PhD in History

Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern History

The group is currently working on a wide range of research projects including: a history of the Bedouin and their role in the Islamisation of the medieval Near East; the nature of crusading violence; the history of Italian universities to 1500; the cultural history of the Virgin Mary; black Africans in Renaissance Europe; the secret political history of Britain c.1558-1688; the English clergy and the Hundred Years War; relations between the army and civilian society in England and Ireland under George I; the history of the smile in Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Terror in the French Revolution.

Modern and Contemporary History The modern and contemporary group are currently engaged in a large number of projects in the fields of American, British, European history and political thought including: urban transformation and radical struggle in Detroit and Turin, 1947-1980; a comparison of attitudes towards capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century; transnational television history, comparing how television reacted to social change in 1960s and 1970s England, Germany and the United States; the Russian civil war; the history of the Kremlin; John Kennedy; Hollywood and the Americanisation of Britain, analysing British responses to American films from the 1920s to the present; conceptions of scientific theory in America since 1900; Victorian moral thought; Edmund Burke; British political thought on the nation, nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, 1820-1930; and Britain in the Sixties.

History of Intellectual and Political Thought The History of Intellectual and Political Thought group is engaged in a wide range of projects, including work on problems of empire and democracy, problems of conquest and ideas of equality, the Enlightenment, political philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, and British political thought on nationalism, patriotism, cosmopolitanism and international relations.