term bear on the students' further research. Assignments/deadlines: Essay submission, in print and as a Turnitin assignment (by 23.59 CET, 14 Dec 2026).