Honours in the Department of History

Download History Honours guide for 2009

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.

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.

Pre-enrolment with the Faculty of Arts

Students need to pre-enrol for honours at the Faculty of Arts office, not the Departmment 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 fulfil 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

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 2 December 2008. 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

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 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.

Each seminar requires approximately 5000 words of written work or its equivalent.

All these units are offered in first semester.

From Social History to Cultural History
Professor Richard Waterhouse

The new social history emerged in the late sixties and early seventies, inspired by Annales, the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population, the New Labour History and (least of all) by the emerging discipline of Historical Archaeology. This seminar will begin with an examination of these four ‘disciplines’. It will then explore the characteristics and achievements of the new social history through a series of case studies of key texts, drawn mostly from United States’ historiography. Finally, the seminar will explore the emergence of the new cultural history, inspired in part by ethnography as well as cultural studies, a form of history which challenged the basic principles which the new social history had valorised. Once again, the syllabus will include case studies, this time drawn from the Birmingham and Melbourne ‘Schools’ as well as examples from the ‘second wave’ of New Labour History.

Gender and History
Dr Penny Russell

What ever happened to women’s history? Was it quashed by gender studies – spun out by the linguistic turn – or undermined by postcolonialism? Or did it simply achieve its goals, and effectively integrate gender as an analytic category into all historical fields? This unit traces developments in gender historiography since the 1970s, as a revolutionary discourse and an established discipline. It takes Australian feminist history as a case study, showing what it has owed, and what it has contributed, to international trends.

Civilising Subjects
Dr. Michael McDonnell

This seminar will explore some of the implications, the possibilities, but also the limits inherent in the double entendre, “Civilising Subjects”. We’ll take as our field of analysis the early origins of European imperialism - the creation of the “Atlantic World” in the early modern period - when Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans first began to create a notion of an “other” to be civilized. Ultimately, our goal will be to explore the multi-faceted ways in which indigenous or “subaltern” peoples around the Atlantic basin confronted, challenged, and ultimately shaped the contours of empire in the early modern period, but also the very nature of contemporary understandings of “civilisation”.

Worlds of Medieval Women
Dr Julie Smith

Takes as its focus both women’s communities and the spatial relationships and physical places that characterised women’s experience in the Central-Later Middle Ages. The spatial and communal limits of women’s lives were constructed within physical boundaries such as home, village, nunnery, or brothel. Women’s ability to negotiate appropriate and safe action both within and outside these spaces was construed and constrained by class, religious, and other cultural rules and representations.

American Freakery
Dr Frances Clarke

Most scholars agree that the origins of modernity can be found in the Victorian era. Where historiography of the period once drew a straight line from repression to enlightenment, however, recent scholarship concentrating on the varied strands of nineteenth-century popular culture offers far more complex readings of the period. This unit analyses cultural histories that deal with the strange side of nineteenth-century life – from phrenology to spiritualism – in order to reassess Victorianism and, in turn, the basis of modernity.

Historical Fictions
Dr Jonathan Walker

What is the difference between historiography and historical fiction, and does it matter? In this course, we shall study both historical novels and films – that is, dramatizations of events that occurred in earlier periods to that of their creation, and which do not claim to be literally true. By judging such historical fictions on their own terms rather than simply grading them according to which facts they get right (or wrong), we can think of ways in which the relationship between historians, novelists and filmmakers could be collaborative and productive rather than antagonistic.

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.

Academic Staff Research Fields and Availability in 2009

Professor Robert Aldrich
Modern European and colonial history, especially France; gay history

Professor Warwick H. Anderson
History of tropical medicine and international health; medical history and anthropology; biomedical sciences and racial thought; disease ecology

Associate 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

Dr Clare Corbould
United States history, African American history, transnational history

Dr James Curran
Australian political and diplomatic history

Dr Nicholas Eckstein
Early Modern European history, late medieval and renaissance Italy, popular religion, urban history

Dr Andrew Fitzmaurice
Early Modern European history, intellectual history, colonization and expansion
On leave in semester one; unable to supervise theses

Dr Kate Fullagar
British history; modern imperial history; early Atlantic history; Pacific history; cross-cultural history; visual cultures

Professor Stephen Garton
Australian history, history of psychiatry and mental illness, eugenics, crime and punishment
Professor Garton is the Dean of Arts and will be able to supervise one or two honours theses at most

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

Dr Michael McDonnell
History of the Atlantic World, Colonial and Revolutionary United States history, Native Americans

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

Dr Dirk Moses
Modern European history, German history, the Holocaust, comparative genocide

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

Dr Stephen Robertson
Twentieth-century United States History, history of sexuality, legal history

Associate Professor Penny Russell
Australian history, women’s history, gender history, colonialism and biography and autobiography
On leave in semester two; unable to supervise theses

Associate Professor Glenda Sluga
Modern European History, nationalism and gender history; international history
On leave in semester two; unable to supervise theses

Dr Julie Ann Smith
Medieval history, religious history and women’s history

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
On leave in semester two; unable to supervise theses

Professor Shane White
United States history; African American history; the history of New York City

Dr John Wong
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese History, international relations and nationalism; Hong Kong

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.

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.

The University of Sydney is offering Honours Scholarships in 2009, valued at $56,000. The Arts Faculty will be awarding some of its Honours Scholarships on the basis of academic merit, and some on the basis of equity and merit.

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

The closing date for applications is December 19, 2008.

Honours Coordinator

Dr Clare Corbould

Room 851 Brennan Building
Phone: 9036-9662

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.