Module overview
Whether "living out" or "sitting in", Southampton students have been making their own history since the university was founded in 1862. In this module we will be bringing the stories of the young women and men who attended the University of Southampton to life, using a range of source materials that have never been looked at by historians before. Every week you will take part in a handling session at Hartley Library's Special Collections Department, working with original photograph albums, scrapbooks, letters and newspapers produced by Southampton students, from 1862 to today. Every week we will also be visiting buildings on and around campus, looking for traces left by earlier generations of students. What can the university's halls of residence, Student Union and other buildings tell us about changing ideas of the university? How have students' expectations of university changed over time? Have they come to Southampton hoping to "get ahead" in the world - or change it? To uncover these stories we will need to draw connections between our students' experiences and more familiar stories - of class and gender, war and protest. This module will be of particular interest to anyone interested in possibly working in the heritage or museum sector, as part of the course will involve hands-on experience of making original sources accessible to non-specialist audiences, as well as thinking about what buildings and spaces are worth preserving.
Linked modules
This module was already vetted and approved by SASEG on 10 October 2019. Covid prevented it from running in 2020.