 mobile. Hello, everyone. My name is Jayda Khadam-Nursad. I'm a lecturer in modern Middle Eastern history in the department, the Department of History, and also the convener for the MA History program, as well as the MA History and Intensive Language Program here at SOAS. And I welcome you all. I have a very small group, but I'm really delighted to see you. This virtual information session, you can see in the background, this is my bookshelf in my office, but I'm not there at the moment. So it's an all-round virtual session, I think, for everyone. Okay. So we have campus representation. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, if you feel like, do type in where you're joining from, the city that you're in, it would be nice to see that flow on the side. So I mean, what I have in mind today, what I plan to do today is to, well, briefly to introduce you to SOAS, to say a few things about what we do here in the department and also in the program, and also at SOAS in general. And what we do differently, which is also an important thing that might be interesting for you to hear. So after that, I will talk a little bit about more detailed information on the program itself and the structure and module options, some of which are fairly new. So they're not reflected on the website yet. And I will point those things out. And overall, I will try to provide you a glimpse of what it is like to study history at the postgraduate level here at SOAS with my presentation. And after the presentation, I will have, I think, ample amount of time to go over your questions about the program, about SOAS, so on and so forth. But that said, I mean, if you have any specific questions as I go along, please feel free to just type in the question. If I notice it, as I continue with my presentation, I can just stop and respond. But in the worst case scenario, I will just go back and read your questions and go over them in the Q&A session. But before I move on to my presentation, we have with us today two of my department colleagues, Lars Laman and Mike Charney, who would also like to say hi to you. So maybe we can go over to you with your introductions and then I can continue with my presentation. Lars, would you like to go first? Okay. Well, welcome to SOAS. My name is Lars Laman. I've been here at SOAS for some time and I specialize in East Asian, especially Chinese and Central Asian, especially Mongolian Manchu studies. And the history that you'll be learning with me is very much, it interacts with the with the neighboring areas. I tend to concentrate on my own research on medicine and popular religion and find that there are many interfaces that also apply to neighboring areas and that have been taught here at SOAS. That's it for the time being. Excellent. Mike? Hi, I'm Mike Charney. I teach a little widely. I'm interested in Southeast Asia and West Africa, but I tend to handle Asia as a whole. Some of the thematic areas I teach are violence and urban history, but also military histories because technically I'm a military historian, but I would say it's more along the lines of warfare and conflict. I'm particularly interested in decolonizing history now. In addition to being a historian for my work, I also engage in a lot of politics involving the non-Western world in my daily life, particularly with the Riga, Myanmar, and politics in Southeast Asia. Great. Excellent. Thank you very much. I can say a few things about my own research as well since we have time. As I said, I am a lecturer in modern Middle Eastern history with the focus on the Ottoman Empire. I work largely on slavery and ideas and practices of freedom, how it was understood and practiced and sometimes abused by the Ottoman state and Ottoman public in general. So, I mean, like that said, I guess I can just move on to my brief presentation. And for that, let me share my screen quickly and let me... Okay. Can everyone see my shared screen? The presentation all right? Okay. Excellent. Okay. So, just really briefly a historical overview of SOAS and the history department. SOAS, as you may already know, going through the website perhaps, SOAS was founded in 1916, this is a rather historic moment in itself in the middle of the First World War. It was referred to as the Great War back then. It was founded as a graduate level teaching and especially research institution. Its original name was School of Oriental Studies, SOAS, not SOAS at the beginning. And the A, Africa, was added to its title about two decades later in 1935. So, initially, it was primarily to train the colonial officers, the British Empire. That was its initial primary aim at the time. But that aim was rather quickly dismantled by SOAS scholars themselves within within a couple decades. So, SOAS historians particularly began to emphasize as early as 1950s, the importance of studying the history of Asian and African countries from their own perspective in their own terms and not through the framework of imperial history, imperial learning. So, this is something that still very much shapes how we do things at SOAS at the department specifically. And it is in this context that SOAS history and SOAS historians have been pioneers in its quest to look at and focus on different parts of the world from their own perspective. So, I mean, this is also, as I said, this continues to shape what we do here at SOAS. And it's also what makes us unique and special as a history department too. SOAS is the only history department in Britain. And it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say this in the world too, with the exception, of course, of the higher education institutions in these respective regions that teaches history from the perspective of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Meaning that in many other history departments in the UK or in the US, you would have the majority of academic staff focusing on European history, British history, American history, Atlantic history best, and you would have a smaller group of academics working on the other parts of the world. I mean, in our case, it's quite the contrary. We all deal with European or global history in our own ways, but the centre is always placed in the regions that we work on. And accordingly, the department has the highest concentration of specialists working in these regions. And SOAS's research facilities match and correspond with that concentration as well. You can see in the background here, SOAS's library is one of the words leading academic libraries for the study of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. And when you think about this in combination with the surrounding libraries, we have most notably the Senate House Library, right next building from SOAS, which is the central library of University of London, SOAS students can use freely, which covers pretty much everything that SOAS doesn't cover. I mean, that's its function in that way. And also, we have the British Library, which is 10 minutes away, walking distance, which again can be used freely by general public. So in that sense, SOAS is in every way a research powerhouse with the facility, research facilities that it offers. That SOAS was founded as a graduate level institution, constitutes, again, to shape who we are, what we do, not only at the school level, but also at the programme level. Unlike many other institutions in the UK, SOAS started with the other institutions that started with undergraduate teaching, and then added graduate level programmes. Postgraduate study is and has always been at the centre of all teaching here at SOAS and continues to be so, to this day. Currently, there are more than 100 programmes across the school, and even more than that, I think about 200, so in degree combinations across the school, you can bring these degrees together. These give you the opportunity, these programmes, give you the opportunity to study a subject in greater depth, but also combining rigorous training in history, historical methods at the same time. And I'll talk about this in a few minutes, but this is done specifically through our compulsory module within the programme, debating paths and crafting histories, it's a year-long seminar that provides this rigorous training in history that I just mentioned. But besides that, these programmes and programme combinations also allow you, allow students to bring together other things, most notably languages, which again, SOAS has been historically famous for in the part of the early training, was to provide language training specifically at the institution. These languages can be studied as part of a degree like MA history and intensive languages in support and connection with your coursework. But you can also study languages as part of your selective, elective course courses or open option courses along with your taught modules. You can also bring together interdisciplinary and inter-regional expertise. And I'll talk a little bit about this when I talk about the module options and programme structure in a few minutes. So what makes SOAS a special place is also its emphasis in engaging with larger issues in the world today. And this this applies to history department as well as SOAS as a whole in other departments too. SOAS scholars including SOAS historians work on a wide range of pressing issues, displacement, poverty, inequalities, environment, race, among many other things. And so for us, which is really important to underline perhaps, history is not something that happened and neatly ended in the past, but something that is continuing and continues to shape the world that we live in today. And this is something again that we like to emphasise when it comes to understanding what's special, what's important with the programme and SOAS in general. So in accordance with this, I mean in accordance with this effort to engage with the present day and pressing issues in our world today. Our graduates, to say just one little thing about it, our graduates move on to PhD programmes here in the UK, the US or elsewhere in the world to pursue academic careers, but also my sense is increasingly so to a variety of governmental and intergovernmental organisations as well as NGOs to pursue careers in policy related areas as well. And that's something that history allows you to do, just equips you with that kind of resource skills and other kind of transferable skills with that as they're called. So in that sense, any research focus, research intensive area, not only in academia but also in those institutions that I just mentioned, history would be a good field to get that kind of training to pursue later on. So this is a very concise introduction or background for SOAS and for the programmes that we offer. And let me now move on to more specifically about the programmes themselves and take a closer look at what we expect you to do, what you can expect from these programmes. So there are currently, you may know this already from the website, there are currently two MA programmes that we offer in the department and the first of these is the MA history programme. And when undertaken in full-time mode, MA history programme is a one-year programme that consists of 180 credits and let me go back. And 120 of these 180 credits are taught courses and 60 credits would be your dissertation that you write at the end of the year. We have a course that is a compulsory module debating paths that I just actually mentioned a few minutes ago, which is the methodology seminar. And it serves as a year-long seminar, meets two to three hours per week, and in many ways serves as the main hub for the MA history cohort. It didn't work that way, unfortunately, last year and it's meeting partly on campus this year, so it is gradually resuming that function, but it really brings together the entire cohort where you exchange ideas and experiences, so on and so forth, which you need as you conduct research and start, especially start writing your dissertation. So that's the function of the core module, compulsory module debating paths and crafting histories. So that would be part of the taught modules and in addition to the debating paths, the compulsory module, you will have to complete another 90 credits, which you can choose from a list of modules offered by the history department or other departments from across the school. And I mentioned that some of these modules, some of these options are fairly new and not reflected on the website and this is more of a full list that you will be able to choose from. On the left hand side, you have a list A, meaning that these modules are offered by the history department itself and several of them you can see on the race and slavery in the Middle East and Africa, formations of the colonial in the Middle East, are new modules that will be added to the program structure on the website shortly. It's also module descriptions and other details that you can find online. On the right hand side, you can see list B. These are modules offered by other departments, but of strictly historical nature. So they can complement your study of history at here and so on. So the full list is a bit longer than this. This is what I could fit in in one page, but as I said, everything will be up to date in the coming weeks. So you'll have a chance to go through the course descriptions, as well as the up to date program structure as well. Apart from these list A and B modules, here you can see the composition of these credits, required credits, which is up to date on the program website, by the way. You can go to the program website and check at the very bottom of the structure, check the program grid and you'll get that composition in detail as a separate file that that bit is up to date. Apart from list A and B modules that you can choose from, you have what are called open option modules and these are modules offered by other departments that are not necessarily historical in nature. Basically, includes all MA level courses offered throughout the school and the list is very long, but I have put here, just chosen and added here a few of these modules just to give you an idea what you can bring in to your studies. You can see from politics and development studies, arts, music, media studies, law and practically all other departments have those options on offer you can choose from and you are free to choose up to two modules that you can combine with your history modules as you study here and those open option modules can also be language modules. Again, it's a wide variety of languages that you can choose from here and so on. And let me quickly move. Speaking of languages, this brings me to the second program, MA program that we offer, the space, the history department and that's history and intensive language program. Again, a similar list of requirements you can see on the screen. It's credit-wide, it's the same structure as the MA history program added intensive language units, which is about, I think, 135 credits. It's a two-year program. The first year you would have, again, similar to the MA history program, have debating past crafting histories for 30 credits and regional thematic courses and then you'd have another 60 credits of the language study, intensive language study, and so on. The languages on offer had to be limited in the past two years due to COVID-related restrictions. We had Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Swahili, if I'm not mistaken, Persian and Turkish, and there may be an expansion of the languages that are offered in the coming year. These will be updated as we go along and please do not hesitate to just drop me an email, checking with me about the status of the language that you're interested in if it's not on the list that you see on the website. And I'd be happy to discuss the, provide information, but also discuss with you the options. The MA history and intensive program has a summer abroad language study component where you normally go abroad to an affiliated institution to do intensive, continued intensive language study over the summer, and then you come back, continue with another 30 credits of language study, then complete the regional thematic courses, history, or open option modules in the second year and write the dissertation and complete the degree. This is what the structure looks like. Again, this is up to date on the program website. You can just follow the links to the program grid at the bottom of the structure page and check out the credit requirements for completion of the program here. And just to say, and I've been mentioning the dissertation for both of these programs that we offer in passing, but let me say a few things about it as well, mainly because it is the most important component in every way for both of these programs. It's worth 60 credits to begin with, that's 25% of your overall mark that you graduate with, but also it takes up a significant amount of your time and energy in terms of conducting research, in terms of writing throughout your time, during your time here at SOAS. In that sense, it's the centerpiece of both of these programs. That said, it requires a lot of time and energy during your time here, but it's also the most enjoyable and most rewarding element within both of these programs. This is an opportunity for you to conduct your own research on a topic that you're interested, you care about, and also write history yourself and make a genuine contribution to our historical knowledge, as many of our students actually do. Some of them, as I said, continue with academic work and others continue with, again, research-related areas, but they do take away from their dissertation the kind of research that they conduct, carry out for the entire year, and writing and managing that kind of project as well. I mean, it's really the end goal of the program in general, but very intellectually rewarding and enriching exercise in every way. I will just stop here. Thank you very much for your attention. I guess we can just move from here to your questions about the program, about my presentation, about any other detail that you can think of. And let me, sorry, move on here. On the screen, you can see my name and my email address as well. Please feel free to drop me a line if you think of anything that you forgot to mention. In this meeting, it also is anything that comes up later on as well. Any questions? You can please feel free to type your questions in the chat box, but also you can just turn in your microphone and talk as well. Hello. Hello, Sangyukta. Hi, Sita. Just a quick question. You showed us the list of modules, and you said they are more up to date. So they will be in the website sometimes. Do you know when they will be on the website? I did take a screen wrap, sorry, but just wanted to know. Yeah, I mean, I'm not entirely sure. I know that a team is working on it. There are substantial changes to the website too. That's one of the reasons that there is a delay in updating this information, but I expect it will be done in the next few weeks or so, or maybe a month. But as I said, the work that they're undertaking is a bit more substantial than usual, so that's the reason to the delay. But I'd be happy to send you, I mean, if anyone is interested in you, Sangyukta, as well, you just send me an email and I'd be happy to share with you the up to date list of modules. Oh, thank you. Let me see, there is. Shruti has a question? Yeah, Shruti asked, I wanted to know about the admission criteria for the course graduates course in history. Do we have to give an entrance? When you say do we have to give an entrance, do you mean an exam? Okay, there is no exam as such. There is a minimum grade average requirement, which is, I think second, I would say 50s or so. But I mean, you can you can check the main history program page and then saw us pages for conversion. I mean, that may not indicate anything that may not look like anything from when compared to the grading structures and criteria in your own institution. But you can convert it easily through using charts and I'd be happy to provide that information too. So as a short answer to your question, there are set criterias, but there aren't any exams or of any sort for that. And even entry requirements, there's quite a bit of flexibility there. If you have a project, and if you if you tell us about it in your statement letter, and if you're enthusiastic about it, you can always review, revise that criteria too. There's a flexibility there and not so much, but there's some flexibility there. Absolutely. I don't know. I mean, Mike Larsh, do you have anything to add? I always have things to add, but it's the beauty of the MA program, of course, is the is that you are, oh, I guess you can just see the truth. Yes, something else. A specific grade is required from graduation. Yes, that's true. That's the and the the grade is set with PhD application. Okay. Let me just finish my line of thought before I get back to the PhDs, because that that's of course another area that's of great interest. So the beauty of the MA program is the breadth, because you have, you can really go to any region in the world and then also go beyond the actual thematic range of that MA and explore. And you have a dissertation that you write, and in this dissertation, you can follow your own interests. So if you're interested in your, say, your own community, you can do that, you can write on that, but building on the the more general background that you have accumulated during your course, if you want to do something inter regional, trans regional, then you can also do that. It's a bit more ambitious, but it's definitely something that you could do. For example, the connections between India and China. That's one thing that I often, not often, but sometimes very successfully actually bring to a conclusion and the dissertations are really amazing. The other thing I wanted to say is actually ties in with the question about the PhD. It is a, we're dealing with thought courses, but we also want you to experience the what Jada referred to as the, you know, the opportunities that the so as library gives, namely that we have an archive and this archive is something that you will find is second only to the British library probably, and the collections in Q. So it's very, you have a great range of items that are either related to the the missionary archives that you find and you don't, they're not just dealing with Christian mission topics that you know, you find out a lot about hospitals, the early hospitals in India, early hospitals in Africa or in East Asia, that the that the missionaries built as part of their project. And the same trade, the same about diplomatic complications that arise. So this is a very important stepping stone if you're interested in academic research as a career. Great. Thank you very much, Lars. I mean, and thank you, Laura, too, for that information that you had put on the chat box. So sure, in that, to sum up, I mean, you don't really need an exam, but you will have to obtain a certain average and colleagues in the admissions division can help you with the details with the conversions as well. And to go back to Sonam's question about the PhD application. And thank you very much, Mike, for for putting that information in the chat box. I mean, absolutely. To repeat what Mike says here, you can write, I mean, I would recommend that you write get in touch with your potential supervisors at the PhD level. You work really closely with your supervisor. And it's good to be on the same page with them before you place your application to so it's it's always good to get in touch before before applying to the program. And tell them what your project is about what your interests are, what your technical capabilities are also, I mean, by that I mean specifically language, the knowledge of the language for that you will use for your research. So yeah, absolutely. Just you can drop your potential supervisors online and and and ask their opinion or just introduce yourself. Sonam continues with good. What kind of references do you require for PhD application? Do both need an academic or can one be professional? If it really depends, I would say mostly academic, but if let's say you have a background in a certain topic, would say in in development studies, working on developing certain projects in the field. And if you have someone that would write that academic letter for you with the testing to your practical capabilities, I think that would also be an important asset. So it depends who will write for you, but anything that supports your project, what you aim to do in the in the PhD program would be a good support of of your application. Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, the second question, second part of your question, Mike answers this. Absolutely. I mean, that's, that's I mean, not a problem or criteria at all. Often, actually, it works quite the contrary. I mean, the true students come in with a very clear idea of what they want to do. That can be really advantageous in every way. So, so yeah, that's that is that is not a criteria anyway. Just to add to what everybody's already said, if you go onto our website and onto our PhD pages and scroll to the very, very bottom, we have a whole section dedicated to references that just reiterates everything that's been said today and can guide you through that part and some of the general criteria that we have in terms of PhD references. I popped a little link in the chat, but all you need to do is scroll to the very, very bottom. And then we have tabs that just go through each stage of the process because it can be a little bit different from our masters. Excellent. Thank you, Laura. I think if there's no more questions, unfortunately, we might have to wrap up because the final session of the OpenD is about to start at one o'clock. Just to repeat, here you can see on the screen my email address. Please feel free to drop me a line if any other questions you can think of later on as as we go along. OK, thank you all for joining in. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Laura.