Asian and International History

Overview

The programme

The core course during your first year at NUS will introduce you to a wide range of contemporary historical methods, focusing on major historians, current debates about historical practice, theoretical history and historical interpretation. This will be complemented by a choice of electives covering modern Southeast Asian, Singapore, modern East Asia, China, America and modern Europe as well as imperialism and empire, the Cold War, military history, cultural history, and oral history.

During your second year at the LSE you will be able to choose from a wide selection of International History courses ranging from the Ottoman Empire to twentieth-century Southeast Asia. Thematically, courses cover everything from war and peace to the history of race and gender. While you will have the option to study European, North American, South American, and African History, this degree allows you to centre your studies on Asian history in all its rich variety. These Asian history courses can be further complemented by specialist options on Asia from the Departments of Economic History, Government, Anthropology, and Geography.

You will engage at an advanced level with the latest academic research in the field, and undertake your own research-based term papers and third term dissertation. The dissertation is one of the highlights of this degree, through which you pursue specialist research on a subject with an Asian focus.

Careers

Through an MA Asian and International History degree at London School of Economics and Political Science, students develop highly transferable skills that are valued by employers and can be used and put in practice in numerous roles and sectors, and listed below:

• research skills and different research methods, intellectual rigour and independence,

• ability to select and organise information, critical reasoning and analytical skills, including the capacity for solving problems and thinking creatively

• communication skills including writing skills and presentation skills, the ability to construct an argument and communicate findings in a clear and persuasive manner

• ability to discuss ideas in groups, and to negotiate, question and summarise

• capacity to think objectively and approach problems and new situations with an open mind

• manage large quantities of information, different expert options