https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/HISU5001?type=COREThe course is an exploration of several major themes and approaches in historiography chiefly in modern and contemporary times. Representing history as a branch of cognition directly relevant to the human condition, it highlights a number of influential and controversial ways of engaging with it. The focus is mostly on European traditions that have influenced writing about the past globally since the nineteenth century; however, these will be contrasted with other culturally and regionally specific historiographical traditions in order to highlight varieties of approaches to history. The topics will be of two kinds (which will alternate during the delivery of the course). Some of them address in an encompassing manner the stakes, traditions and forms of historical discourse, issues of methodology and philosophy of history. They will tackle the various purposes, political and cultural agendas, to which history has been instrumental over time (acknowledging that narrativity has always been a purpose of its own); and the ways in which its practitioners made efforts - these being themselves deeply context-dependent - to invest historical investigation with the aura of scientific objectivity. While "historical science" is generally held to be a product of modern times, associated with Historicism as a world view and positivism as a method, its concerns and approaches display some longue durée continuities which require consideration. These include the problem of causality, explanation, verification and interpretation; the question of time (including chronology, periodization, continuity, change and break); the problem of scale and significance (including the appropriate units of historical study and analysis).The other sessions will critically examine theoretical approaches and research methods that have been conceived and practiced in academic historiography from its inception in the nineteenth century until the present. Major historiographical schools and trends will be presented from three angles, first with their context-dependent characteristics, then in their disciplinary, scientific and systemic aspirations, and finally in their possible practical use for research in the historical field under present-day circumstances. The influential nineteenth-century schools of historicism and positivism, the development of the critical-philological method will receive some attention. We shall then consider the objections to historicism and the twentieth century turn towards the sociological, psychological and anthropological structuring of the historical field. The third part of the course will focus on the development of historiographical theory and practice over the past two generations, including the various "turns" (cultural, linguistic, spatial), and changes in the scope of historical interest (microhistory, gender history, global history).