Topics in History

This advanced undergraduate course enables students to study a range of exciting and important historical topics in collaboration with specialists in the field. The topics will vary from year to year, depending on the expertise of the convenor. The structure and assessment of the course may vary from topic to topic. In each iteration the course will enable students to develop their knowledge and research skills by working with experts. Students will have an opportunity to develop a research project of their own, with guidance and support. Please refer to the Class tab for details of the specific topic available each year, and the Class Summary for a detailed description including convenor, theme, format, scheduling, detailed assessment structure, and indicative readings. Sample topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: - The History of Capitalism - The History of Humanitarianism - Gender and History - The Death Penalty and its Alternatives in History Topic for Semester Two, 2026: Intimate Empire: Bodies, Race & Colonialism in the British Colonial World What does empire feel like from the inside? Not from the vantage point of generals or governors, but in the home, the hospital, the bedroom, and the courtroom – in the daily regulation of who could live with whom, what bodies meant, and who got to decide. Intimate Empire examines British colonialism as a project of intimate governance: the control of gender, sexuality, race, and reproduction as tools of imperial power. Drawing on two of the British Empire’s most formative colonial experiments – India and Australia – the course asks how the same imperial system produced radically different but deeply connected colonial societies. Students will trace how colonial administrators used medicine, law, and domestic ideology to regulate colonised bodies; how colonial subjects and settlers navigated, resisted, and transformed those regimes; and how racial categories came to be articulated across the two British colonial jurisdictions, and influenced policies on spatial, segregation, inheritance, whiteness, protection, and the removal of children, amongst others. Case studies will include the Contagious Diseases Act, age of consent laws in India, The Devadasi System, ‘social purity’ in the suffrage and temperance movements, anxieties about bodies in hot climates and Europeans ‘going native’, and the policies and practices of Australia’s Stolen Generations. Drawing on the diverse historical scholarship alongside primary sources from colonial archives, the course develops sophisticated skills in comparative and transnational historical analysis. The course draws on a range of historical methodologies, including gender history, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and transnational history, and introduces students to the practice of reading colonial archives ‘against the grain’. It asks students to see Australian history not as exceptional or isolated, but as one expression of a global imperial formation whose legacies remain urgently present. All students will come prepared having done the weekly readings, which individual students will take the lead in presenting during the weekly seminar. The major piece of assessment is a research essay of 2,500 words on a topic agreed with the conveners, and for which a plan will be submitted for review and assessment during Week 7.