Programme Profile

This master’s degree programme is the only programme on Historical Geography in the German-speaking world. It offers you the opportunity to develop your own academic profile in the field of historical geography and therefore acquire the necessary skills for an academic career or the various specific requirements of non-university professions. This programme is characterised by four key thematic focus areas:

• The foundation of this programme is a sound education in the discipline’s most important theories and concepts with a particular focus on the international development trajectories of historical geography. Current academic debates are addressed in the context of historical environmental research, the history of land use and cultural landscapes, or the politics of planning and settlement in rural regions. Approaches from the fields of research on landscape names, spatial perception and memory spaces, regionalisation and territorialisation processes or from the disciplinary history of historical geography are discussed.
• An important focus is placed on teaching advanced skills for dealing with the fundamental sources and methodologies of historical geography. Students practice handling maps, visual sources, material sources and tangible heritage, as well as archival records. Moreover, links are drawn to the field of digital humanities and geographic information systems that can be used to analyse historical-geographical sources.
• Theoretical and methodological competencies are strengthened in connection with key current research topics from the international field of historical geography. In this regard, students engage at an advanced level with significant terms from the fields of human and physical geography within their respective historical dimensions, such as environment, landscape, sustainability, memory, identity, nation, region, periphery or borders. The focus is primarily on the guided independent design of a research project in order to directly apply the fundamental skills acquired to practical research.
• An emphasis is placed on students’ academic education having close links to practice. As well as applying the fundamentals of historical geography as part of their own research project and in field trips and fieldwork exercises, students are required to complete an eight-week internship. 

The University of Bamberg stands out for being a university of ‘small disciplines’. According to the Mainzer Arbeitsstelle Kleine Fächer (the Mainz Office of Small Disciplines), small disciplines are those that have no more than three permanent professorships at any one German university, but that do have their own specialist society and at least one specialist journal. In Germany, the specialist society is the Working Committee for Historical Cultural Landscape Research in Central Europe and specialist journals are present both in the German-speaking world with the Siedlungsforschung journal and internationally with the Journal of Historical Geography in particular. 

Historical Geography belongs to these small disciplines. This fact has two significant advantages: in the context of the master’s degree programme in Historical Geography, it creates a personal study atmosphere with small seminars and in-depth guidance from teaching staff. In addition, it also obliges us to constantly network in an interdisciplinary way with other subjects and to stay connected in the context of international research discussions. Both factors allow students to establish individual focus areas at a high academic level as part of their studies by enabling them to purposefully form their own profile at the intersection of various disciplines within the humanities.

Our students can establish temporal, thematic, methodological and regional focus areas and therefore benefit from close links to other disciplines at the University of Bamberg as part of the distribution elective component.

• Temporal focus areas can be established in the early modern period, in the long nineteenth century, in the period of National Socialism, or in contemporary history since 1945.
• Thematic focus areas are particularly possible in the field of historical environmental research, geographical consumer research, cultural landscape research, the political geography of rural structural politics or geographical commemorative research. 
• Methodological focus areas can be established in the fields of geographic information systems, digital humanities or digital cartography.
• Regional focus areas can be established in Eastern Central Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic and Hungary, in Italy, in the United States of America or in Japan, alongside Germany.

As part of the master’s degree programme, you come into contact at many points with external institutes that provide you with insights into potential professional fields.

• Generally, cooperations take place as part of the two-semester research seminar that is conducted together with libraries, museums and archives, individuals from the political sector or administration, civil society initiatives, non-profit organisations or associations according to its thematic focus.
• There is close collaboration between the Professorship for Historical Geography and the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography) in Leipzig, in particular with its ‘Historical Geographies’ research area. A fieldwork exercise is regularly offered together with Bamberg’s Honorary Professor for Historical Geography, Prof. Dr. Haik Thomas Porada, who also conducts research at the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde.  
• We have close personal links to important archives, museums and libraries where graduates of the Historical Geography programme are in high demand due to the skills they have acquired in their master’s studies. Over the past years, graduates have chosen to start their careers in the Deutsches Landwirtschaftsmuseum (the German Agricultural Museum), the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (the Bavarian State Library) or the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (Central State Archive in Stuttgart), for example. Regular contact between our students and graduates is made possible due to involvement in the Historische Geographie Bamberg e.V. society, which also serves as an official geographical society in Bamberg.
• The Working Committee for Historical Cultural Landscape Research in Central Europe (ARKUM) also presents an outstanding network for students. This committee has been a central network for historical cultural landscape research for many decades, with members from Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Russia. As a working committee at the intersection of archaeology, history and geography, it provides a joint platform for the transdisciplinary subject matters of historical geography. It also brings together countless experts from the field of applied cultural landscape research and therefore gives students good networking opportunities for internships and for starting their career.

In Germany, historical geography is traditionally located at the interdisciplinary intersection of geography, history and archaeology. The University of Bamberg is almost unique in Germany in the exceptional opportunities it offers to gain insights into these disciplines as part of the distribution elective component.

In the distribution elective component, you complete full modules worth at least 30 ECTS. According to your individual focus areas, courses from the following master’s degree programmes in particular are strongly recommended:

• Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology
• History

The distribution elective component is also an excellent opportunity to gain new foreign language skills or to improve your existing foreign language skills. You can find more information on languages offered at the University of Bamberg on the Language Centre’s webpages. This component can also be used for studying abroad. You can find information on this topic under Studying abroad. In addition, courses offered by the Virtuelle Hochschule Bayern (vhb) may also be an option.

Our subject advisory service is happy to help you plan the distribution elective component in a way that best suits you.