 Welcome to all of you. It's a great pleasure to be able to find you. I just see you as a string of names. But if you don't mind, you can just switch yourselves on and I'll see you as well as a group. But otherwise we just communicate as we can. After all, this is Zoom. This is something that is as close as you can get. To a conversation between the International Space Station and Earth. So this is the planet, so as which is welcoming you. And we have a number of topics to talk through today. But I mean, the concrete things which you may or may not be interested in. But importantly, I'm going to tell you what we can offer you here at SOAS. And this is of course a... I don't know whether... Can you see the large version or the small version? The version with the... Which only has a sign or I mean the picture or also the margin here. Which one do you see? You're meant to see the large one. Maybe I need to do it differently. Yeah. Nope. I close it and then I open it again. So it's the... Take over here. We are technologically so advanced. We are masters of this art. Try again. Okay. So this is going to take us to a screen. Which you can see in large and you don't want to see. Okay. So now you should be able to see the screen as a large... In large version and you can see this fantastically crafted welcome sign which my colleague Roy official has... Who's the convener of the BA program here at SOAS in history. And whose details you can see down here. So you can see the name and also the email address. And the email address has its initials and a number. Because we like numbering things here at SOAS. As a student you will only get the number. That's very nice as well. So we want to not persuade you to study history at SOAS. But we'll just explain to you what studying history is like. At a college which is quite unique. This uniqueness already on the welcome page. Because for a university, for a college, part of London University which is almost exclusively focused on Asia and Africa. There is really no equipment anywhere in neither in Britain nor in... Well in Europe you have two or three places which are quite similar. In the wider world you have a few faculties which do something similar. But it's a relatively small circle of colleges which fulfill this function. We have a history which goes back to the time when this bronze was probably either stolen or bought too cheaply and ended up in museums where they were then admired by the colonial populations of the colonial motherlands in Britain or France or Belgium or the Netherlands. So you have a link with the colonial past and SOAS which is quite important because it is actually... I mean talking about decolonisation. SOAS is the place where the colonial administrators for the British Empire were being trained in the languages, in the cultural background, in the histories of the places which they were meant to administer on behalf of her pre-canic majesty. And this takes you to Africa. It takes you to China where the colonisation projects did not really work but in neighbouring areas well through the treaty port system in a way. In neighbouring areas definitely. South Asian continent has a number of places where the colonial era left direct imprint but this one actually takes you to another empire which existed before the Mughal empire. So there are a whole range of areas which were being taught at SOAS as a colonial institution and which are being taught now as a very decolonised institution and the decolonising exercise is something that we... Since I joined SOAS have been taking very seriously because the essential difference between us and most other universities teaching India for example is that we place the emphasis on the indigenous agency. So we look at the populations, at the states, the empires that existed independently of the British Empire. If you study India at any of our other colleges you will usually do it through the prism of the occupying of the colonising force and use their literature, use their impressions and get a picture which is altogether very different. So this is what we take pride in and it is not out of ideological reasons because really out of professional ones and academic reasonings and this puts the emphasis on indigenous languages, languages that are spoken by the indigenous populations of the places that we teach. Here at SOAS that mainly means Asia in all its different expressions. You see the Middle East, South Asia, Eastern Asia, Eastern Asia. Do we also teach the languages of the Russian Far East? A little bit. We teach a bit of Tungusik in the shape of Manchu so that is also there in Mongolia. So if you study about Mongolia you also know something about the south of Russia, the Russian Federation. So in that sense. But importantly we also include all of Africa so that's all the parts of Africa that you could subdivide the continent into and the interregional space. So for example the, what you can call, it's often called misnomed as the Islamic world but the world that had contacts from the very beginning of civilizations, Egyptian civilization, the Indus Valley, Oxos, the Fertile Crescent, all of that is interconnected from the very beginnings. Do we teach the very beginnings? Well we used to teach them for the time being a bit weak on them but they are always there, they're always in our mind and the important thing is that you need to realize as a historian that everything is interconnected or everything is local history and people are not aware of the wider world but still through trade, through conquest as well, through migration you get a degree of assimilation which is there from the very first evidence that exists of civilizations and that take us actually into the sphere of archeology. Do we teach Europe? Usually we say no but we do because Europe is enmeshed into the histories of Africa and Asia and again the very, very beginning and the more you study Europe you actually realize, especially Europe's early history is that it's very marginal, it's a non-entity, it's something that also develops but at a much slower pace and differently from the high civilizations that we teach here so the Indian civilizations Eastern Asian ones, China and Africa, the West African kingdoms outshone what you could get in Europe easily and the first major exception is the Roman Empire but the Roman Empire also passes and then what you get afterwards is fragmented and it's not very influential in any way but we do teach it, for example in the context of the Crusades and Crusades are of course a very controversial period in time and the reason why this is is because they are often read against the background of the present and we have a fixation on certain spaces, certain places let's call it the Holy Land and the center of the Holy Land is Jerusalem and Jerusalem is very much the center of Christian Europe, both Catholic and the Orthodox halves and it's also the center of the beginning Islamic world and of course for Judaism it is the center there's no other center than the center so you have these overlapping of the same space and we're trying to get this across in our teaching and whatever combination you end up with, if you study if you're particularly interested in the Middle East say and you're studying development studies you're studying Israeli studies, you're studying you can study any of the languages that has been spoken there with history then this plurality comes through again and again the same goes for the development of Islam in Middle East in the areas where it established itself as the predominant religious and social order and the function in history courses would always be how is that connected to the reorganization of social life what is the road between majorities and minorities how do rulers how do the dynasties which are built on certain religious principles how do they actually get across the fact that they are the rulers of a plurality plurality doesn't come out of my mouth plurality of populations how do they rule over multiple populations multiple better this is one of the phenomena that we can follow again and again through history and the Mughal empire Roy can tell you much more about that you have Hindus you have Muslims, you have an expanding Muslim population you also have other religious groups and they are under the same rule and at the same time they begin to extend into areas where they were never at home for example into the center of southern Russia now a majority religion China far away this is a bit of hearsay but the second oldest mosque in the world why because there were trade connections that had established an Arabic speaking population in cities of southern China from there that Islam spreads almost simultaneously with the Middle East so many things that you think you know you have to unlearn in order to learn them this is no more so than for Central Asia of course in Central Asia you have a variety of systems which are government systems which are either described as tribal usually in the colonial literature or as established states and think of the kingdom of Afghanistan and of course you have a king, yes but there are also other entities and these entities are very well established and they're very well ruled and the only reason that why you could call them as the tribe is because there are certain principles which govern them which link the families together in a stronger way than state institutions do and this is one of the things that we study and we study them from the bottom up so from using archives of course translations of primary sources that come from this time we get a much better understanding a much more nuanced understanding of the way that populations relate to each other and that different classes and groups within these populations do the same so and this is true for civilizations at any level of development and if you believe in different levels of development then you can say from the primitive stage up to the most civilized stage but of course I would like you to empty your head and to think again just what does it mean to be civilized and so on so this is an example from Hanoi this is not how people in Hanoi live but it's an open air museum which has a long house from a Hwong area if you're a little bit at home in Southeast Asia you will know that apart from the big dominating dominant populations you have like the Han or the king the Chinese and the Vietnamese you get many many minorities together actually make the majority but they are fragmented and this is one of these minorities this is another minority dressed up in drag in very colorful clothes a shaman and it's a modern day shaman so these are probably receptors for his mobile phone but it's this is a shamanic dance that has been enacted in a skiing resort but it's a very timely reminder that the north eastern Asian civilizations that they also go back to somebody else in the past and we have here a this is a colonial era but actually pre-colonial it's a western document which comes from the time before any Europeans had established themselves in eastern Asia except for the Dutch because the Dutch are there always for anybody else and they are further down here in the southeast in Sumatra and Java and then also they extend over the spice items but the important thing is that we have this map of Japan, Korea and China which actually and for Mosa so in other words China, Taiwan during a time when it is not yet really part of the province of Fujian and you get this idea that this is all very closely connected and here you think of Podel who writes about the Mediterranean as a sea that connects so in other words not a sea that separates but a sea that forms a bridge and this bridge is made of water and all the people here in Nagasaki who communicate very closely with their counterparts, merchants in the south of Korea who then communicate with the areas in Chandong that you get developed as part of the Chinese empire, you can see how closely this is related. Earlier on I showed you a Manchu, this is a Manchu script here, this is the gate of the great Qing, so this is from Shenyang, Shenyang the second capital of the Qing empire. Did you know that it had two capitals, most people don't it's the significance of this is that the Manchus had a certain role to play namely that of providing the dynasty but this did not mean that they were occupiers who colonized China or through China other people so this is again something you have to unlearn. Now you have Xinjiang in the news, fantastic session yesterday with my MA class about the Galdan campaigns you know, there is so much there is simplification and there is of course truth in everything but the whole story about how the Qing empire formed its borders is much more complicated than comes out in Wikipedia pages so we try to give you the view from different angles and then especially from the original documents that you find from the time both in this case in Qing languages and Qing sources Chinese Mongolian Manchu we translate them and then of course also later you would use Wiga in Arabic script you can have that here and then also the Europeans count yes Americans even that even Americans count but Europeans count yes because they send visitors they send travelers they send consoles and these people create their own their own records and we put them side by side with the ones that we encounter again takes us to Africa we have accounts about China and Africa and vice versa so we have a number of really interesting accounts that I have sitting here on my bookshelf from early journeys from East Asia into Africa and with depictions of giraffes and so on so this is a something that you certainly can study here if you're interested and how you study these things Myanmar Rohingya just read this morning that there was plenty of traffic Burma and India refugees actually not Rohingyas in this case they were people of the minority crossing over this is something that you can learn here so as Africa from every angle especially from the angle of communities that have that are multilingual because they are minorities within areas that are governed or dominated by other groups so this is it shows you this is Congo in all its expression and they publish in languages as well so if you have a reason to study here so as when I'm at the point now where I'm going to hand over to Roy in a second do come here if you have an interest in finding out the histories of the populations in their original languages and also in their original interpretations namely that of the states that they form and the archives that they collect and if it's oral history if it's non-written languages that can also be explored so be imaginative we will help you with that if you're a slightly older student I'm very happy here so as because we have a high proportion of mature students again if you're not from England or if your parents are not from England you feel like a fish in water and then also the library which is the last thing that I'll refer to it's one of the most complete collections of non-Western origins so China, Africa Asia, Africa and quite a number of languages that you wouldn't expect here we have them and we have them because this is one of the libraries that receive a grant from the British government have been receiving a grant for ever in order to keep a complete collection over the world for the British Empire later for the spies who have been trained here at SOAS and in the Cold War and today for you who are going to be studying here at SOAS because you are the future and you deserve the best and we will give you the best both in our library and in our teaching and Roy will tell you now how we teach here at SOAS Thank you Larsh and I'll ask you when to change slides for me please so after the very exciting presentation of Larsh we'll have to get a little bit more to the boring bit of structure of programs although quite important I would say less inspired maybe though although before that I just want a quick addition to something that Larsh said about the Chinese depiction of giraffes interestingly enough we have from late 15th century a temple in South India with giraffes engraved on it it's not a temple it's actually a performative platform so it's something aimed at display to the people and this is part of those kind of trance Indian Ocean links that connected East Africa with India with Southeast Asia and later in China so how are we going to approach this massive part of the world that we are covering we are covering about 80% 75% of the human race this is our emphasis and not as the periphery and this is one of the things that make us so unique I'm going to present briefly the BA history as a single subject and later I'll make a few comments about BA history as a joint degree with another program we have a few quite a few students on each track so I'm going to introduce them and I'm going to introduce them for you to have a basic idea so our idea here is to introduce you into first of all history as a discipline as a method and a way to investigate the past it can be a remote past it can be very recent and it can be a way of analysis and then of argumentation and in that sense history is really a terrific degree to him it helps you develop these kind of aspects which are not only great for you for your future as people but also more particularly for the job market for example and that's one of the interesting connections that we have we have with people and they say afterwards that the skills that they learned in history especially around evidence argumentation presenting their ideas in a very clear way came in handy so we are going to cover this kind of methodological aspects of the discipline in addition we will give you tools that are being broader global context either by putting them in actual global history or in addition in the following years also by presenting themes that you can apply to different parts of the world and then the focus that you choose from a selection of modules about regions you want to look at with I think the best strategy is always to take different modules from the covering different regions of the world because the approaches the ways that questions were asked and discussed was significantly different in different parts of the world and to give this a huge variety of approaches only helps you to understand your own intellectual skills as people so according to those three main objectives of the degree we have constructed the three years the first year you will have two core modules in term one approaching history that both large and myself are teaching this year in which we exactly start thinking about as a discipline and how different it is from anything that you may have learned at A levels or in whatever school setting that you have so taking away from the list of dynasties and something very rigid in terms of the way that you articulate the answers to allow you develop your own flexible approach and to understand the depth and the complexity of this wonderful wonderful discipline of course I will say it's wonderful because I chose to do this for my life my livelihood hopefully until retirement but I do think that we can agree generally speaking that history is very interesting I guess that otherwise you wouldn't have been here with us today the second term of the same core aspect we are looking at the question of colonial historiography in relation to so as as an institution so taking so as a case study we look at the way that history is related to the environment in which it is written so we are looking at so as an institution that started as training civil servants for colonial purposes and changed tremendously since it was the first institution that actually taught seriously African languages in the west it was one of the first places in which the non theological approach to languages like Arabic or Hebrew was a what was practiced so we have our own complex history as a very interesting tool to start thinking about how history has been written and how much it represents the presence the various presence in which history was written and not only the past so this covers this kind of methodological aspect in addition you will learn world histories which is a very so as version of global history very much in continuation of what Lars presented earlier it's trying to understand the world not as a product of European kind of project of thinking but a much more complex system in which Asian and African societies and civilization played a huge role and then the Europeans arrived at one point and even when the European arrived it's not as if it was the British to become European dominated realms in which Africa and Asia are completely mute not at all so for us if we look at the British Empire it's the empire as was perceived not only in the government offices in Whitehall in London but also the way it was experienced in places like Clegos or Cape Town or Bombay or even in places that were not directly ruled by the British Empire like let's say Shanghai right so we have our own take of global history in which Europe is considered but in its right place as kind of the less fashionable parts of Eurasia very damn very I mean I'm looking outside the window now and seeing this grey cloud not the most fun part of Eurasia I have to say then you can select from regional introductions so we will look at the list of modules say in a bit then you have the option to take other regional introductions open options from another module sorry from another program if you are interested or and we highly recommend one of the wonderful selection of languages so as from Chinese or Arabic or Japanese to Yoruba or Zulu so we have a really unique selection of languages. Second year we have the same logic behind it but it's slightly different you will continue with historical research and the methodological aspect to which will be attached a first attempt of yours to create a research project not a very small one but not yet fully independent in terms of the global perspectives here we will focus on themes thematic modules we will see the list in a second and then more region or more specific focus module and then you can continue with the language or open option or other modules from our program the third year you will see the list as your core which is an interesting combination there is a lot of focusing on particular cases but again as part of training for you to write your independent research and this is I think the crowning the jewel in the crown of your degrees writing your own dissertation and independent study the results that we have seen in previous years are remarkable really our students write such wonderfully original and in depth studies of the program and then you have a few more modules to choose from Lars will you please so another way to look at it is broken the first year in particular broken to the core which is the more methodological the world the way with we look at global approaches and then the regional options that you can see I think that we have a list later so please continue Lars and be a history and is of course half of the aspect that you need to more or less half in history and half in the other program it's a bit more flexible when it is relevant we can discuss it more which includes the core modules because you'll have to deal with the discipline and then you can look at either the global original introduction the methodological a historical research in second year again to continue with the disciplinary aspects and then the methodological aspect and then both thematic and regional focus and you'll have to take the special approach to the core but then you have the option whether to write a dissertation with us or not Lars please continue another way to present exactly the same a table for the first year so the core and that yeah and continue Lars so this is the selection of regional introductions that you have this is we cannot guarantee what is going to be a run next year yet but by and large it gives you a good idea of what is on offer here so term one you can choose from the introduction to history of Africa the Confucian world which is a early history of Eastern Southeast Asia and the introduction of the early history of the Middle East the second term we have the history of the middle world so it's Middle East in the modern world again you see that we are doing it in a very sourced way of not only looking at the region but to understand how the work functions in a global context then we have the option of the history of South Asia which is my own field and the introduction of the history to the history of modern East and Southeast Asia which is taught by Lars this year right can you continue for the second year we talked about the historical research methods and the project attached to it and then the thematic and the regional modules Lars please continue here is a good example of what we are teaching again we cannot promise at this point that all of them will run when you are students but it has to give you a taste of what kind of modules some of them run in alternating years so my own modules which is the state and society in Mughal India and empire and globalization in the early modern Muslim world run one each year so if you are really interested in that you can catch theoretically if this continues the pattern one of them in your second year or in your third year the same with colonialism and culture in modern South Asia and nationalism and identity in South Asia so there are separate modules that run in alternating years so I mentioned the thematic modules for now we define those four as important themes that might interest you its cities, frontiers gender and violence again is categories of historical investigation that manifested themselves in different ways in different context so it's giving you the tools to take those ideas and implement them on the parts of the world that you are interested in and the regional modules you see great selection modern South Asia empire reform in the modern Middle East the really 20th century Middle East we have a couple of Asia, Mao's China and from courtesan and suffragists women in Chinese history and we have the Africa modules Atlantic slavery and the Muslim societies in Africa hopefully to be revived soon but cannot promise that so this is the kind of things that we select from now you can continue large the third year as I said you write one dissertation if you are single subject if you are joint degree you can write a dissertation in history but not necessarily so it depends if you will write dissertation if you choose to it depends on the program you're in I cannot cover all programs but you are most welcome to write dissertation with us in history if you are interested in and you will have to take one of the special subjects that combine specific themes but with a methodological issues and help you develop your research skills and those currently include the partition of the Indian subcontinent and the late Ottoman Empire South African apartheid and Larsh's own opium and empires please continue and just very very quick reference that we have very interesting resources here we have the history blog I really recommend you to take a look it's wonderful wonderful all run by students welcome to write for that as students it's a really good platform to experiment in writing for audiences so it's terrific we have our own library including tutorials you will be introduced to it as part of the course but also you are most welcome to take one of their tours and the handbook and degree regulations if you are really curious about the technicalities at this stage and the last bit we are in London not only London we are very much in central London which means that you have unparalleled resources as students it's just unbelievable the richness of it within walking distance we have the best libraries probably we have the best library collection in the world so we have the British Library the second largest collection of all libraries in the world after the Library of Congress I think which is the American equivalent for the British Library it is about 13 minutes walk from SOAS as students you can get easily access to their collections you have access to collections of all other University of London colleges you can go to LSE if you need London School of Economics if you need for some study more European centered resources that we happen not to have at SOAS you can go to Senate House Library which is literally three minutes from SOAS or to our neighbouring colleges like UCL we have museums and we have everything because London in that sense is amazing I think that I'll finish here and I guess it's now it's time for questions from the audience to Lars or to myself thank you oh and yeah if you go back to the beginning slide if you have questions you are most welcome to email me as the programme convener if you have a conversation you are interested in this is my email address rf26 at SOAS any questions that you may ask or you can use the chat box Daniel? yeah I'm a student ambassador this is just to everyone but if you have any questions about SOAS I can help you with that I'm a second year student doing history and international relations so any questions and Daniel I saw your name I wondered what you were doing it looked a bit too familiar that's actually another thing that is worth mentioning is that we are a smaller programme than Daniel or Queen Mary and there is one advantage that many students don't think about it and Daniel I really hope that you feel the same about that that we are very accessible yeah definitely yeah we talk to our students we encourage our students to talk to us and not to teaching assistants but to us the full academic staff we are trying to develop this kind of relationship that I think that it's wonderful for us for sure I think that it's pretty good for students you never feel that you are alone or at least you have so many ways to make sure that you are not alone in this in your degree you have quite a lot of support from us yeah Lars will you take Ubyte's question yes I can't see any questions oh yeah in the chat box so Ubyte is asking what are the entry requirements if I share this then it's I can't oh actually one second maybe I can oh yes yes yes yes do you do any year abroad what are the entry requirements for history entry requirements well it depends on the depends on the year what the entry requirements are but at the moment it's quite high so you may level terms AAB so that's the but there's some flexibility so but we have a almost a higher expectation from you in terms of preparedness to show that you're interested in in the world world of history in this case that does not mean that you actually have to have studied history at college so it's at university at school yes at school we have many students who for example I did the straw poll at the beginning of our introductory course H101 and how many of you have studied history roughly half so that's not a requirement so if you're not studying history now you can still join us as students and then what we would like you to do is to consider studying you know an interest in languages always helps when it comes to selecting students and if you have a language that you not necessarily have in your school reports for example because your parents speak Bengali at home or an African language then by all means mention that in your in the covering letter that we get because that is something that will make us you know look again at your application okay shall I continue with the following questions so do you do any year abroad the history program at this moment and I emphasizing in this moment does not have a year abroad except for a few people can apply to Erasmus programs but we don't know where it stands after Brexit yet but first of all and I had a conversation in the previous the in-person open day about that with some of my colleagues and we are now working on enabling it so we cannot promise that it is going to happen but we hope that it will be introduced at the same time if you are doing a joint program with one of the languages then you do have a year abroad so we do have year abroad for the languages so people who do let's say it's kind of popular these days is to do Korean Korean became extremely popular even before the squid games I suspect that it's K-pop the popularity of K-pop generally speaking popular culture from Korean that encourage many people to learn this language which is always a wonderful reason I think and then it's a four degree program with a year in Korea international relations is one of the most popular combinations so it's a very well well-trodden path let's say and there is a system for that I think that it's a good combination history and IR is very good because it really gives this depth to your IR interest the program itself IR itself will not have just to add on I'm doing an international relation a lot of the content international relations intertwines with content from history so for example in the first year we look at global history trends and themes throughout history and so a lot of it interlinks and it's quite enjoyable great thanks you Daniel that's the experience of student is always way more valuable than ours because we can imagine what we are giving but it might be received in a different that's a very important lesson for history for generally speaking dealing with history is that we look at sources we assume that what is written there is how the source was received but those are completely different things how many hours a week is timetable as Marlin for non-language degrees is eight hours a week usually if you add language usually it's many more hours because languages tend to occupy more hours exactly because of the particular kind of practice in it but generally speaking a module is two hours contacts a week plus all the work that you need to do there you see a very big shift in the way that you do the way that school is constructed and university is constructed and the source thing that's a university thing is that there is much more emphasis on how you will learn on your own so we give you tools but this work is not us feeding you but we help you develop your skills to do it to to to study yourselves Lars will you continue with the bytes maybe yes so this is okay the official entry requirements they will be fine tuned always when it comes close to admissions and I mean the UCAS procedure when admissions decide who will get an offer it sometimes happens and there's discussions in that direction certainly going on at the moment that the general the official entry requirements will be lowered but I can't promise anything and I can't see anything actually in the correspondence that I've received and the post that I've participated in that this would be happening soon so we need to see where we are and also also in the worst case if you don't get the grade that you're out for you that you can reapply you just go through the clearing process and then you can write my grades were lower than expected but I'm very keen and I have lived for five years in western Africa and I would like to pursue this we are not robots so we do let people in if the grades are not a hundred percent there so again we have to see we will need to wrap up in like a couple of minutes so let's get the following questions very quickly just to add to large about requirement those with certain backgrounds fall into what we call widening participation and their requirements from them slightly different so this is another way that it's another thing that is worth examining this option so let's hold interviews for history for entry no a dissertation and I don't know if a dissertation is required in history if it is you can choose whether it's IR or history if it is not required in IR you can choose to do a dissertation in history or not do a dissertation at all it's your choice here and combination of history of Japanese yeah it is a four year degree with one year abroad so you do two years that saw us according to our year one and two a year abroad and then the final year is so it's fourth year of your Japanese but third year of history so there is a very clear path there I guess that we do need to finish here so thank you very much all of you and thank you Amani for a further information and questions please see the last message from Amani in the chat and you are most welcome also to contact me directly for anything related to history in particular I just want to say thank you to Lars and to Roy for hosting this session like I said if you do have any admissions questions you can contact study at SAAS or if you have any history specific questions you can contact Roy and yeah just want to thank you all for joining us today thank you very much bye bye