School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies

Notes on Style for Essays, Dissertations and Year Abroad Project

Essays

Bibliography and References: MHRA System

BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography comes after the main text and must include all the materials you
refer to in the main text. That is, any item that appears in your references must
also appear in the bibliography, and vice versa. You may divide it up (e.g.
between secondary literature and primary sources – NOT between different kinds of
secondary literature, like books and articles).
The bibliography (or each sub-section of the bibliography) is a list (NOT numbered),
set out in alphabetical order by the last name of the authors of the works (or if there
is no author, by the title).
If there is more than one work by the same author, they are listed in alphabetical
order by the titles of the publications. Like this:
Alder, Ken, ‘A revolution to measure: the political economy of the metric system in
France’, in The Values of Precision, ed. by M. Norton Wise (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 39-71.
Brubaker, Rogers, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Brubaker, Rogers, Ethnicity without Groups, (Cambridge MA and London:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Brubaker, Rogers, ‘In the name of the nation: reflections on nationalism and
patriotism’, Citizenship Studies 8 (2004), 115 -127.
Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
Césaire, Aimé, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine,1955).

Books
Each entry in the list should include the author(s) or editor(s), title, place of
publication, publisher, date of publication, set out in the following ways.
Césaire, Aimé, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955).
Clarke, C.G. and T. Payne, eds, Politics, Security and Development in Small States
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).
Levi, Primo, Se questo è un uomo (Torino: Einaudi, 1968).
Ribeiro, B., O índio na cultura brasileira (Rio de Janeiro: UNIBRADE-UNESCO,
1987).
Rodgers, G., ed.. Urban Poverty and the Labour Market: Access to Jobs and
Incomes in Asian and Latin American Countries (Geneva: ILO, 1990).
Wenzel, Eike, Gedächtnisraum Film: die Arbeit an der deutschen Geschichte in
Filmen seit den 60er Jahren (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000).
Note:
· where there are two authors or editors, the second name is in the normal order:
given name / surname;
· in English-language book titles, all nouns, verbs and adjectives are capitalised;
· the place of publication is always a city; where there are two cities with the same
name (like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, England) you should
make clear which it is by including the state in the case of American or Australian
locations;
· book titles in foreign languages follow the capitalisation conventions of the
respective languages.

Articles in journals
Each entry should include the author, title, journal title, volume number, year,
part/issue number if needed, and page numbers, set out as follows:
Arrom, S., ‘Popular politics in Mexico City: the Parián riot, 1828', Hispanic American
Historical Review 68 (1988), 33-56.
Granata, Victoria, ‘Marché du livre, censure et litterature clandestine dans la France
de l’époque napoléonienne: les années 1810-1814’, Annales Historiques de la
Révolution Française 343 (2006), 123-145.
Veira Filho, D. (1978) ‘Os escravos e o código de posturas de São Luis', Revista
Maranhense de Cultura 2 (1978), 2, 33-56.
Note:
· in both foreign and English language journal titles, nouns and adjectives are
capitalised;
· the issue/part number of a journal volume may be omitted if the page numbering
is consecutive throughout the volume.

Articles in books (anthologies / collections of essays)

Each entry should include the author, title and editor(s) of the volume in which the
article appeared, page numbers, place of publication, publisher, date of publication,
set out as follows:
Alder, Ken, ‘A revolution to measure: the political economy of the metric system in
France’, in The Values of Precision, ed. by M. Norton Wise (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 39-71.
Kanbur, R. and J. McIntosh, ‘Dual economies', in Economic Development, ed. by J.
Eatwell, M. Millgate and P. Newman (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 311-342.
Note:
The bibliography entry is the ARTICLE, not the book. Each article should be cited by
its own author and title in both bibliography and references.
A single page number is indicated as ‘p.’ followed by a space; ‘pp.’ means pages.
Theses / Dissertations
Wally, T., 'Dual economies in Argentina: a study of Buenos Aires' (Unpublished
doctoral thesis, University of Liverpool, 1989).

Websites and on-line publications

Ordinarily, on-line publications with an author or title distinct from the name of the
website itself will appear in the appropriate place in the general alphabetical list. An
article in the on-line version of a print journal should be cited like any other article.
Otherwise:
Bacon, H.P., ‘The pig pen: frequently asked questions about Pig Latin’ <URL
http://www.hamnet.org/pigfaqs.html> [accessed 4 November 2005].
Everett, Dan, ‘On Nonobjects of Syntactic Study,’ Online posting. 10 July 2001.
LINGUIST list. 31 Aug. 2001 http://www.linguistlist.org/
issues/12/12-1785.html#1 [accessed 5 November 2005]
Ontoast, N., ‘Communication games for the public school pig Latin classroom’, E-
journal of PL Studies [on-line serial], 16 (1996). [accessed 10 November 2005]
If your reference is to a website rather than an item on a website (something which
should be relatively unusual), the name of the website, URL and date accessed
should appear in a separate listing at the end of the bibliography.

Interviews
These should be listed in a separate section after the main bibliography, e.g.
Interview, María Gonzalez, 27 March 2007.
If for ethical reasons it is necessary to maintain the interviewee’s anonymity, this can
be achieved through numbering your interviews, e.g.:
Interview #12, 29 July 2007.

REFERENCING

When and why to use references

When you are deciding whether you need a reference, follow the ‘conversational’
principle: Ask yourself what the reader needs to know. The reader is (or should be)
asking: ‘How do you know that?’ (or: ‘What makes you think that?’) and ‘How could I
know that?’ (or: ‘Why should I think that?’). You accordingly use references:
· to show the sources for data and arguments
o any direct quote (even if expressed indirectly or as a paraphrase); for each
sentence below, you need a reference, and in each chase the reference would
be to the same page in Miller’s book:
§ Miller comments on the ‘exceptional altruism’ of the XXX culture.
§ Miller notes that the XXX culture is exceptionally altruistic.
§ Miller says ‘The XXX culture is exceptionally altruistic.’
 o any evaluative or argumentative statement which originates with another writer
or writers; here, too, your reference would be to Miller, and maybe some other
writers who have also written about the XXX culture:
§ XXX is well known to be an altruistic culture.
o any statement of fact (item of data) which is not generally known:
§ ‘The world is round’ or ‘World War I began in 1914’ does NOT require a
reference.
The following do require references:
§ XXX families spend more annually entertaining their neighbours than
buying clothes for their families.
§ In 1925 one American family in four on average owned a car.
· to engage in ‘conversation’ with other writers, especially to indicate that you are
aware of other writers’ arguments that accord with or contradict yours. The
following sentence represents a judgement rather than a fact, and it’s a
judgement which is disputed among scholars; you would provide a reference
citing those authors who agree with the proposition, but it would be good practice
to indicate which authors disagree:
§ Isolated expressions of national feeling in early 19th-century Germany
cannot be described as ‘nationalism’.

Referencing form: Footnotes / endnotes

The standard form of reference in the MHRA system is footnotes or endnotes.
Footnotes are notes that appear at the foot of a page; endnotes appear in a list at the
end of the main text. You may use either – NOT both; they serve the same purpose.
In each case, the note is numbered and refers to a numbered reference in the main
text. Footnote/endnote references are superscript Arabic numbers (1, 2, etc.). They
are generally placed at the end of a sentence, after the punctuation mark.
Footnotes/endnotes are numbered consecutively through the text; there should be no
more than one note with the same numerical reference; do NOT restart numbering
on each new page.
For any source (book, article etc.) there are two kinds of note. The first time you
refer to an item, you provide full publication details as in the bibliography. Here you
must also provide the exact page(s) to which you are referring. Thus:
1
Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Torino: Einaudi, 1968), p. 56.
2
Ken Alder, ‘A revolution to measure: the political economy of the metric system in
France’, in The Values of Precision, ed. by M. Norton Wise (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995), pp. 39-71 (p. 46).
3
S. Arrom, ‘Popular politics in Mexico City: the Parián riot, 1828', Hispanic
American Historical Review 68 (1988), 33-56 (p. 35).
4
Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, (Cambridge MA and London:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 10-15.
5
Rogers Brubaker, ‘In the name of the nation: reflections on nationalism and
patriotism’, Citizenship Studies 8 (2004), 115 -127 (p. 123).
Note: This is almost identical to the bibliography entry, except that the author’s first
name and surname come in the ‘natural order’.
If you cite the same work again, you use a shortened form, as long as it is clear
which item in the bibliography you are referring to:
6
Levi, p. 97.
7
Arrom, p. 42.
8
Brubaker, Ethnicity, pp. 55f.
9
Brubaker, ‘In the name’, p. 120.
Note: ‘pp. 55f’ means pages 55 and 56 (i.e. the page immediately following)
If you have two or more references to the same item in immediate succession, you
should use Ibid. (= the same). All three of the notes below refer to Brubaker,
Ethnicity, where note 11 refers to the same page as note 10, and note 12 to the
same book but a different page:
10
Brubaker, Ethnicity, p. 76.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., p. 80
– but if you find yourself doing this often, you are probably not writing a very good
essay!

If, as may be the case in literary criticism, you make many references to a particular
work (e.g. a play or novel) within a few paragraphs of text, you may first use a
footnote/endnote and subsequently simply put the page number (or act and line
numbers), as long as it is perfectly clear to what you are referring.

Look at the sample pages below to see how it works:

 Sample Pages – MHRA System

Sample I (History)

‘Because the commune stood “all for one and one for all,”’ argues Claudia Ulbrich, ‘an
individual male had only minimal ability to act on his own . . . interests or those of his
household’ once the lines of confrontation were clearly drawn.7 Thus a person signed a
petition not as the expression of some individually bounded view on this issue or that, but as
a gesture of belonging to a community of goods responsible for the equitable distribution of
rights and obligations among its members. Together, such signatures embodied the village
commune, or Gemeinde. Given in this mode, signatures described a constraint on individual
intentions and actions, not an expression of personal interests or systems of belief.8
The signatures published in Emden were radically different. They put on display the results of
a mobilisation campaign that had reached deep into rural society, well beyond the narrow
circle of enfranchised housefather-farmers who normally dominated local politics and whose
signatures were taken to embody the communal will. In contrast to communalist signatures,
these were collected without heed to the constraints of franchise and were assembled on the
assumption that any adult male, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how well or poorly
integrated, could and should give his opinion freely on matters of the day. This postulate, in
turn, was allied to an assumption—rarely articulated explicitly but one without which the
declaration made no sense—that the sheer quantity of signatures was as likely to impress a
reader as their social quality. The signatures printed in Emden were gestures of belonging to
a community of opinion that had little or no direct tie to the communal nexus between
agricultural production, village society, and political entitlement. They were the personal
marks of atomised political actors. How should we account for this transition? It is a
commonplace of early modern historiography to hold the ever-consolidating state, with its
‘splendid, petty-minded, and pitiless system of notation,’ broadly accountable for the
formation of the modern individual.9 Through its meticulous visitations, monitoring and record

7
Claudia Ulbrich, Shulamit und Margarete: Macht, Geschlecht und Religion in einer ländlichen Gesellschaft des
18. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Schmidt, 1999), p. 132.
8
Blickle, ‘Kommunalismus’, p. 535. Within the village, of course, there were many settings in which an adult male
peasant could act on the basis of individual or household needs—as a housefather in relation to family and
dependents, as a member of the village commune—even in regions where communes possessed little
autonomous authority; see Liselott Enders, ‘Individuum und Gesellschaft: Bäuerliche Aktionsräume in der
frühneuzeitlichen Mark Brandenburg’, in Gutsherrschaft als soziales Modell: Vergleichende Betrachtungen zur
Funktionsweise fru¨hneuzeitlicher Agrargesellschaften, ed. by Jan Peters (Munich: Beck, 1995), pp. 155–178.
9
The phrase belongs to Valentin Groebner, ‘Describing the Person, Reading the Signs: Identity Papers, Vested
Figures, and the Limits of Identification, 1400–1600’, in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of
State Practices in the Modern World, ed. by Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), pp. 13–25.
 Sample II (Literary/Cultural studies)

We can see the immediate impact of the congress on Du Bois’s thinking in The Negro, his
first effort to expand his study of Negroes to encompass their African origins and history
since the completion of his dissertation. Published in 1915, this work drew on the lectures
and writings of many of the attendees at the URC.12 The optimism of the URC influenced Du
Bois’s analysis, and many of the ideas that would shape his early Pan-Africanism originated
in its proceedings. While a certain political conservatism adheres to The Negro, there is
much that is radical in terms of its ideas about race, thus showing a distinct movement away
from Du Bois’s earlier work. One of the work’s most radical aspects derived from Du Bois’s
attempt to shift the focus of African history away from empires and geographical landmarks
to (as the work’s title suggests) those who peopled the continent. Earlier accounts of Africa
had tended to be static, converting places of struggle and sites of contestation into exotic
wonders and cultural artefacts. Du Bois’s work was a social history of sorts, perhaps an early
ethnohistory. He cast his gaze firmly on people in Africa and the diaspora. He certainly noted
all the empires that waxed and waned, but he was most interested in the people as they
moved around the continent, migrants all.13
Indeed, though commentators have generally overlooked this, migration is of prime
importance to this volume, defining the different peoples in all the various sections of Africa.
We learn of the wandering herders on the Senegal River in early times, who then ‘changed to
a Negro or dark mulatto people and lived scattered in small communities between the
Atlantic and Darfur’ (60). We find out that in coastal West Africa, ‘movement and migration is
evident along this coast in ancient and modern times’ (63). Meanwhile, around the Great
Lakes, there was ‘endless movement and migration both in ancient and modern days’, which
makes the region ‘very difficult to understand’ (80). Also we learn that ‘the first clearly defined
movement of modern times,’ the migration of the Bantu from central to southern Africa,
began ‘at least a thousand years before Christ’ (80). And it is not just people who move.
Trade routes circulate ideas, customs, and commodities around the continent and beyond its
boundaries.14

12
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). All future references
to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text. Gustav Spiller, ed., Papers on Inter-racial Problems
Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911
(London: King, 1911).
13
Du Bois’s interest in migration echoed some of the participants’ at the Universal Races Congress. See, for
example, Felix von Luschan, ‘Anthropological View of Race’, in Spiller, Papers on Inter-racial Problems, p. 21.
14
It is this focus on migration (a major preoccupation of 1990s ethnic studies programs) that gives The Negro its
current feel and that also enables it to speak to so many areas of historical scholarship about Africa and the world
that have developed since. The current rage to internationalise American history, for example, clearly has long
roots, and one could hardly do better than to take The Negro as a guide for such an enterprise. See Robert
Gregg, ‘Making the World Safe for American History’, in Burton, After the Imperial Turn, pp. 170–85. See also
Shepperson, introduction, xv–xvi; and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(London: Verso, 1993).