Thesis Design: Themes in History of International Relations

Course goals

The aim of this course is to enable you:

• to develop a design for their own historical research project at an advanced level;
• to develop a research question embedded in the academic debate;
• to operationalize that question, and to identify relevant methods, cases and sources as well as techniques to analyze these sources.

Content

The course Thesis Design: Themes in the History of International Relations in bloc 2 of the master’s program is explicitly designed to prepare for the thesis. Students will be divided in small groups, each of which will focus on a specific theme. Each theme is broad enough to cover a variety of research interests among students. In October, students will be asked to indicate their preferences. Subsequently, they will be assigned to one of the groups. Supervised by the lecturer they will delve into the literature about the theme of your group, write a research proposal and also write the introduction of the thesis. The lecturer of the Thesis Design course will also be the thesis supervisor.