Honours in the Department of History
The honours year gives students a taste of history as a vocation. In seminar work, students grapple with problems in the theory and practice of history; the thesis gives them the experience of formulating a significant historical problem and writing a substantial piece of original research.
Students who take honours at the University of Sydney study in one of Australia’s leading history departments. They work closely with dedicated teachers and active researchers whose interests span a wide variety of fields and methodological approaches.
The department is proud of its honours program, graduates of which have gone on to a rich variety of rewarding careers. For some people, the honours year is a critical step on the path to further study; some of your teachers will be University of Sydney honours graduates. For others, the fourth year is the culmination of their formal education, an experience that helps them refine their skills in research, analysis and writing; extend their intellectual range; and develop the body of personal and professional skills needed to see a major project though to completion.
What Prerequisites Do I Need?
To be eligible to undertake Fourth Year Honours in 2009 or later, you must have completed 48 senior credit points of History (i.e. 8 senior units of study), including HSTY2691, and have an average grade of credit or above in those 8 units of study. Up to 18 credit points (i.e. 3 units) may be cross-listed units.
Details
If you do not have all the prerequisites but are close, please contact the honours coordinator to discuss your options.
How Do I Enrol?
| Pre-enrolment with the Faculty of Arts |
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Students need to pre-enrol for honours at the Faculty of Arts office, not the Department of History.
Current University of Sydney students moving on to fourth-year honours will have their eligibility for honours checked by the Faculty of Arts. All the applications that fulfill the published requirements for honours entry are forwarded to history department’s honours coordinator. The faculty will also refer to the department applications from students who haven’t completed all the prerequisites. In these cases, the department’s honours coordinator has some discretion to allow those students into the honours year. Students who want to do honours but have not fulfilled all the prerequisites should contact the honours coordinator as soon as possible. If the student’s pre-enrolment is successful, that should be the end of their dealings with the faculty. The student will be sent an invoice with an interim library card in December/January, and another for the academic year in February.
In the first semester, students simply enrol in two ‘shell’ units, HSTY4011 and HSTY4012 (History Honours A and History Honours B). These codes bear no relation to the actual seminars taken. The faculty only needs to know that you’re doing two 12-credit units of history honours; which two seminars you take is between you and the history department. (This is why the seminars have no unit codes.) In the second semester, you enrol for another two ‘shell’ units, HSTY4013 and HSTY4014 (History Honours C and History Honours D), which represent the thesis.
If you are transferring from another university, or returning to studying at the University of Sydney after more than a semester away, the procedure is different. Students in this situation need to lodge an Honours Conversion form available from the faculty office. You can download the form here.
Before going to the faculty office, transfer students need to get the history department’s honours coordinator to approve and sign the form. Once the faculty office has the completed form, it will produce an enrolment form, which the students complete in February.
| Registration with the History Department |
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Students also need to register with the Department of History. Each student’s program of seminars and thesis topic must be approved by the honours coordinator, who will sign the student’s registration form. The completed form should be handed to the coordinator by 7 December 2009. It’s possible to change your seminar choices before March of the year in which you are doing Fourth Year Honours, but we do need an indication of what courses you’ll be taking and who your supervisor will be.
Download Registration Form
| Part-time and Mid-year Entry |
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Only in exceptional circumstances will the department allow mid-year entry to the honours program. Students who have the two seminars under their belts at the end of the March semester, and can bring that experience to bear on the four or five months they have to devote solely to the thesis, which is due at the beginning of October. Because all the fourth-year-only seminars are in the March semester, entering honours at mid-year would require a student to take one seminar open to fourth-years and postgraduates alike in the second semester, and begin work on the thesis in earnest; then, in the March semester, the student would take one seminar open only to fourth-years and complete the thesis, which would be due at some point in the March semester. Alternatively, the student could work on the thesis in the July semester, and then take both seminars in the March semester of the following year. A student who took either course would not get the benefit of working on the thesis full-time after completing (and learning from) the two seminars. More generally, a student entering the program mid-year would have an honours experience that is very different from that of other honours students in history. Taking honours on a part-time basis also raises problems. Students contemplating part-time study or mid-year entry should talk to the coordinator as early as possible.
The Fourth Year Honours Program
The fourth-year honours program in history consists of two seminars, which students take in the first semester, and a thesis of 15,000-20,000 words, which is due at the beginning of October.
Seminars for Honours Students in History
Each seminar requires approximately 5000 words of written work or its equivalent.
All these units are offered in first semester.
Place & Meaning in the Past
Dr Lyn Olson
Although traditionally associated with time, History can also be rewardingly approached through place, and place-oriented History has its own methodology. The places of which the historical meaning was investigated the last time the seminar was taught were: Great Zimbabwe, Mohenjodaro, Greater Angkor, Mausoleum of Augustus/Ara Pacis, Temple Mount/Dome of the Rock, Winchester Cathedral, the Great Wall of China, the ‘Mary Rose’ shipwreck, Delhi, a slaveholding household in Baltimore, Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse/Reichstag, the World Trade Center and houses in Sydney’s Rocks (field trip). Other suggestions are welcome. The seminar offers both geographical breadth and chronological depth to round out your historical experience.
Gender and History
Associate Professor Penny Russell
Gender has been entangled in all the recent twists and turns of history. Historians have argued about the place of women and men in history, the historical politics of gender and sexuality and the gendered politics of history writing itself. Their arguments have been enriched by – and have significantly contributed to – developments in cultural history and postcolonial studies as well as emergent interests in the body, citizenship and the emotions. This unit takes Australian feminist history as a case study, showing what it has owed, and what it has contributed, to international trends. It will benefit all students who wish to understand how and why the question of gender imbues historical interpretation, and especially those who seek to deploy its analytic frameworks within their own research.
Science, Race & History
Professor Warwick Anderson
This seminar surveys new and classic studies of racial thought and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on knowledge of human difference in Australasia, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia. We will examine the entanglements of racial thought with imperialism, decolonisation, and nationalism. Additionally, we explore the relations of science and other intellectual endeavours with whiteness, Aboriginality, and the ideals of modern citizenship. No previous knowledge of the history of science is assumed.
Southern Crossings
Dr Kirsten McKenzie (with Professor Nigel Worden, University of Cape Town)
This course explores colonial history and its political impact on the present. Our case studies are the Cape Colony and Australia in the period c.1750-1850, areas where the historiography has taken great strides in recent years. We examines some of the most innovative examples in order to familiarise students with debates in the field and new approaches to research. Topics emphasise transnational themes and will include: historiographical challenges to national histories; indigenous encounters; cartographic, textual and visual representations of landscape and its inhabitants; debates over the nature of convict and slave labour; violence, masculinity and honour; scandal and reputation; liberalism, humanitarianism and transnational lobbies; the History Wars and recent public debates over the past in South Africa and Australia. No prior knowledge of South African or Australian history is assumed or required.
Biography
Associate Professor Mark McKenna and Professor Peter Read
In this course we explore both the current theories and practitioners of biography. We ask: Who writes, and why? How close should a biographer be to the subject, in gender, age, interest and time. How have preferences changed historically as to what makes a good biography and what it should contain? Narrative or analysis? What are the relative merits of biographical methods practised in film, drama, dance and music? What kinds of sources do biographers draw upon? What are the merits of authorised as opposed to unauthorised biographers when writing about a contemporary subject. What degree of closeness to the subject is desirable? What is it like to be written about? What are the constraints? In the end - Is there a real personality to be written about at all, or does the subject only exist in a series of personas shown to different others? In the course of the semester we will meet some well-known biographers and maybe a biographee and try to unpack the biographical experience.
In the long essay, students will be free to study their own biographical interests.
The Sixties
Professor Ann Curthoys
This unit will focus on ‘the sixties’ as a period of radical change, or at least a period in which many sought radical change. Though the focus will be on Australian experience, we will consider it in a broad international context, paying attention for example to the American and British Sixties, and the processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia. Students will have an opportunity to engage with some of the now extensive historiography onf the Sixties, and consider the influence of postcolonial, transnational, social movement theory and cultural history approaches.
The course will focus on three closely inter-related themes: politics, race, and culture. Topics will be drawn from the following list, depending on student interest.
- Politics: The new left in Australia and worldwide; the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement; anti-nuclear peace movement; and environmental campaigns (anti uranium mining; anti-pollution, etc.)
- Race: American civil rights movement and its influence abroad; the end of the White Australia policy; Aboriginal politics and protest; and the anti-apartheid movement.
- Culture: Sixties music, television, film, novels, pop art, and fashion; the counter culture; sexuality and the emergence of campaigns for gay rights; changing gender relations and the emergence at the end of the decade of Women’s Liberation
The Thesis
The culmination of the honours year is a thesis of 15,000-20,000 words. The thesis is an original piece of work based on research in primary sources and a sound command of the existing scholarship. Students will do the bulk of work on the thesis in the second semester, after their seminars are over. But it’s important to make an early start, and not just for reasons of time management: having the project simmer away in the back of your mind as you concentrate on your seminars will enrich the thesis immeasurably. Moreover, having a good idea of what your thesis is about by the beginning of the March semester will enable you to connect what you learn in your two seminars to your thesis work. Many of these connections will be oblique, but no less powerful for that. To ensure that the thesis does not get altogether left until the July semester, students will have to submit a brief statement on their thesis topic, together with an outline of the primary and secondary sources available and read so far, to the history honours coordinator in the middle of the first semester. The coordinator will meet with each student individually to discuss this prospectus and the student’s progress so far.
Students work out a thesis topic in consultation with their supervisor, whose responsibility it is to ensure that the topic is manageable — both in its scope for completion in the time available and in the availability of appropriate materials in Australia. Every student will have a lecturer in the history department as their supervisor. The supervisor guides and advises the student as she or he undertakes research, helps the student refine the topic and the argument, and comments on drafts. Students and supervisors should meet regularly: every two to three weeks on average, more often at ‘crunch’ times, and also whenever problems crop up.
The thesis is initially marked by the supervisor and by one other academic. Both examiners write reports, which the student sees. All the theses are then reviewed by a committee chaired by the honours coordinator. This committee ensures that the thesis results are comparable across different fields, and adjudicates cases where the two reports diverge in their assessment of the thesis in question: the committee reviews the reports and the thesis, and sometimes commissions a further report. Every thesis in contention for a medal is read by the entire committee.
- Examples of Honours theses
This link takes you to the Sydney eScholarship Repository, where electronic copies of History honours theses will be available, beginning with those completed in 2006 - A list of past theses in the Department, available to borrow.
Thesis Supervision
Academic Staff Research Fields and Availability in 2010
Professor Robert Aldrich
Modern European and colonial history, especially France; gay history
Professor Warwick H. Anderson
history of science, medicine, and public health; and racial thought
Professor Alison Bashford
History of medicine, history and gender, late modern European and British history
On leave all year; unable to supervise theses
Dr Saliha Belmessous
Early modern French history; colonial history (French, European, Atlantic); history of race; European-Indigenous relations
Dr Emma Christopher
Atlantic history; transatlantic slave trade; convict transportation
Dr Frances Clarke
Nineteenth century United States history, women’s and gender history, memorialization of warfare
On leave semester one
Dr Clare Corbould
United States history, African American history, transnational history
On leave all year; unable to supervise theses
Dr James Curran
Australian political and diplomatic history
On leave semester two
Professor Helen Dunstan
Premodern Chinese history, economic thought and economic policy
Dr Nicholas Eckstein
Early Modern European history, late medieval and renaissance Italy, popular religion, urban history
On leave semester two
Associate Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice
Early Modern European history, intellectual history, colonization and expansion
Dr Kate Fullagar
British history; modern imperial history; early Atlantic history; Pacific history; cross-cultural history; visual cultures
Dr Chris Hilliard
Modern British history, history and literature, New Zealand history
Dr Julia Horne
Australian history, oral history, higher education
Associate Professor Judith Keene
Twentieth century European History, film and history
Professor Iain McCalman
Eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth British and European history; popular culture and low life; uses of media for history
Dr Cindy McCreery
Modern European History, British and Irish History, maritime history, visual representations
On leave all year; unable to supervise theses
Dr Michael McDonnell
History of the Atlantic World, Colonial and Revolutionary United States history, Native Americans
On leave semester two
Associate Professor Mark McKenna
Australian history, particularly political and cultural history and Aboriginal history; biography
Dr Kirsten McKenzie
Australian history, colonialism, gender history, comparative colonial history
Associate Professor Dirk Moses
Modern European history, German history, the Holocaust, comparative genocide
On leave semester two
Dr Lyn Olson
Medieval history, religious history
Dr Margaret Poulos
Modern Greek history; World War Two; post-war movements for democratisation
Professor Cassandra Pybus
Australian history; American history; Transatlantic history
Professor Peter Read
Aboriginal Australia; place; oral history
Associate Professor Stephen Robertson
Twentieth-century United States History, history of sexuality, legal history
On leave semester one
Associate Professor Penny Russell
Australian history, women’s history, gender history, colonialism and biography and autobiography
Professor Glenda Sluga
Modern European History, nationalism and gender history; international history
Dr Julie Ann Smith
Medieval history, religious history and women’s history
On leave semester two
Dr Jonathan Walker
Early modern Venice; spies; crime; historical fiction; photography and history; modernization
Professor Richard Waterhouse
Australian history, cultural history and rural history
Mr Richard White
Australian history; history of travel and tourism
Professor Shane White
United States history; African American history; the history of New York City
Professor John Wong
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese History, international relations and nationalism; Hong Kong
Academic Staff Research Fields and Availability in 2010
There is a single supervisor for a fourth-year student in the preparation of his or her Honours thesis, although students are encouraged to draw on the experience and expertise of other members of the department as appropriate. In exceptional circumstances, however, the Chair or the Honours Coordinator may authorize co-supervision. These cases would include, in particular, circumstances in which all of the specialists in a particular area of study are unavailable for part of the year. In such a situation, two members of staff would supervise a thesis, one in each semester. This arrangement must be agreeable to the student and the department. All students seeking co-supervision must complete a co-supervision application form.
Marking Scale for Fourth Year Honours
The department and the Faculty of Arts regard the honours year as a single, unified program. Consequently, while honours students receive marks on the assignments they write in their seminars, they receive only one overall grade for honours on their academic transcript. At the first semester, students will receive an ‘R’ mark (indicating satisfactory performance) on their academic record. Their final, overall honours mark will be for the Honours D course code.
The marking scale for honours is as follows:
Above 90%: Eligible for medal
80%-100%: First Class
75%-79%: Second Class, Division One
70%-74%: Second Class, Division Two
65%-69%: Third Class
64% and below: Honours not awarded
As you can see, honours coursework and theses are marked on a different scale from undergraduate work. Eighty percent, the threshold for first-class honours, is equivalent to a High Distinction at undergraduate level. A mark of 79 in fourth-year thus indicates a higher achievement than a 79 in a third-year course.
The following criteria for grades of award for the thesis may help to explain the raw marks above:
Honours First Class
[90+] Medal quality. Exceptional quality; outstanding academic promise; demonstrating independent thought throughout, a flair for the subject and research achievement of a kind that produces at least some element(s) of PhD or potentially publishable standard in serious academic fora.
[87-89] Excellent First class quality, showing a command of the field both broad and deep; independent intellectual argument and the presentation of original thought to a significant degree.
[83-86] Good first class quality with some evidence of intellectual independence and some originality of thought
[80-82] Clear but bare first class quality, comprising general soundness in subject area, breadth of knowledge in discipline, clear familiarity with and ability to use central methodology and theory of discipline, clear evidence of some independence of thought.
Honours Second Class, Division I
[75-79] Sound in subject area; average ability to use methodology and theory of discipline, evidence of careful and thorough discovery and use of appropriate sources; ability to present material clearly and succinctly with a well-thought out argument and to meet normal professional requirements.
Honours Second Class, Division II
[70-74] Adequate understanding of subject area and methodology; honest and straightforward research into sources and presentation of material; may lack one or more of the qualities expected in a higher award.
Honours Third Class
[65-69] Adequate overall, but with significant defects in several of the qualities expected in a higher award.
Late Work
Requests for extension of time for late work must be made in writing (email) to the honours coordinator at the earliest possible date and before the relevant submission dates. Extensions will be granted only for serious illness or misadventure. For theses, the bar for an extension is much higher than it is for undergraduate assessments. A thesis is a long-distance event, not a sprint, and an illness that prevents you from pulling all-nighters in the last week is highly unlikely to be grounds for an extension.
Late work should be handed in at the SOPHI office and may not be marked if submitted without an extension. A record will be kept of work which is late without extension and presented to the final history honours meeting, which will take notice of this in its final assessment and ranking of students.
Scholarships
The University of Sydney offers scholarships for Honours. These are awarded on the basis of academic merit and personal attributes such as leadership and creativity.
Students currently enrolled at the University of Sydney or other universities intending to undertake an additional Honours year at the University of Sydney are eligible to apply.
Application forms can be obtained from the Scholarships Unit, Mackie Building K01, University of Sydney NSW 2006.
Details
Contacts
Honours Coordinator
Dr Kirsten McKenzie
Room 815 Brennan Building
Phone: +61 2 9351 6668
The coordinator approves students’ entry into the program, maintains student records, liaises with supervisors and the staff teaching seminars, and chairs the committee that oversees the marking of theses. Students having any difficulties with the program at any time should see the coordinator.