find your perfect postgrad program
Search our Database of 30,000 Courses

Refine courses

The University of Edinburgh: Contemporary History

Institution The University of Edinburgh View institution profile
Department School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Web https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying
Study type Taught

Summary

The second half of the twentieth century was witness to many of the developments that have shaped our contemporary world, from the crystallisation of the Cold War to the decolonisations that swept across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. At the same time, new forms of communication and transportation infrastructure transformed daily life, if in highly uneven ways.

Drawing on archival documents, artefacts of material culture and audio-visual content, historians of the contemporary period enjoy access to a widened pool of primary sources to explore these themes critically and analytically. With staff expertise across a broad thematic and geographic coverage, you have a unique opportunity to understand the present through the recent past.

Breadth of expertise

Students benefit from the experience and methodologically different approaches to contemporary history of over 40 internationally recognised experts. To name just a few, our staff specialise in:

  • political history

  • cultural history

  • social history

  • economic history

  • military history

  • colonialism and post-colonialism

  • gender history

  • intellectual history

In addition, students will have the opportunity to take appropriate courses in other Schools, e.g. those of Social and Political Science and of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Our staff specialising in contemporary history jointly cover not only every imaginable disciplinary approach to history, but also almost every geographical region on the globe, including Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

We are therefore in a position to deliver a programme that emphasises the increasingly inter- and transnational, and indeed global experience of humankind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Students will be able to study this unique period of history within a range of diverse topics, including:

  • the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries

  • civil rights

  • decolonisation

  • human rights and social memory

  • cinema

  • crime

  • gender

  • ethnicity

  • class

  • the digital world

MSc

Edinburgh University

Edinburgh. Extraordinary futures await.

The University of Edinburgh is one of the world's top universities, consistently ranked in the world top 50, and placed 34th in the QS World University Rankings 2026.

Our position as one of Britain’s leading research universities was reaffirmed by the results of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). The University of Edinburgh is one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, ranked 4th in the UK for research power (Times Higher Education, Overall Ranking of Institutions), with 90% of our research activity classified as world leading or internationally excellent in the 2021 Research …

View Profile

Not what you are looking for?

Browse other courses in Humanities, History or Contemporary history, or search our comprehensive database of postgrad programs.

Postgraduate Bursary Opportunity with Postgrad.com

Are you studying as a PG student at the moment or have you recently been accepted on a postgraduate program? Apply now for one of our £2000 PGS bursaries.

Click here