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Member rate £492.50
Non-Member rate £985.00
Save £45 Loyalty discount applied automatically*
Save 5% on each additional course booked
*If you attended our Methods School in Summer/Winter 2024.
Monday 7 ꟷ Friday 11 February 2022
Minimum of 2 hours llive teaching per day
09:00 ꟷ 12:00 CET
VIR: This is a virtual course
This online course provides a highly interactive teaching and learning environment, using state of the art online pedagogical tools. It is designed for a demanding audience (researchers, professional analysts, advanced students) and capped at a maximum of 12 participants so that the Instructor can cater to the specific needs of each individual.
This course aims to give you an advanced understanding of the core elements of comparative historical analysis (CHA). It will guide you in exploring four methodological implications of studying macro-historical questions:
3 credits Engage fully with class activities
4 credits Complete a post-class assignment
Markus Kreuzer is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. He has worked on the origins of European and post-communist party systems, qualitative methodology and comparative historical analysis.
He teaches a module on comparative historical analysis at the yearly Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research hosted by Syracuse University. Markus is the author of various articles, and the following books:
These are tumultuous times, yet again. A failed insurrection in the world's oldest democracy, a pandemic disrupting global supply chains, ascending China altering global geopolitical dynamics, and global warming challenging everything.
What makes our present so challenging is its transformative and hence historical nature. Whatever historical engine propels the world forward and sideways also transforms research agendas.
Scholars consequently ignore history at their peril and those who do only get results without ever producing genuine answers. This course provides guidance to scholars looking to CHA for methodological advice.
CHA is an umbrella term for a wide range of tools and techniques that scholars have long used to explore a wide range of macro-historical phenomena. Analysing such phenomena poses a distinct set of challenges for standard, more variance-based methodologies, which assume a static and ahistorical world. Those assumptions make it difficult to analyse phenomena like revolutions, waves of democratisation or democratic backsliding, economic crisis, wars, collapse of empires, or, more recently, pandemics.
Analysing such phenomena requires placing time at the centre of analysis to properly understand the temporal dynamics of such changes as well as the qualitative / historical changes they produce. Consequently, this course aims to cover four distinct elements of CHA:
The course employs a flipped classroom pedagogy. Each of the five daily modules will involve four to five 10-minute pre-recorded lectures (e.g. for a daily total of no more than 60 minutes) as well as a set of readings. The lectures and readings will provide background information for the two daily hour-long discussion-based, synchronous seminars.
The recorded lectures and seminars will be linked together by:
These exercises will be carried out during seminar sessions, when we will also discuss the readings and the lecture material.
If you are already doing (at least) dissertation level research on macro-historical questions, you will be able to use your own projects in lieu of the in-class exercises.
No formal prerequisites. You are unlikely to have had any formal training in CHA because its methodological tools are generally used in an implicit manner.
You will benefit most from this course if you have an interest in history, social or political change, or broad curiosity around the forces transforming our societies. Or, you might be familiar with one or more of the following literatures: