Past PhD students
Explore completed research projects of graduates in History.
Thesis: Practicing orthodoxy: community celebrations and Chinese religious professionals in the age of Russian Orthodox expansion in China (1900-1917)
Supervisors:
Almost half of the small Chinese Orthodox Christian community were killed by the Boxer Movement in June 1900. In the aftermath of the Uprising, Russian diplomats and even certain church officials advocated for the Orthodox mission's closure. Yet, not only was the mission not closed, it grew significantly more active and productive in the coming years. This thesis examines the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in China during its most fruitful period between 1900 and 1917, when the number of Orthodox Christian converts grew more than tenfold. It builds on scholarship on the Russian mission by shifting the focus from the mission as an institution, religious or diplomatic, to the hitherto largely ignored religious community that formed around it. By doing so, this thesis seeks to reintegrate Russian missionary activity and Orthodox Chinese into the broader history of Christianity in China. In order to do so, it focuses not on the activities of the Russian missionaries but on the religious celebrations in which most of the active Orthodox Christians participated. It examines three important festivals: Chinese Lunar New Year, Easter, and the Day of All Saint Martyrs, commemorating the Chinese Orthodox casualties of the Boxer Uprising. In studying these religious festivities, this thesis explores how entertainment, fasting, feasting, and religious processions were used to translate elements of the Orthodox religious message to a Chinese context.
A key theme of this thesis is the role played by the Chinese Orthodox religious professionals in this translation process. Chinese monastics, ordained priests and lay preachers stood in between the Russian missionaries, who often lacked relevant language skills, and the Chinese converts. Scholarship on the Russian mission often conceptualises it as being in-between China and Russia and thus facilitating communication between the two countries. This thesis, however, highlights the role of Chinese actors as mediators and transmitters of the religious message: their combination of linguistic, cultural, and religious expertise best positioned them to effectively communicate and interpret the Orthodox message to Chinese audiences. The first two decades of the twentieth century were a formative period for the Chinese Orthodox clergy, with the ordination of the first Chinese monastics and the opening of the catechist college in Beijing in 1907. This body of Chinese clergy, most vividly represented by Father Sergiy Chang, was later able to demonstrate their independence from the Russian hierarchs by contesting their power in the 1930s and 1940s. The key question that this thesis engages with is how Orthodox Christianity was translated and practised in the early twentieth-century Orthodox Chinese communities.
The first chapter covers the Orthodox geography of China, shifting the focus from the regions with a large Russian presence (such as Manchuria and East Turkestan) to lesser known locations in rural Hebei, Henan, and Hubei, where the Orthodox Church focused on its missionizing activities rather than on maintaining Christianity among the Russian expatriates. In the second chapter, the thesis deals various aspects of missionary activity and particularly the roles assigned to native Chinese priests and preachers, attempting to recover their stories and reconstruct their roles as mediators of religious space. The final three chapters focus primarily on how Orthodox Christianity was practiced by analysing three of the mission’s largest festivities associated with different aspects of Chinese Orthodox identity: one celebration was Chinese, one Christian, and one uniquely Chinese Orthodox. In this way the thesis reveals how religious festivals were used to communicate the Christian message and shape the Chinese Orthodox community with the help of Chinese mediators. It also highlights how Russian missionaries, outside of the borders of the Russian empire.
Research project
Thesis: Weddings in Britain' and is now: Lucy Cory Allen, 'Material Enchantments: belief, belonging, and wedding rituals in England, c.1836-1914'
Research project
Thesis title: Un-Roman Empires, Post-Roman Worlds: Translatio Imperii and Cross-Cultural Influences in Western European Imperial Ideology, 800 - 1000.
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis title: The Karen People in Burma and Britain: Refugees, Identity and Memories
The research will focus on the experiences and memories resettled Karen in Sheffield, Bury and Bolton and those currently residing in some of the refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. It is primarily concerned with the formation and production of their ethnic identities in the camps and in Sheffield. By capturing their evolving Karen memories and experiences of the insurgent war, their displacement and resettlement, the research will underpin their own changing ethnic perception, how the conflict shaped Karen identity from 1948 to the present in the personal and community memories. The focus on memory and identity is not fixed but historically shaped since there is a deeper politics of these historical memories that continue to serve as one of the main obstacles to national reconciliation. Other aspects such as the renegotiated family dynamics with their new resettlement experiences through their diaspora will also be considered.
Supervisor
Research Interests
Oral history: refugee histories; Burma development studies: Burma/Myanmar history.
Additional information
I am aged 60 and currently employed full time as a network engineering manager for British Telecom based in Chester and cover a large area of the North West and Wales. As I possess very rare diagnostic and commissioning skills within BT, the prospects for early retirement are receding as the company 'migrates' the legacy network to the 21st Century Based Networks and I get more involved with this migration.
My personal relationship with the Karen of Burma has been for over 35 Years as my father-in-law was born in Toungoo, Burma and was of Karen extraction. My proximity to this community led me to undertake a MA at Liverpool University and a second MA from Manchester in Cultural History of War under the supervision of Dr Ana Carden-Coyne in 2010. I have visited Burma and the refugee camps on the border on numerous occasions, the last time being in 2013 where my wife sustained very serious injuries in a traffic accident which interrupted not only my research but my work and personal life as well.
Research project
Thesis: Heroines, Queens, Goddesses and Glamazons: Theatrical Male Cross-Dressing Performance in 20th Century London.
My research focuses on male cross-dressing performance in London between 1930 and 1970. This will include an analysis of the end of the music hall period, all-male veterans’ cross dressing comedy revues which were borne out of wartime concert parties, and the beginnings of ‘glamour drag’ as popularised by performers such as Danny La Rue. Some key issues addressed in my research will be how male cross-dressing performance changed across this period, how male cross-dressing performance was received by the wider public, what ramifications this kind of performance had on the leisure economy in London, and what/who the major performances, venues, and performers were. I will also draw upon the work of various gender theorists such as Judith Butler who often use cross-dressing as an example of ‘gender performativity’ but rarely use specific historical examples to reinforce or challenge these theories.
Supervisors
Research interests
Cultural History, Gender History, History of Sexuality, Queer History and Theatre History.
Additional information
I am originally from Brooklyn, NY but came to the UK to do my undergrad and Master’s degree at The University of Edinburgh. I’ve been a PhD student at Manchester since September 2013. In my spare time I enjoy performing, a good cocktail, and watching films.
Contact details
- Email: jacob.bloomfield@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Twitter: @JRBloomfield
Research project
Thesis title: The Forgotten Hand of Hitler: The Representation of Holocaust Collaborators within a Museum Setting
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: 'Leisure and Masculinity in 'Dear Old Dirty Stalybridge', c.1835-1875'
My research looks at how sites of leisure reflected or shaped male behaviour and attitudes in the mid-nineteenth century. It focuses on: pub culture (in particular the inherent domesticity of many drinking establishments); music (how environment shaped responses to sound); and walking (the significance of urban/rural/contested landscapes in experiencing and managing emotion).
Supervisors
Research interests
- domesticity
- emotion,
- leisure,
- masculinity,
- material culture,
- regional specificity,
- sound.
Publications
'From International Success to Industrial Decline: Taylor Lang & Co., Stalybridge, 1852-1936', Cheshire History (2014).
Conference presentations
The Paradox of the Provincial Industrial Town: Walking, Emotion and Masculinity in Stalybridge, 1856-63 (Urban History Conference, 27 March 2014).
Popular Culture in the Provinces: Leisure and Pleasure in Stalybridge, c.1830-1880 (Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 12 February, 2014).
Romance, fatherhood and grief 'beyond t’Brushes': Walking and masculinity in mid-Victorian Stalybridge (Northern Identities Conference, 27 September 2013).
The Temptation of 'Pleasant Companions' and a 'Snug Public-House': Drinking Culture and Male Homosociality, c.1830-1880 (Social Networking Since 1600 Conference, 24 May 2013).
The Domesticity of Drinking: Provincial Pub Culture in Stalybridge, 1830-1880 (Social History Conference, 25 March 2013).
Teaching experience
Cities and Citizens (2011-12); Who Do You Think You Are? (2012-13); Origins of Industrialization (2013-14).
Contact details
Research project
Thesis title: The Gens Anglorum or the Gens Normannorum? The Emergence of English Identity Among Middling Normans 1130-60
Supervisors
Thesis title
'The Highest Men in the Realm'? Bishops of Lincoln and Structures of Power in England, c. 1066-1200
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: Soldiers of Stamina and Daring’: Exploring the Lives and Legacies of Major General David Lloyd-Owen and Major General Orde Wingate
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingship.
It is a peculiarity of Anglo-Saxon scholarship that the development of early Anglo-Saxon kingship has been seen as a natural or inevitable development. Yet various comparable cultures demonstrate that this is anything but the case. Where the origins of kingship have been discussed by scholars, kingship has typically been seen as the product of competing tribal units and the coercive power that this brings to their leaders. This, though, ignores the ideological dimensions of kingship which are central to its nature. It thus provides at best a partial picture of the origins of early Anglo-Saxon kingship and one that needs to be re-examined.
Of course, any study of this period is complicated by the sparseness of the available sources. No written sources survive from England from the period 400-600, while the period 600-750 is dominated by just one source, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It is thus necessary to draw comparatively on both sources from other geographical areas together with archaeological evidence; this provides a much firmer basis for study. These sources are currently being systematically surveyed, starting with the archaeological evidence, in order to re-evaluate the origins of early Anglo-Saxon kingship. Despite the sparseness of the sources, it is proving possible to illuminate the origins of early Anglo-Saxon kingship, including its ideological dimensions, in surprising detail.
Supervisors
- Professor Paul Fouracre
- Nicholas Higham
Funding body
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: Transnational and Cultural Comparisons of Those Involved in the Falklands War
This project will investigate in detail not only how the media reflected but also influenced the motivations of the governments and personalities involved in the run-up to and during the conflict, also analysing the manner in which the different cultural perceptions impinged on the media coverage and its differing effects.
The original aspect of my work will be to determine to what extent the governments were in thrall to popular opinion as manipulated by the media and who or what was pulling the strings. The fact that the Spanish language sources have as yet not been investigated fully in this respect adds to the originality of my project. A further important aspect of media coverage I intend to examine was the extent to which the media, being itself a child of the culture, actually provoked the opposite effect to that desired.
Supervisors
Research Interests
British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, Argentine President, General Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri Castelli, US President Ronald Reagan, The Falkland Islands, US-Latin American relations, the 'Special Relationship', foreign policy, and the Cold War.
Additional information
I completed both my BA and MA at the University of Liverpool, and PGCE at the University of Chester.
Research project
St Albans was a major centre for the narrative construction of English history in the Late Middle Ages. My thesis aims to examine the entire surviving corpus of St Albans historiographical manuscripts to understand how, where and why these chronicles were produced, what detailed manuscript analysis can tell us about transmission, and, most importantly, the role of design in medieval book production. In contrast to previous studies on St Albans historiography, my research focuses on manuscript and book production instead of authorship and textual variation.
Supervisors
Funding body
- The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Research interests
Codicology, palaeography, book history, manuscript design, monasticism, Incunabula, early printing, medieval chronicles, historiography, book design and monastic book production.
Additional information
I originally studied Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), before pursuing my interests in the history of the book and design history. I completed an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Manchester in 2012. In addition to my academic work, I am currently the Coordinator for the Manchester Classics for All scheme.
Contact details
- Email: jessica.coatesworth@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Twitter: @JCoatesworth
- Manchester Academia profile: JCoatesworth
- Linked In profile: Linkedin jcoatesworth
Research project
Thesis: A Social History of the Styal Estate
Quarry Bank Mill, Styal is a site of major historical importance. An early, rural cotton-spinning mill, the mill was owned and operated by the Greg family until 1939, when it was donated to the National Trust and became a museum of the cotton industry. The estate that the Gregs created was unusually encompassing in terms of those who worked there, involving as it did not just work locations but also the housing of all its workers. The village of Styal was developed and maintained throughout the working life of the mill to provide decent living conditions for its workers and promote appropriate ways of living. It, therefore, provides us with a unique view of employee-employer relations, and of working life and leisure during the industrial revolution. This project will draw upon the extensive but underused archives of the Styal Estate to explore the lives of its workers – including those in the mill and their managers as well as agricultural workers and shop workers – through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Supervisors
- Prof Hannah Barker
- Dr Helen Rees-Leahy
- Amanda Lunt (National Trust)
Funding body
For my postgraduate Masters, I held a part-scholarship for promising potential researchers from the Faculty of Life Sciences. My doctoral research is funded by the Economic Social Research Council via the North West Doctoral Training Centre.
Research interests
Social and cultural history of technology, social history, gender studies, North West industrial history and heritage, 18th and 19th century British history.
Additional information
I studied an undergraduate MA in History at the University of Aberdeen from 2009-2013, gaining a first class grade with honours and winning the Forbes Medal in History for best performance in mandatory examinations. From 2014-2016, I studied a part-time postgraduate Masters in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, balancing postgraduate study with part-time work and obtaining a distinction. I have given lectures and seminars on the history of science and technology at the Wilmslow Guild’s adult education classes and at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Research project
Thesis: A Review of the Impact of Women's Military or Wartime Service in the Aftermath of the First World War
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: Digging for Race: Archaeology, the Bible and Science in India and Egypt from 1850 - 1947
Supervisors
- Dr Georg Christ
- Dr Campbell Price
Research project
My thesis examines the development of ideas about ‘race’ within the early Communist movement in Britain. I aim to examine how analytical models established within the Social-Democratic Federation, later the British Socialist Party, impacted the Communist Party of Great Britain’s approach to the issue of ‘race’ both as a discursive construct and political reality. I want to elucidate how race was thought to impact society, and the effect this had on the strategies and discourses of the Communists. I am particularly interested in how transnational dialogues enabled through the establishment of the Comintern and Comintern-dominated organisations, as well as a rising sense of popular internationalism during the inter-war period, impacted an organisation which has been portrayed as theoretically shallow, imperially-minded, and chauvinistic. It is my hope that such a study will be able to shed light not only on the attitudes within the Communist movement, but the extent and nature of popular inter-war internationalism and racial ideologies.
Supervisors
- Professor Stuart Jones
- Dr Chris Manias
Funding body
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Research interests
Imperial History, Communist/Labour History, Racial Thought, Inter-War Internationalism and Social Movements.
Additional information
I studied International History and Politics at the University of Leeds from 2007-2010, where I largely focussed on British imperial history. From 2011-2012 I completed my MA in War, Culture and History at the University of Manchester and studied a diverse range of topics from Cold War historiographies to Professional Wrestling’s relationship to American national identity. I began my PhD research project at the University of Manchester in September 2013 after being awarded AHRC funding.
Contact details
- Email: daniel.edmonds@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Twitter: @stormtheheavens
- Manchester Academia profile: DanielEdmonds
Research project
Health, Medicine and Heritage at the ‘Factory-Colony’ of Quarry Bank Mill, 1800-1850
This thesis explores the impact that early to mid-nineteenth century cotton manufacturing had on the health of workers and their employers in the 'factory colony' of the Quarry Bank Mill, Styal. The thesis seeks to explore the actions taken by Quarry Bank's mill owners and the workers themselves to manage, maintain and protect their health in a period before national regulations were in place. The historiography on occupational health in Britain focuses on health and safety legislation, enforced regulations and compensation schemes of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. This thesis, however, seeks to contribute to the largely neglected area of early nineteenth century health and medicine in mills and factories. It aims to illuminate the significance of health approaches and attitudes, and medical practices among the Greg family. It considers their impact as employers of a worker and apprentice community and the role of paternalistic management strategies around health. It examines how the Greg family understood health in both the industrial workplace of the mill and the domestic spaces of their own private homes, as well as the dwellings and public spaces of their workforce and argues that the Greg family employed several different strategies to maintain the physical and emotional health of both themselves and their workforce.
The thesis will focus on nutrition, communal and individual hygiene and sanitation, and the housing conditions of the workers' village in Styal and how this affected living standards amongst the Quarry Bank workforce. It will also consider how the Greg family, the paid workers, and the indentured apprentices attained and interacted with medical provisions, such as those offered by the mill's medical men. This thesis aims to bring to light the multiplicity of different medical provisions within Mill community, which was shaped by the relationship of each group within the community with the Greg family. It will argue that the Greg family cultivated the landscape, managed the occupational and domestic places, and provided health and medical care in order to maintain, monitor, and regulate their workforce. Finally, the thesis examines how the public history of health and medicine was presented to contemporary audiences in the National Trust exhibition A Healthy Profit informed by my research as part of my collaborative doctoral programme. It argues that the early history of health and medical becomes can be made relevant to modern visitors via what I will call an 'empathetic bridge' between their own experiences with ill-health and healthcare and the personal historic health narratives of both the Greg family and workers.
Thesis supervisors
Research project
Thesis: Dangerous Sexualities and Cultural Geographies in 1960s England: ‘The Moors Murders’.
Cultural representations and media discourse of The ‘Moors Murders’, the serial homicides committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, offer an opportunity to explore post-war England through an event that gained national and international coverage. The thesis offers primes insights into the constructions and contestations of evil, affluence, sexuality and working-class intellectual life and the image of the North of England in the 1960s.
Supervisors
Research interests
Cultural and social change, micro-histories, class, affluence, sexuality and post-war Britain.
Additional information
Manchester undergraduate and postgraduate:
- BA (Hons) Politics and Modern History (2002-05)
- MA (Distinction) British Modern History (2005-06)
- PhD History Candidate (part-time, 2010-present)
- One of the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons Image competition winners (2013)
Contact details
- Email: ian.field-2@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Manchester Academia profile: IanField
Thesis title
'The historians and historiography of St Albans'
Research project
Thesis: 'Filipino Nationalism and the Filipino Martial Arts (FMA)'
Supervisors
My research examines concepts of Filipino national identity and nationalism, and the Philippine project of nation-building through the national government’s appropriation of the Filipino Martial Arts (FMA). I argue that like the construction of the nation, the Filipino Martial Arts were compressed into a unitary national symbol from plural, fragmented fighting traditions throughout the country.
First, I explore the transformation of FMA practice from private communities (usually family-based) to commercialized clubs, and discuss how this mirrors the transformation of the Philippines from colony to independent nation.
Using the mythical-historical figure of Lapulapu, I next look at how FMA clubs conceptualized nationalism and idealized national identity, and then discuss how imaginings of national identity through Lapulapu were ways by which FMA clubs imagined themselves as part of the nation.
Lastly, I analyse three FMA-themed action films and discuss how they reflect the way in which localized identities are compressed into a national one under the framework of nation-building.
Research interests
- Nationalism
- Military history
- World War II
Publications
Traditional Forms of Kalingawan in World War II Iloilo. Danyag: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences XIII, 2:261-2:268 (2008).
Teaching experience
2007-2011, University of the Philippines Visayas.
2013, Graduate Teaching Assistant, The University of Manchester.
Additional information
Master of Arts in History (University of the Philippines Diliman) 2007
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: Kingship, Morality, and Masculinity: The Creation of Royal Identities in Later Anglo-Saxon England, c. 871-1016.
This dissertation will attempt to investigate the creation of ideals of kingship in later Anglo-Saxon England, from around the time of Alfred the Great to the beginning of the reign of Cnut. Primary sources ranging from Christian homilies to heroic poetry to so-called “mirrors for princes” all struggled to define what it meant to be a good or true king, and kings had to personally embody (or reshape) these ideals in their own reigns. Notions of piety and justice competed with ideas about bravery and strength in battle. This thesis will further consider how early medieval conceptions of masculinity are related to these same topics. In general, it will ask: Are the things that make a man manly the same things that make a king kingly?
Supervisors
- Dr Charles Insley
- Professor Paul Fouracre
Funding award
- School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Graduate Scholarship
Research interests
The Early Middle Ages; Anglo-Saxon England; Vikings; Masculinities; Identity; Power; Justice and Kingship.
Conference presentations
2012: "'Reges ex Virtute Sumunt:' Kingship, Military Power, and the Creation of the Anglo-Saxon State, c. 400-900," The 2012 Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Society Regional Convention – Carolina Region; Queens University of Charlotte.
2012: "Charisma, Ritual, and Kingship: The Role of Ideological Power in the Formation of an Anglo-Saxon State," Graduate History Conference on Power and Struggle; University of Alabama.
2012: "Grave Goods and Buried Hoards as Sources of Anglo-Saxon Royal Power: Military, Economic, and Ideological," Society for Historical Archaeology 2012 Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Baltimore, MD (4-8 January).
Teaching experience
2012-2015: Teaching Instructor and Academic Coordinator – Italy Intensives Program, East Carolina University (Certaldo Alto, Tuscany).
Additional information
Originally from rural North Carolina, USA, I earned my BA in History and Medieval & Renaissance Studies (2008) and my MA in European History (2012) from East Carolina University. My MA thesis, under the direction of Professor Michael Enright, was entitled “The Role of Royal Power in the Formation of an Anglo-Saxon State, c. 400-900 AD.”
After finishing my MA, I was appointed Teaching Instructor and Academic Coordinator for ECU’s Italy Intensives study abroad program based in Certaldo, Tuscany, and I spent three years living in Italy, teaching history, guiding tours to historic sites and museums, and generally helping run the program.
Outside of academia, I’m interested in cooking, board games and other historical games, and fantasy literature (from pulp to contemporary). I’m also an avid musician and play guitar and banjo in bluegrass, country, and folk music.
Contact details
- Email: ryan.goodman@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Twitter: @RTGoodman
- Academia: nbsp;RyanThomasGoodman
Research project
My doctoral thesis opens a new chapter in the history of emotions by uncovering, for the first time, the significance of ‘happiness’ as a socio-cultural practice rooted in the interaction between human bodies, material objects, ideas, and feelings in England, 1550-1700. Focusing on a wealth of documentary and material remains of aristocratic and gentry families from the north west, I explore the plurality, mutability and significance of ‘happiness’ in everyday life.
Thesis Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: Work, Identity and the Printing Trade in Britain, ca.1750-1850.
My thesis examines the relationship between work and identity in the letterpress printing trade, questioning what work meant to printers, how they identified with it and how they were identified by it. Throughout their history printers have displayed strong levels of occupational identity, most obviously demonstrated in recent memory through the solidarity of their unions. This sense of solidarity has however resulted in printers being studied almost exclusively within the narrow context of labour history. By focusing on the social history of all life-cycle stages of the printing trade (apprentices, journeymen and masters), as well as issues relating to family, political, geographic and social identities, my research takes a broader view and highlights an increasing diversity of socio-economic experience amongst printers in the early nineteenth century.
Supervisors
Funding awards
- School of Arts, Histories and Cultures Studentship Award (The University of Manchester, 2010/11)
- Research Travel Grant (The University of Manchester, 2012),
- Research Grant (Printing Historical Society, 2013)
Research interests
Printing history, history of work, social history, 18th and 19th-century British history.
Additional information
Before starting my PhD I completed an MA in Library and Information Studies at University College London and am now working part-time at the Jerwood Library, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. I have a particular interest in special collections and have given presentations on my work in this area at conferences organized by the Historic Libraries Forum and International Association of Music Libraries (UK branch).
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: 'Early medieval dykes 400-850'
A study of the early medieval dykes of Britain that attempts to ascertain the number, location and function.
Supervisors
- Prof. Nick Higham
- Prof. Paul Fouracre
Research interests
- Anglo-Saxon invasion
- Cornish language
- welsh annals.
Publications
- 'Boundaries and walls in Anglo-Saxon England', a chapter co-written with Margaret Worthington in an upcoming book on the Anglo-Saxon environment to be published by the University of Exeter.
- 'Early medieval dykes in Britain 400-850 AD', a conference paper to be published in an upcoming volume by Oxbow Books.
- 'The dykes of Cornwall' to be published in an upcoming edition of Cornish Archaeology.
- A section in 'The Anglo-Saxon World' (2013) by N. Higham and M. Ryan on early medieval dykes.
- 'Eamon de Valera's escape from Lincoln Prison' 2011 Lincolnshire Past & Present 86.
- 'The Charter of the Forest' 2010 Living Woods September/October issue.
- 'Mole Rain and other natural phenomena in the Welsh Annals: can mirabilia unravel the textual history of the Annales Cambriae' 2009 The Welsh History Review 24.4.
- 'Charter of the Forest' 2009/2010 Historic Lincoln Winter issue.
- 'The Mods of Lincoln' 2008 Lincolnshire Poacher Autumn issue.
- 'The Medieval Cornish Bible' 2008 Cornish Studies Volume 16.
- Beunans Meriasek: the Life of St Meriasek, a study guide 2008 Cornish Language Board.
- 'Fosow an Osow Tewl a Gernow' (note this article was written in Cornish and the title translates as 'Cornish medieval dykes') 2008 An Gowsva 35.
- 'Thoughts on language change in Cornwall' 2007 An Gowsva 32.
- 'Lincoln's medieval theatre' 2007 Lincolnshire Past & Present 67.
- 'St Aldhelm's Chapel' 2007 Dorset January issue.
- 'Diaries for genealogists' 2007 Family Tree Magazine October issue.
- 'The story of the Fiskerton skull' 2006 Lincolnshire Unearthed 6.
- 'An old Soldier brought to life' 2006 Ancestors 50.
- 'Bog bodies – a skull found at Fiskerton' 2005/6 Lincolnshire Past and Present 62.
Conference presentations
I have given the following papers at conferences at the University of Manchester:
- 'The origins of Christianity in Dorset, 350-800 AD'.
- 'Bede's attitude to the Britons'.
- 2009 'Medieval dykes of Cornwall, 400-800 AD'.
In 2012 the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies invited me to give a paper on 'Early medieval dykes in Britain 400-850 AD' which is to be published by Oxbow Books.
Teaching experience
2009-10 I taught undergraduate seminars at the University of Manchester as part of the Origins of England (400-800 AD) course.
2011 onwards gave seminars of my own devising to both MA Journalism and MA Medieval Studies students on the Magna Carta and the origins of English law at the University of Lincoln.
Contact details
- Email: erik.grigg@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Manchester Academia profile: ErikGrigg
Research project
Thesis title: Working-Class Children's Play and Leisure in England, 1820-1900
Supervisors
- Sasha Handley
- Julie-Marie Strange
Research project
Thesis: From 'Pugs' and 'Outlaws' to the 'Gentlemanly Art of Self Defence'; Notions of Masculinity and Violence in England, 1850-1914.
My research examines changing notions of masculinity, in particular masculine violence, in England in the Late Victorian & Edwardian periods. I look at the decline of bareknuckle boxing, and the emergence of “modern” combative systems such as gloved boxing, Jiu-Jitsu, and Bartitsu. Using formative analysis techniques, I aim to develop a hermeneutics of combat which will enable gender historians to explore the relationships between masculine identity and the use of violence more fully and extend research into a pivotal, but previously impenetrable, aspect of masculinity.
Supervisors
- Dr Max Jones
- Dr Julie-Marie Strange
Funding award
- Carlaw-Martin Scholarship
Research interests
Self-Defence, Jiu-Jitsu, Bartitsu, Pugilism, Masculinity and Gender History.
Conference presentations
"Understanding Victorian Cultures of Violence: the utility of Experimental Archaeology and Practical Hermeneutics" – History, Heritage & Historical Archaeology, University of Huddersfield, July 10th, 2015
Additional information
Liam was awarded an MA. and Mlit. by the University of Dundee before moving to Manchester where he worked in the third sector for a number of years. He has practiced martial arts since childhood, dabbling in Karate, Kickboxing, Judo, Aikido, and Jujutsu. He now practices Jujutsu and Bartitsu.
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: Agoraphobia and urban space in England, 1880-1914
My research establishes how the urban environment shaped professional and popular understandings of the mind and the consequences of this on urban planning in England, 1880-1914. I will focus on the development of agoraphobia and similar spatially situated disorders in England between c.1880-1914, the period in which major professional constituencies such as planners, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts successfully formulated themselves and their paradigms as legitimate frameworks for establishing professional, expert discursive authority, both within the state and wider public discourse. My PhD will challenge ideas, both from the past and in contemporary scholarship, that psychiatric diagnoses are best understood within relatively closed professional or cultural discursive frameworks. Instead, I wish to test the hypothesis that medical diagnoses may explicitly inform the evolution of everyday life in an open and public way.
Supervisors
- Dr Leif Jerram
- Dr Charlotte Wildman
Funding awards
Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures PGR Studentship 2016-17
Research interests
Urban Geography, Space and Place, Town Planning, Modern British History, Psychology.
Conference presentations
'Trickery, Tactics, and everyday life in the 20th-century library' Lancaster Hist Fest, 29-31 May 2015
Additional information
I studied for my undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex between 2008-2011. I then spent three years in Oxford working as an editor at Oxford University Press and setting up a gender empowerment and music charity. I started a part-time MA in History at the University of Manchester in 2014, before being awarded the University of Manchester Faculty of Humanities PGR studentship in 2016 to undertake my PhD.
Contact
Research project
Thesis: Through the Eye of the Needle: Reconfiguring British Isles History as Narrative Embroidery.
My source texts - modern embroidered histories of the British Isles – offer an idiosyncratic form of public history that takes inspiration from the Bayeux Tapestry. Reworking a range of local and national historical narratives, they loosely appropriate the form of this well-worn cultural artefact to new ends.
I am researching how and why the Bayeux Tapestry is used as conceptual raw material in modern embroidery projects, and the ways in which recent projects use 'Bayeuxness' to interrogate significant cultural developments. These include debates concerning changing patterns of work and leisure and the upsurge in heritage consumption, and discourses surrounding the emergence of alternative constructs of national identity.
My work will incorporate reflections from project participants and responds to Raphael Samuel’s (1994) call for examination of 'the imaginative dislocations which take place when historical knowledge is transferred from one learning circuit to another.'
Supervisors
- Dr Julie-Marie Strange
- Dr David Matthews
Funding body
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Research interests
The Bayeux Tapestry, its reception and offspring; public history; memory studies; reception studies and medievalisms.
Publications
Henderson, Anna and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds), Making Sense of the Bayeux Tapestry: Readings and Reworkings (forthcoming MUP: 2015).
Henderson, Anna with Gale R. Owen-Crocker, ‘Introduction’, in Making Sense of the Bayeux Tapestry: Readings and Reworkings (forthcoming MUP: 2015).
Henderson, Anna, ‘Through Victorian Eyes: Re-assessing Elizabeth Wardle’s Replica’, in Making Sense of the Bayeux Tapestry: Readings and Reworkings (forthcoming MUP: 2015).
Conference presentations
'The Bayeux Effect', at The Middle Ages in the Modern World Conference, St Andrews, 2013.
'Re-inventing the Rules: Slipping between the Bayeux Tapestry and the Victorian Replica', at Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2012.
'The Bayeux Tapestry and its Victorian Facsimile', at Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2011.
'Travels in Time: The Bayeux Tapestry and its Heirs', at Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2010.
Additional information
I have returned to study after a career in academic publishing (as Editorial Director at University of Exeter Press). I completed an MA in Medieval Studies at Manchester in 2011.
Contact details
- Email: anna.henderson@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Manchester Academia profile: AnnaHenderson
- Twitter: @acorhender
Research project
Thesis: 'Fantasies of state power? French banlieues and the boundaries of modernity, 1955-1973.'
My research focuses on the modernisation of post-war France, specifically the construction of mass housing developments in the banlieues of Paris. I focus on two such housing estates in Pantin and La Courneuve in order to look critically at the nature of state power during this period, which historians have often viewed as an omniscient, all-encompassing technocracy.
I analyse the debates surrounding the construction and management of banlieue housing in order to challenge this narrative of generic, universal modernisation. My thesis looks at sources from urban planners, sociologists, councillors and police and argues that French modernity was concerned with presenting the illusion of power rather than power itself. In other words, the French state constructed a coherent narrative of order that shrouded a complex reality of conflict, compromise and uncertainty.
Supervisors
- Dr Leif Jerram
- Prof Bertrand Taithe
Research interests
- France,
- housing,
- cities,
- modernity,
- protest,
- planning,
- local politics.
Publications
'Oracles of suburbia; the banlieues in French cinema, 1958-1968', Modern & Contemporary France 21:4 (2013) pp. 435-451.
Conference presentations
'When bidonville met brutalism: reconstructing the banlieue in the French urban imagination, 1959-68'. ASMCF North West Postgraduate Workshop, University of Liverpool, 19th June 2013.
'"A world disturbed by modernity". The banlieues in French cinema, 1958-1968', Banlieue Network Conference 'Communities on the Periphery', Institut Français, London, 5th April 2013.
'"History to order?" The challenges and opportunities of corporate history', New Media and Academia Conference, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 11th May 2011.
Teaching experience
State, Nation, and Nationalism (2013)
Globalisation in Historical Perspective (2013)
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2012, 2014)
1968 And All That: Protest in Western Europe (Edge Hill University, 2013)
Additional information
I studied a BA (Hons.) in History & French at the University of Manchester, graduating in 2009. I then completed an MA in Cultural History, also at Manchester, before beginning my PhD in History. I am a member of number of research groups including SSFH, ASMCF and the Centre for Urban History.
Contact details
- Email: ravi.hensman@manchester.ac.uk
- Blogspot: thebanlieueblog
Research project
Thesis: Radical Religion and the Early Development of the Quaker Movement in the Area of Pendle, the Ribble Valley, Craven and the Yorkshire Dales in the Period 1600 to 1660
Supervisors
- Professor Sasha Handley
- Dr John Morgan
Research project
Thesis: Norman Identity in Capetian France (1204 - c.1400): The Chronique de Normandie and Etablissements de Rouen
My research focuses on the development of Norman identity in thirteenth and fourteenth century Capetian France. I aim to demonstrate that a distinct Norman identity persisted beyond the conquest of 1204. More broadly my research addresses the wider issue of the formation of the French state, its national narrative and how it reacted to distinct ‘autonomous’ zones within it. This will be achieved by investigating two previously understudied sources. The Chronique de Normandie, an early fourteenth century chronicle, housed within the John Rylands Special Collection. As well as the Etablissements de Rouen, a set of customs and privileges that were reconfirmed, reconfigured and disseminated across Normandy during period.
Research Interests include identity, ethnic communities and pre-modern nations in the medieval and early modern era.
Supervisor
Contact details:
Research project
Thesis: 'Mid-Tudor Ballads: Music, Words and Context'
This thesis aims to situate the ballads of the mid-Tudor period (1530-70) within the wider musical and literary culture that produced and consumed them. The term ballad encompasses a wide variety of demotic, vernacular song found in manuscript sources as well as printed broadsides. The thesis examines the ballads' links with art music and folk music through the first in-depth analysis of sixteenth-century ballad tunes. It places these ballads within the context of the political, religious and social upheavals of the sixteenth century in order to study their part in the development of a proto public sphere. It demonstrates that, in addition to providing entertainment, ballads could sometimes take an active role in debates about matters of politics and religious belief. This is particularly the case with songs that engaged their knowing audience with political and religious messages which were not always immediately apparent within the text.
Research interests
- Early modern history,
- renaissance music,
- ballads,
- Tudors,
- Stuarts,
- reformation.
Publications
'Out and About in Bolton: Industrial Revelation'. The Historian, (109), pp. 28-31, (2011) (co-authored with David Clayton).
'Culture Shock: The Arrival of the Conquistadores in Aztec Mexico'. The Historian, (104), pp. 6-12 (2009).
Conference presentations
16 June 2014: 'Hearing the News: Music and the Dissemination of Information in the 16th Century Ballad', Tudor and Stuart Seminar Series, Institute of Historical Research, London.
11 April 2014: 'Ballads and the Public Sphere in Sixteenth-Century England', Music, Circulation and the Public Sphere, British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Royal Musical Association, University of Manchester.
18 February 2014: 'William Elderton and the Ghost of the Ladie Marques', John Rylands Seminar on Print and Materiality in the Early Modern World, Manchester.
27 November 2013: 'Knowingness and the Mid-Sixteenth Century Ballad', North West Early Modern Seminar Series, University of Lancaster.
1 November 2013: "'Depart ye songs, lascivious": Ballads, Psalms and Knowingness in Tudor England', Beyond History, University of Manchester.
8 June 2013: '"Lend Listening Ears a While to Me": Ballads and a Culture of Knowingness in Mid-sixteenth Century England', Histfest, University of Lancaster.
Teaching experience
PGCE (Secondary) Music with several years of experience in secondary education.
Additional information
Trustee of the Historical Association.
Contact details
- Email: earlymodernballads@aol.com
- Twitter: @wallyberry
- Manchester Academia profile: Jenni Hyde
Research project
Thesis: 'An unrepentant Old Whig': A genealogy of Hayekian liberty.
Friedrich Hayek was one of the major actors within the post-war emergence of neo-liberalism. I, however, am looking at the pre liberal origins of Hayek’s understanding of liberty. This involves an exploration of his rejection of utilitarianism, his debt to the evolutionary social theories of Hume, Burke and Smith and his deployment of a description of freedom that approximates to the notion of non-domination associated with republicanism and Whiggism.
Supervisors
Funding awards
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Scholarship
- Adam Smith Fellowship, the Mercatus Center Virginia
- Institute of Humane Studies Fellowship
Research interests
Liberalism, Republicanism, Liberty, Law, Social Order, and Governance.
Conference presentations
'Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and Michael Polany: Liberty, Enterprise and the Growth of Knowledge', Oxford History of Political Thought Early Career Seminar, May 2013.
Teaching experience
Seminar leader, ‘The Making of The Modern Mind’, University of Manchester, 2014.
Research project
Thesis: 'The influence of the 'Little Circle' and the Manchester press on the passage of the 1832 reform act'
Research project
Thesis: The early history of the florin.
My research is all about the florin and how this tiny gold coin minted in Florence in 1252, reached massive success, in line with a wider west European revival in gold coinage and a wider commercial revolution in medieval Europe. From the third quarter of the thirteenth century onwards, there is evidence of its wide circulation from West to East. How to explain such rapid popularity? What if the florin was minted in the wake of the international coinage, as a substitute for the Byzantine and Arabic gold coins as an international currency, crucial for the trade of Italian trading cities? Answering this question and keeping an eye out for the impact of the florin in the political, cultural and social contexts, I aim to open up new perspectives on Florence and provide an innovative strand for a comparative analysis of the commercial entanglement of the Byzantine and Arabic East and the Latin West in the medieval time.
Supervisors
Funding body
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Research interests
Medieval History, Economic History, Numismatics, and Florin of Florence.
Conference presentations
XV International Numismatic Congress, Taormina (Sicily), 21-25 September 2015. Awards: International Numismatic Council Travel Grant, Royal Numismatic Society Grants
Papers: Aspetti della Monetazione dei Regni di Napoli e Sicilia nel Cinquecento: due Tesori Inediti dall’Isola di Lipari
Quatrième école d’été d’histoire économique, Les moyens de paiement aux époques médiévale et moderne, Villa Finaly, Florence (Italie), 26-28 août 2015. Paper: The Florin of Florence. Production, Circulation and Distribution in Europe, Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries
III Incontro Internazionale di Studio del Lexicon Iconographicum Numismaticae. Moneta e Identità territoriale: dalla ‘polis’ antica alla ‘civitas’ medievale. Convegno conclusivo del progetto PRIN 2009 (Università di Messina, Bologna, Genova, Milano). Bologna, Piazza San Giovanni in Monte 2, Dipartimento di Storia Culturale e Civiltà, aula Prodi, 12-13 settembre 2013.
Paper: La Città nelle Mani del Santo.
Additional information
- MA (Distinction) in Historical Sciences at the University of Milan
- Diploma in Archival Science, Palaeography and Diplomatics at the State Archives of Milan
- BA (Hons) in History at the University of Milan
- Volunteer and Project collaborator in the Department of Coins & Medals at The British Museum
- Project collaborator for the University of Milan
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: Before New Liberalism: The Continuity of Radical Dissent, 1867-1891
Much political history on Nonconformity and the Liberal Party still rests on outdated assumptions about the secularisation of Victorian society towards the close of the century. As a result nonconformity has become marginalised by historical narratives emphasising the work of secular intellectuals and other socio-economic imperatives.
The project re-evaluates its role in relation to the Liberal party towards the close of the century and considers the extent that New Liberalism represented the continuity of political nonconformity. Through a series of case studies focusing on discordant extra-parliamentary activities, it explores how dissent provided the Liberal party with vitality, a common religious identity and language, in developing important radical platforms which enabled the party to make radical changes in policy.
It also considers how changes in religious doctrines that embraced social issues, immanentism and communitarian values helped develop and justify state interventionism in the social sphere. It focuses primarily on the press, critically examining the use of religious language and themes, supplemented by speeches and private correspondence.
Supervisors
- Professor Stuart Jones
- Dr Thomas Scriven
Research interests
Intellectual history, history of political ideas, historical methodology, newspapers, journalism, computational history, digital humanities and data mining.
Research project
Thesis: Ecclesiastical Networks and the Papacy at the End of Late Antiquity, c.550-700
My research deals with how the political and ecclesiastical networks of the sixth and seventh centuries continued to tie together people and ideas across Christian Europe, both within the Mediterranean world and beyond, at a time when these connections are often said to have collapsed already or were disintegrating due to the turmoil of this period. The papacy was a particularly active institution and its allies can be found in Anglo-Saxon England, Merovingian Gaul, as well as the Eastern Roman Empire, and this thesis takes their networks as a starting point to discussing how interconnected the Christian world remained after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. By re-examining together the Latin and Greek sources of this period and by placing them into conversation with each other, I argue that it is possible to find new parallels and continuities that linked together both the Northumbrian world of Bede and the cosmopolitan empires of the eastern Mediterranean, even at the 'end' of late antiquity.
Supervisors
- Professor Paul Fouracre
- Dr Charles Insley
Funding awards
- School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Graduate Scholarship
- President's Doctoral Scholarship
Research interests
Late Antiquity, Early Middle Ages, Global History, Mobility, Borders, History of Religion.
Additional information
I completed a BA in History and an MSc in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford (2011-2015), with a special focus on cross-cultural exchanges in late antiquity. This remains my focus during my PhD and I am interested in all aspects of movement and transnational exchange, particularly in integrating concepts from the social sciences into historical studies.
Contact details
- Email: sihong.lin@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Twitter: @shlin28
Research project
Thesis: News from Burmah: the Role of the English Press in the Making of the British Empire in Burma.
My research focuses on the role of the English newspapers in conveying news and information about the British imperial expansion in Burma to their readership in Britain and British India as well. The opinion of the press on the Burmese question and whether their report could have an impact on the Government’s imperial policy will be a main issue of the thesis. The study will also investigate the relations between the press and the mercantile communities and how newspapers acted as a mouthpiece for the economic interests in Burma. And as my research covers the period between the 1850s and the conquest of Burma in the 1880s, I will examine how the development in the communication system, especially the introduction of the telegraph, changed the way the papers operated their imperial news-reporting. Online British newspapers archives and the Anglo-Indian newspapers collection at the British Library are the main sources of the study. The official papers and privates papers of the Government and the commercial enterprises will also be consulted.
Supervisors
Research interests
Burma, Imperialism, British Empire, Newspapers, and Telegraph.
Additional information
I completed my BA in History from Silpakorn University, Thailand, in 2013 before receiving a Thai Government’s scholarship to study in Master’s and PhD in European History. I had finished my MA in Modern History at the University of Kent in 2014 and moved to Manchester in January 2015 after I got accepted to study in the PhD program. European history and Southeast Asian history, mainland - to be precise, are what I am interested in.
Contact details
Research project
This thesis integrates the environmental history of the peat bogs, or mosslands, of early modern Lancashire into the wider social, economic, and cultural history of England and the continent. Mosslands were hugely important to those living on and around them, however this significance has been obscured by centuries of disparagement under the ideology of ‘improvement’. Mosslands were gradually drained throughout the early modern period, a process which culminated in wholesale agricultural conversions beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century. This thesis seeks to recover the importance of the mosslands before these agricultural conversions, and to understand these conversions in their full social and ecological significance.
Thesis supervisors
- Dr John Morgan
- Professor Sasha Handley
Research project
Thesis: Bachelorhood in Georgian Britain.
My research will explore the ways in which the bachelor navigated a society that frequently associated single status with immoral, irresponsible, and directionless lifestyles. I seek to develop a more nuanced understanding of the history of eighteenth-century masculinity by asking how bachelorhood was actually experienced. My thesis will thus redress recent scholarship that has assessed bachelorhood through a predominantly normative lens, a lens that positions the married male householder as the hegemonic model of masculinity. My study will re-position the eighteenth-century bachelor into the broader histories of masculinity by evaluating the personal testimony of several bachelors from their diaries, letters, and memoirs. This testimony will be compared against the cultural construction of the bachelor found in contemporary periodicals, satirical literature, and newspapers, for example. This project will reconstruct the theory and actual practice of bachelorhood to argue that the unmarried man should be viewed as a co-existing, not conflicting, model of masculinity.
Supervisors
Funding awards
- Full Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Award to undertake a PhD at The University of Manchester (2012-2015)
- Graduate MA Award at the University of York (2010-2011)
Research interests
Eighteenth-Century British History and Culture, Constructions of Masculinity, Social and Cultural History, Gender History, Histories of the Home, History of Sociability, Consumption and Material Culture, Eighteenth-Century Literature, and Intellectual History.
Teaching experience
I have taught the period general course 'Forging a New World: Europe c. 1450-1750'.
Additional information
After completing my BA (Hons) in History at The University of York in 2010 I remained at York to complete my interdisciplinary MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies for which I achieved a distinction in 2011. I was awarded full AHRC funding from The University of Manchester in 2012 to continue my academic career at the doctoral level.
Contact details
- Email: helen.metcalfe@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Manchester Academia profile: Helen Metcalfe
Information coming soon.
Research project
Thesis: Reshaping bodies, behaviours and minds: Polish displaced persons in refugee camps after WWII
The aim of my research is to investigate Polish Displaced Persons in refugee camps in Europe after the Second World War in the context of postwar practices of building a new international order which emphasized the need to re-civilize and reshape individuals. Focusing on the body as the primary matrix of the DPs’ outlook will provide an original perspective by underlining the role of emotions and basic needs, social dynamics in closed communities, and manifestations of a range of psychological conditions. This research will put greater emphasis on the private and intimate experience of DPs which will enable a clear focus on their agency as well as a deeper insight into the mechanisms governing the body of the refugee.
Supervisors
Funding body
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Research interests
History of the body, Cultural history, and East-Central Europe.
Publications
Metodologia Oral History, Kultura i Historia, vol. 20, 2011.
Conference presentations
Polish Displaced Persons In-between Imagined Homeland and Imagined "Small Poland" (SIEF2015: Utopias, Realities, Heritages: Ethnographies for the 21st, Zagreb, Croatia, 2015).
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: Royal Emotions for the People: Monarchy, Mass Media and the British Public, 1919-1955
Twentieth-century British historians have paid surprisingly little attention to the monarchy. Most scholars have followed David Cannadine’s pioneering work in explaining the monarchy’s changing historical role through reference to constitutional progress: the crown’s political power was exchanged for the sovereign’s symbolic leadership of the democratic state, which was manifested in grand ceremonial spectacle and glamorous public display. Historians have sharply differentiated between the monarchy’s constitutional and symbolic roles, and there is little scholarship that has analysed the interrelationship between them.
My doctoral thesis complicates this narrative of the rise of the symbolic constitutional monarchy. It shows how the monarchy’s centrality to national life was achieved through a media-orchestrated royal populism which encouraged personal identification between the British people and the royal family. Within a broader popular culture that was increasingly preoccupied with emotional intimacy after 1918, members of the public formed strong affective bonds with the House of Windsor. In this way, the constitutional role of monarchy became embedded in subjective fantasies of everyday life, and the sovereign’s function as guarantor of democratic politics was invested with personal and emotional meaning.
Supervisors
Research interests
- New media,
- monarchy,
- newspapers,
- subjectivity,
- emotion.
Conference presentations
''The Queen Looked up and Smiled to show her Love for Her Children': The 1953 Coronation Broadcast, Post-War Childhood and the British Family.' New Elizabethans 1953-2013: Nation, Culture and Modern Identity, (University of London, June 2013).
''All the World Loves a Lover': Royal Romance and the Enchantment of Constitutional Monarchy in Interwar Britain.' Social History Society Conference, (University of Leeds, April 2013).
'The 1934 Royal Wedding and the International Repercussions of the Assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia.' Royal Loss Conference, (University of York, November 2012).
''Marina Hats are selling well, and sitting pretty!' Media, Marketing and the Royal Wedding of 1934.' Retailing and Distribution History Conference, (University of Wolverhampton, September 2012).
Teaching experience
'Winds of Change: Politics, Society and Culture in Britain, 1899-1990', Semester 2 (2012-13), Semester 1 (2013-14).
Contact details
Research projects
Thesis: Deism and the interpretation of Hinduism in the writing of East India Company servant
My research looks at four East India Company servants, all of whom published work about India in the period 1764-1800. John Zephaniah Holwell, Alexander Dow, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, and Charles Wilkins were all interested in Indian culture and religion, and all share a similar enthusiasm for what we now broadly recognise as Hinduism. Contrary to orthodox histories that followed the template of Biblical chronology, these writers posited Hinduism as an inherently moral and ancient religion that predated all other world religions. There are various points of departure between them, but all these writers shared a conviction in the original purity and essential monotheism of "Hindoo" or "Gentoo" philosophy, as expounded by its 'sagacious' Brahmins. In turn, these interpretations, and the evidence deployed to support them, had a significant impact on the world of European letters. Among others, Voltaire, Edmund Burke, David Hume and Moses Mendelssohn all responded critically to their work.
Supervisors
- Professor Stuart Jones
- Professor Jeremy Gregory
Funding awards
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- University of Manchester President's Award
Research interests
Intellectual History, The Enlightenment, The East India Company, Hinduism, Religion, Deism, Heterodoxy, Eighteenth-Century, and History of Philosophy.
Additional information
I obtained a BA in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. During my undergraduate degree I was mainly interested in the history of political thought. I went on to receive a distinction for the Queen Mary MA in the history of political thought and intellectual history (2011-2012). After some time living and working in Hong Kong I decided that I wanted to pursue my interest in intellectual history through further research. I joined the University of Manchester as an AHRC PhD candidate in September 2013.
Contact details
- Email: jessica.patterson@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Twitter: @J_E_Patterson
- Manchester Academia profile: Jessica Patterson
Research project
Thesis: 'The jokes on who?': Comedy and the construction of English identities, c. 1945 – 1970.
This thesis is examining the diversification of English identities from 1945 to 1970 through an analysis of popular stage, radio and television comedy. Humour provides a previously unexplored medium through which to study historical change but, as Vic Gatrell notes, can take us to the heart of a generation's 'shifting attitudes, sensibilities and anxieties'. The research is analysing comedic representations of four aspects of English identity: class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity and region and locality. In so doing it is responding to the appeal from Bill Schwarz that more research is required on how the popular media constructed new narratives of Englishness after 1945, and builds on Peter Mandler's thesis that the different levels of identity within the nation need unearthing.
Supervisors
Funding award
- President's Doctoral Scholarship
Research interests
Englishness, identity, popular culture, and comedy.
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: Emerging Elites in Anglo-Saxon England and Northern Francia, 1000-1150
Supervisors
Research project:
Thesis title: The Construction of a 'New Jerusalem': Bologna, Saint Petronio and the Santo Stefano Complex, 1100-1400
Supervisors:
805774 Katherine Reed: Graffiti at Ellis Island, New York (1900-1954): Personal testimony, mark-making ...
Research project
Thesis: Graffiti at Ellis Island, New York (1900-1954): Personal Testimony, Mark-Making and the Experience of Immigration
Supervisors
502000 Rosy Rickett: Spanish Civil War refugees and those they left behind
Research project
Thesis title: 'Spanish Civil War refugees and those they left behind: life histories, 1936-2013.'
I use different kinds of personal testimonies to both reconstruct the experiences of particular Spanish refugees at different stages of their lives and to assess how the memories of these experiences are shaped by present concerns and passed down through generations. Based on archived oral history interviews, additional oral history interviews I have carried out, refugees’ letters, unpublished and published memoirs, and official documents, my thesis brings together diverse and underused source materials stored in the UK, Spain and Mexico, as well as online.
Each chapter considers a different aspect of the refugees’ experiences and how these experiences are represented in the source material: motivations for leaving Spain, the ways in which people continued to communicate with people living in Spain, the experience of returning (or not returning) to Spain, and the memory of exile within families living in Mexico and Spain.
Supervisors
- Dr Pedro Ramos Pinto
- Professor Peter Gatrell
Research interests
- Personal testimony,
- Refugee studies,
- Spanish Civil War,
- Europe post-WW2,
- Cultural History of war.
Publications
Una comunidad imaginada: correspondencia entre los exiliados españoles y los que se quedaron en España, 1952-1975/ An imagined community: correspondence between Spanish exiles and those who stayed in Spain, 1952-1975, IV Encuentro de Jóvenes Investigadores de la Asociación de Historia Contemporánea, Universidad de Valencia, September 2013, Conference Proceedings.
Conference presentations
'The benefits of infidelity or why interdisciplinarity works for me', Beyond History: a postgraduate conference, History Lab North West, 1 November 2013.
'Una comunidad imaginada: correspondencia entre los exiliados españoles y los que se quedaron en España, 1952-1975', Meeting of young researchers 2013, University of Valencia, Spain, 10 September 2013.
''Este camino angustioso sobre el océano': Spanish Republican refugees on their way to Mexico, May-July, 1939', Social History Society Conference, University of Brighton, April 2012.Teaching experience
Graduate Teaching Assistant on 'Cultural history of modern war', University of Manchester, 2012 and 2014.
Responsibilities:
- seminar tutor;
- weekly office hours;
- essay and exam marking for 30 students.
Topics and themes covered:
- gendered experiences of war;
- genocide;
- experiences of displacement throughout the 20th century;
- treatment of/policies towards disabled veterans;
- experience of prisoners of war;
- war reenactment;
- museums, monuments and societal vs individual memory of conflicts.
Teaching techniques:
- engagement with scholarly literature from a range of disciplines;
- working with different primary sources including texts (newspapers, pamphlets etc.), oral history, films, official documents;
- discussion in class and small groups;
- setting topics for student-led presentations;
- one to one essay advice.
Contact details
- Email: rosy.rickett@manchester.ac.uk or rosyrickett@gmail.com
- Manchester Academia profile: Rosy Rickett
Research project
Thesis: Graffiti at Ellis Island, New York (1900-1954): Personal Testimony, Mark-Making and the Experience of Immigration
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis title: 'Spanish Civil War refugees and those they left behind: life histories, 1936-2013.'
I use different kinds of personal testimonies to both reconstruct the experiences of particular Spanish refugees at different stages of their lives and to assess how the memories of these experiences are shaped by present concerns and passed down through generations. Based on archived oral history interviews, additional oral history interviews I have carried out, refugees’ letters, unpublished and published memoirs, and official documents, my thesis brings together diverse and underused source materials stored in the UK, Spain and Mexico, as well as online.
Each chapter considers a different aspect of the refugees’ experiences and how these experiences are represented in the source material: motivations for leaving Spain, the ways in which people continued to communicate with people living in Spain, the experience of returning (or not returning) to Spain, and the memory of exile within families living in Mexico and Spain.
Supervisors
- Dr Pedro Ramos Pinto
- Professor Peter Gatrell
Research interests
- Personal testimony,
- Refugee studies,
- Spanish Civil War,
- Europe post-WW2,
- Cultural History of war.
Publications
Una comunidad imaginada: correspondencia entre los exiliados españoles y los que se quedaron en España, 1952-1975/ An imagined community: correspondence between Spanish exiles and those who stayed in Spain, 1952-1975, IV Encuentro de Jóvenes Investigadores de la Asociación de Historia Contemporánea, Universidad de Valencia, September 2013, Conference Proceedings.
Conference presentations
'The benefits of infidelity or why interdisciplinarity works for me', Beyond History: a postgraduate conference, History Lab North West, 1 November 2013.
'Una comunidad imaginada: correspondencia entre los exiliados españoles y los que se quedaron en España, 1952-1975', Meeting of young researchers 2013, University of Valencia, Spain, 10 September 2013.
''Este camino angustioso sobre el océano': Spanish Republican refugees on their way to Mexico, May-July, 1939', Social History Society Conference, University of Brighton, April 2012.Teaching experience
Graduate Teaching Assistant on 'Cultural history of modern war', University of Manchester, 2012 and 2014.
Responsibilities:
- seminar tutor;
- weekly office hours;
- essay and exam marking for 30 students.
Topics and themes covered:
- gendered experiences of war;
- genocide;
- experiences of displacement throughout the 20th century;
- treatment of/policies towards disabled veterans;
- experience of prisoners of war;
- war reenactment;
- museums, monuments and societal vs individual memory of conflicts.
Teaching techniques:
- engagement with scholarly literature from a range of disciplines;
- working with different primary sources including texts (newspapers, pamphlets etc.), oral history, films, official documents;
- discussion in class and small groups;
- setting topics for student-led presentations;
- one to one essay advice.
Contact details
- Email: rosy.rickett@manchester.ac.uk or rosyrickett@gmail.com
- Manchester Academia profile: Rosy Rickett
Research project
Thesis: Reconfiguring the role of credit in fifteenth-century England.
My research considers the role of credit as both an economic and social means of exchange in the late fifteenth-century market. Using manorial court rolls charting debt litigation in the Derbyshire region and a series of household accounts, the study focuses on the social relationships which accompanied economic transactions, asking how familial and neighbourly relations affected economic rationale. The focus on the close of the medieval period brings to the fore significant questions about the functions of credit in a market experiencing bullion shortage as well as age-old historiographical debates about the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the morality of the market.
Supervisors
Funding awards
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- Presidents Doctoral Scholar Award
Research interests
Credit, market, peasantry, and money.
Additional information
I completed my BA in history at the University of Exeter in 2012 and received my MA in early modern history from the University of Manchester in 2013. I am also publicity officer for the North West Early Modern Seminar.
Contact details
- Email: hannah.robb@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk
- Twitter: @HannahKRobb
Research project
Thesis: The Decline of Punishment Miracles in Medieval Europe, c.1000 - 1200
Thesis title
Elite Women, Emotions, and the Lived Experience in the Eighteenth-Century Country House, 1700-1830
Supervisors
Research project
This thesis explores the lived experiences of elite women residing in the English country house during the eighteenth century. By asking the question, 'what was it like to be the mistress of the country house?'; this thesis reconstructs the embodied experiences of elite women in these environments as it considers their everyday physiological, emotional, and sensory navigation of their homes.
Scholarship looking at elite women's relationships with the country house has received more attention in recent years following decades of erasure and has reinstated their position as impressive social, cultural, political, and domestic agents whose management of the country house held significant and wide-reaching implications for eighteenth-century society. This thesis adds to this body of work by illustrating how elite women felt about these roles, how they dealt with the pressures and expectations placed upon them, and how this impacted their wellbeing, their health, and their understanding of the country house as a lived environment.
The following chapters are framed around themes that represent important elements of the lived experience - mind, body, self, and death - and look respectively at elite women's mental health, their embodied experiences of sickness, their assertions of identity, and finally their conceptualisation of mortality and legacy in the country house.
To do so, this thesis draws on a range of sources and disciplines and demonstrates how past lived experiences can be accessed and recreated via interdisciplinary study. In so doing, this thesis makes an important contribution to the field by introducing an approach by which an individual's sentience and lifeworld can be recreated, providing a better understanding of the culture, society and, most importantly, the environments that they inhabited.
Through this work, the country house, and the expectations it placed upon its mistresses emerge as a prominent influential force in elite women's lives and allows us to re-read these environments as conscious declarations of self, experience, and emotion.
Research project
Thesis: Mandarins in Manchester: Networks, Authenticity and Projections of China in the Art Collections of John Hilditch (1872-1930)
This thesis will investigate the Chinese art collection amassed by John Hilditch (1872-1930), in order to explore British understandings, and engagements with China. This research will use the collection in order to understand Hilditch’s self-representation, revealing what an affiliation with ‘the Orient’ could offer British individuals in interwar Britain, and in particular Manchester. More than a biography of Hilditch, this thesis will provide a broader insight into British culture following the First World War, addressing themes of race, imperialism, authenticity, Chinese modernity and museology.
Supervisors
Research interests
British imperialism, Sino-British relations, material culture, individuals and identity.
Additional information
I completed both my BA (2014) and MA (2016) in History at the University of Manchester. In between, I spent ten months in China teaching English. Other interests include football and 80s pop.
Twitter: @lewryder
Research project
Thesis title: The First Sisterhood: Strikes and Solidarity within the Sexual Politics of First-wave Feminists in Britain and the USA, 1840-1920
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: The Affective Communities of Protestantism in the North West of England, 1660-1730.
The historiography of English Protestantism following the Restoration of Charles II to the rise of Methodism is one dominated by conflict and the decline of energetic religious devotion in the form of a "reaction against enthusiasm". It is the purpose of this thesis to use emerging methodologies and disciplines, principally, the history of emotions, to challenge these over-arching narratives. The work contends that an examination the practice of pious and devotional activities by English Protestants of the period will demonstrate both a greater unity at the heart of English Protestantism, across conformist and confessional divides. Moreover, an understanding of the linguistic construction of categories of feeling and the role and nature of feeling within devotion will demonstrate that religious practice retained a vibrancy otherwise neglected in current historiography.
Supervisors
- Professor Jeremy Gregory
- Dr Sasha Handley
- Dr Andrew Crome
Research interests
English Protestantism, History of Emotions, The Household, Devotional Culture, Gender, Anglicanism, Puritanism, Dissent, History of Christianity, Early Modern History, Seventeenth-Century History, and Eighteenth-Century History.
Conference presentations
'"The expressing of Devout Affections of the Heart"; Piety and the Affections in the Works of Matthew Henry', Matthew Henry: The Bible, Prayer, and Piety interdisciplinary conference at The University of Chester 14th–16th July 2014.
Additional information
- BA (Hons.) History – University of Sheffield – awarded 2010
- MA Early Modern History – University of Manchester – awarded 2013
- Secretary of the North West Early Modern Seminar 2012/13, 2013/14:
Contact details
Research project
The Limits of Americanisation?: Hollywood Cinema and British Popular Culture in the 1960s
This thesis presents a sustained analysis of Hollywood cinema and how it was received in 1960s Britain. The thesis focuses on the success of American films at the British box office, the promotion of stars in the media and the broadcast of Hollywood movies on television. In doing so, my research demonstrates the continued success of Hollywood cinema in Britain during the 1960s, which was achieved through the use of popular genres as well as the importance of Hollywood stars in presenting constructions of gender and national identity. My research also emphasises the significance of television in presenting Hollywood cinema to British viewers, as well as highlighting television as a site of direct interaction between American and British popular culture. Consequently, this thesis complicates the image of the 1960s as a liberalising decade in British society and culture due to the sustained popularity of American cultural forms, alongside the limited success of British popular culture in addressing the challenges of contemporary society as a response to American influences.
Thesis Supervisors:
Research project
Thesis: Rationed Food: Experience and Memory.
My thesis evaluates how lived and memorialised experiences of rationing in the Second World War affected the nature of gender construction then and now, offering new insights into the connections between national and individual histories. Central to this investigation are three key themes: marital relationships, parent-child interactions, and war work.
This thesis offers an original assessment of rationing as a gendered issue by examining a diverse set of primary sources including diaries, oral history recordings and museum exhibitions. Many of these sources have not been used by other researchers, and provide exciting new avenues of study.
Supervisors
- Professor Penny Summerfield
- Dr Julie-Marie Strange
- Dr Charlotte Wildman
Funding awards
2014:
- School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC) Postgraduate Bursary, The University of Manchester, £220
- Best Poster Presentation Award, American Historical Association Conference
- Jones Travelling Grant, The University of Manchester, £200
2013:
- Lessons of War Conference Postgraduate Bursary, Lancaster University, £25
- Anglo-American Conference Postgraduate Bursary, Institute of Historical Research, £100
- School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC) Postgraduate Bursary, The University of Manchester, £244
- Artsmethods@manchester conference funding, How Does Gender Mean? Conference, £385
- Institute of Historical Research Friends Bursary, £400
2012:
- SALC Postgraduate Bursary, The University of Manchester, £200
Research interests
Food Rationing, Gender, Second World War, and Personal Testimony.
Publications
'Imported Food' to be published in Ken Albala (ed.), Food Issues, an encyclopaedia expected in autumn 2014.
Review of Dianne Lawrence’s book, 'Genteel Women: empire and domestic material culture, 1840–1910', Women's History Review (2013), p.1-2.
Conference presentations
2014:
- Women’s History Network Annual Conference, University of Worcester, '"A Good Housewife in Wartime": Food Rationing and the Construction of Femininity on the British Home Front'
- Social History Society Conference, Northumbria University, 'Sunshine Susies, Single Women and Feeding Practices: Domesticity and Gender Construction in Wartime’
- NGender Research Seminar Series, University of Sussex, '"A Good Housewife in Wartime": Food Rationing and the Construction of Femininity on the British Home Front'
- American Historical Association Conference, Washington, D.C., 'Rationed Food: Experience and Memory', poster presentation
2013:
- Lessons of War: Gender History and the Second World War Conference, Lancaster University, 'Experiences of Rationing: Between Domesticity and War Work'
- Social History Society Conference, University of Leeds, 'Memories of Rationing: An Analysis of the Links Between Food and Gender in the Second World War'
- How Does Gender Mean? Debates and Applications in Modern Britain Conference, The University of Manchester, 'Looking Through the Rationing Lens: Recalling Gender Roles and the British Home Front in the Second World War'
Conference organisation and facilitation
2014:
- Social History Society Conference, Northumbria University, panel co-organizer, 'War, Food and Relationships'
2013:
- History Lab North West Conference, The University of Manchester, panel chair
- Lessons of War: Gender History and the Second World War Conference, Lancaster University, panel chair
- How Does Gender Mean? Debates and Applications in Modern Britain Conference, The University of Manchester, co-organized, facilitated and chaired
- History Lab North West Conference, The University of Liverpool, panel chair
Teaching experience
2014:
- Lectured in 'Men’s Roles and Women’s Work, 1918-1939' on 'Cities and Citizens: Foundations of Modern British History' course, Year 1 undergraduate history module
2013:
- Seminar Tutor - 'Who Do You Think You Are? Identity and Selfhood in Modern Britain (1750-2000)', Year 2 undergraduate history module
2012:
- Seminar Tutor - 'Cities and Citizens'
Additional information
Originally from Rochester, New York, I came to the Britain in 2010 to study for a Master’s Degree in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London. I went on to postgraduate work at The University of Manchester in 2011. Currently, I am completing my third year of PhD studies in the Department of History at Manchester.
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: The Child Detective in British Culture and Society, 1900-1950
My project investigates the social and cultural meanings of the child detective, which was an increasingly popular feature of children's media in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on fictional representations of child detectives (most notably those created by prolific children's author Enid Blyton), as well as training and education initiatives aimed at developing children's skills in observation, my research will explore how the young investigator demonstrated changing notions of childhood in the new 'watchdog' state. In particular, I am interested in how the 'innocence' of childhood was increasingly cross-cut with messages of surveillance, control, and suspicion. As previous scholarship has utilised Sherlock Holmes to interrogate issues such as masculinity, national identity, and modernity, my focus on the child investigator will shed further light on the construction of youth identities, and the role of juvenile literary and leisure cultures in shaping these identities.
Supervisors
Research interests
Surveillance and policing, urban geography, visual culture, gender history, British and Canadian imperial history.
Additional information
- MA (Distinction) History, The University of Manchester;
- BA History, Human Geography, University of British Columbia (Vancouver).
Contact details
Research project
Complicating the Narrative: Memorialisation of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the United States
This thesis tracks the memorialisation of the civil rights and Black power movements from 1970 until 2022. It reads this memorial landscape against the burgeoning scholarship of the Black freedom movement to determine what popular narratives are upheld or rejected at memorial sites. Drawing on various disciplines including history, geography, and museum studies, this thesis argues that the landscape has undergone significant change—between 1970 and 2022—regarding leadership, region, gender, and Black Power. Studies in civil rights memory have yet to address these changes. This study provides a methodological intervention by combining these disciplines to answer how the memorial landscape has changed over time.
Thesis supervisors
Research project
Thesis: The classical world and the concept of civilisation in British thought, 1919-39.
My thesis examines the relationship between interpretations of the classical world and the concept of civilisation in interwar British political and international thought. It is primarily a history of the ideas of four intellectuals who were both ancient historians and variously engaged in international politics, R.G. Collingwood, Gilbert Murray, Arnold J. Toynbee and Alfred Zimmern. This thesis involves an inter-textual and philological analysis of their writings on the classical world, international theory, philosophy of history and contemporary political affairs in order to address imbalances in prevailing interpretations of their thought and establish a greater understanding of how the concept of civilisation was interpreted. My thesis contends that interwar British social, political and cultural thought cannot be properly understood without directly addressing the concept of civilisation. Civilisation was the essential lens through which people envisaged contemporary political and international affairs as well as the wider experience of modernity.
Supervisors
Research interests
British and European political, social and cultural thought, 1890-1945 | British historiography | Interwar internationalism
Funding awards
Faculty of Humanities, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Graduate Scholarship, 2016
Additional information
I completed my BA in History at the University of Leeds in 2013, where I focused mainly on medieval exploration and the Crusades. I completed an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge in June 2016. My research looked at interpretations of ancient Rome in British historiography, philosophy and political thought, looking particularly at J.B. Bury, R.G. Collingwood, and Francis Haverfield and the Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero.
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: The History, Experience and Commemoration of Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in the Philippines in the 20th Century
My research will analyse the role of the Philippines within the realm of forced displacement in the twentieth century, focusing on socio-political aspects and their effect on the collective memory of Filipinos today. This topic is an entirely new approach to Philippine history in the twentieth century, which has been dominated by issues of Philippine identity and sovereignty. I shall establish to what extent the Philippines was a pioneer in responding to refugee situations and to what extent it followed the example of other countries. My approach is informed by social science theory and methods (particularly inter-disciplinary refugee studies).
Supervisors
- Professor Peter Gatrell
- Dr Aaron Moore
Additional information
I did my BA in Classical Studies at King's College London, then pursued my Master of Studies at the University of Oxford focusing on Late Antique and Byzantine Studies. With a general interest in history, I chose to pursue my research on forced displacement of the twentieth century.
Contact details
Thesis title
'Dynasty and Succession: The Legitimation of Royal Authority in Ninth- and Tenth-Century England'
Supervisors
Thesis abstract
The ninth and tenth centuries are well regarded as a pivotal phase of English history; typically, due to a combination of military success in the face of Scandinavian incursions, the formation of a single kingdom under a unified church, and the establishment of a coherent and centralised apparatus of governance. Less well appreciated, however, are the practices and strategies of succession of the Ecgberhting royal family, under whom these developments occurred. This thesis seeks to recentre the role of royal family politics and the contingent and dynamic role of succession within elite networks as integral dimensions of kingship. It is the style, rather than the structure, of rulership that is of interest here. In so doing, this thesis advocates a reappraisal of the political culture of the emergent English kingdom and interrogates the criteria by which narratives of kingdom and ‘state’ formation are constructed.
Research project
Bhadramahilas and activists: gender, class, and political involvement in late colonial Bengal (c. 1920s-1940s)
This thesis explores the subjectivities of activists and politically conscious bhadramahilas, or Bengali middle-class educated ‘gentlewomen’, during the last decades of British rule, as emerging from their own writings. It argues that the bhadramahila identity – usually identified with passivity and derivativeness – and activism were not mutually exclusive categories; rather, they gave life to a broad spectrum of diverse subjectivities that historiography has failed to fully grasp.
Scholarship has often depicted Indian women acting assertively as either docile subjects of their male guardians, or shocking yet circumscribed exceptions to otherwise respected gendered norms. By advancing new methodological and interpretative perspectives on the articulation of Bengali women’s political selves, this dissertation explores how these actors variously navigated, challenged, and reflected on their selfhoods as produced by intersecting discourses of class, gender, and caste.
From the political associations of the late 1920s, to the revolutionary movement of the 1930s and the communist movement of the early 1940s, Bengali women displayed progressively bolder and less derivative forms of agency in the public sphere. This was often paired with a calculated attention at maintaining ‘respectability’, thus producing complex subjectivities. This dissertation studies both prominent activists, like Latika Ghose, Bina Das, and Manikuntala Sen, and non-activist women, such as the Indian memsahib Mrs. Ghoshal, through their writings, while also drawing in their immediate formative environment, associations, and networks of support. It analyses their activities and political sentiments in the light of their wider interactions with the nationalist, revolutionary and communist politics, as well as amongst themselves.
In the process it is possible to see their framed subjectivities in contestation with the ways in which political roles for women were being defined in contemporary discourses. In this study, such subjectivities are understood as different iterations of the ‘bhadramahila and activist’ spectrum, thus showing how female activists progressively carved a space for themselves as women in the public sphere.
Thesis supervisors
Research project
Thesis: Developing the Picture: Women Photographers in Vietnam, 1961-1975
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: US-Philippine Cold War Relations, 1946-1969.
This project is an analysis of the US-Philippine relationship during the height of the Cold War. I focus on Filipino contributions to the Vietnam War, socio-economic conditions in the Philippines and how these were the foundations for recurring domestic unrest which challenged the American-style democracy and independence in the newly founded Republic of the Philippines, and the impact of the global Cold War on the foreign policies of successive Philippine presidents. This will contribute a fresh perspective on US policy and the influence of US policy, in Southeast Asia during the height of the Vietnam War and examine the development of a newly independent state which had been a colony on the United States for half a century. I will be primarily using documentation from the LBJ Presidential Library, NARA College Park, as well as material form LSE and SOAS.
Supervisors
- Dr Aaron Moore
- Dr Thomas Tunstall Allcock
Funding award
- Zochonis Grant
Research interests
Cold War, South East Asia, Philippines, United States, foreign policy, communism, China, Vietnam War, colonialism, and Lyndon B Johnson.
Teaching experience
From Middle Kingdom to Economic Superpower: The Making of Modern China, 1800-2000.
Additional information
I have complete both my BA and MA at Manchester
and am currently a PhD candidate at Manchester. I undertook research during summer 2013 in London at LSE, SOAS, and the National Archive, and then in the United States at the LBJ Presidential Library (Austin, Texas) and the National Archive (College Park, Maryland).
Contact details
- Email: ben.walker@manchester.ac.uk
Research project
Thesis: Race, motherhood, and multiculturalism: the making of female identities in the British inner city, 1970-2000
My thesis recovers the lives and identities of women who lived in Britain’s inner cities in the late twentieth century. Building on a variety of source material, including oral history testimony, personal memoir, and grassroots publications, it looks closely at the experiences of women of colour who came to be concentrated in Britain’s inner cities, but whose lives have evaded historical interrogation. This thesis also explores representations of inner-city women in the tabloid press, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’ to tease out the connections between race, inner-city womanhood, and national identity in the late twentieth century. It argues that, far from being one-dimensional recipients of social and geographical misfortune, inner-city women had multi-faceted identities made up of personal, inter-personal, and transnational experiences, which transcended the environmental and temporal realities in which they lived
Supervisors
Additional information
I have had work published in The Historical Journal, Rethinking History, Women's History Review and the European Review of History.
I am currently the Book Reviews Editor for the European Review of History.
I am the recipient of the University of Manchester’s School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Studentship.
Contact details
Email: jessica.white@manchester.ac.uk
Twitter: @jesswhitehist
Research project
Thesis: Savagery and Civilisation: Representations of Americans in English Print Culture 1492-1607.
This project seeks to examine English understandings of indigenous Americans in the period prior to the settling of the Jamestown colony in 1607. By looking at English print culture between 1492 and 1607 I hope to discover how far representations of America, usually associated with English colonialism and Enlightenment thinking, were already present in the sixteenth century. The project will explore to what extent ideas of ‘barbarian’ and ‘noble savage’, and their contrast with European ‘civilisation’, were the result of Renaissance and Reformation notions of religion, morality, and classical knowledge, not just that of the Enlightenment propensity for rationality and empiricism. Much printed Americana from this period was either adapted or translated from works first produced in continental Europe, influencing the way America was perceived at a time when the English had little direct experience of the world across the Atlantic. The project will also, therefore, have a transnational dimension, examining the adaptation of European concepts and the cultural and intellectual connections between England and her European neighbours.
Supervisors
- Dr Sasha Handley
- Dr Jenny Spinks
Funding awards
- Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Block Grant Partnership Award
- President's Doctoral Scholar Award
Research interests
Early Modern English Society, Print Culture, and Cultural Encounters.
Contact details
Research project
Thesis: Tensions of development and postcolonial identities at the periphery of France: French Guiana, 1946-1996.
The only South American territory never to gain its independence, French Guiana (Guyane française) to this day remains an Overseas Department of France and Ultraperipheral Region of the European Union. It has a land area around the size of Portugal, but a population which – although it has multiplied tenfold since 1961 - would barely people a European city. Guyane's population is also remarkably cosmopolitan, with Amerindians, Maroons, Haitians, Dominicans, Surinamese, Guyanese, Brazilians and metropolitan French people among those sharing its territory.
My doctoral thesis traces French imaginings of Guyane between 1946 and 2006, asking how local inhabitants have engaged with these visions, and how identities have been negotiated in a place where French governance is transposed onto Amazonian geography. It posits that Guyane's conceptual and geographical situation - as a European frontier linking France, the Caribbean and Amazonian South America - presents an important challenge to narratives of postcolonial development and to constructions of French national identity.
Supervisors
- Professor Bertrand Taithe
- Dr Laurence Brown
- Dr Barbara Lebrun
Research interests
- Twentieth-century France,
- overseas departments and territories,
- migration,
- cultural geographies,
- constructions,
- representations of identity.
Conference presentations
'An "interior" war on the margins of France: the Surinamese Civil War and Guyane, 1986-1996', 60th Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies, Université du Québec à Montréal, 25 April 2014.
'Traces-mémoires of atrocity: commemorating the Surinamese "Interior War" in Suriname and Guyane, SSFH and ASMCF Joint Postgraduate Study Day, Newcastle University, 1 March 2014.
'Silences, space and ecology: representing the "Amerindian" in contemporary Guyane', Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF), University of Leicester, 5
September 2013.
'France's final frontier? Migration, politics and development in French Guiana since 1946', The Latin American and Caribbean Studies Symposium of the North West Doctoral Training Consortium, University of Manchester, 17 May 2012.
'The Galmot affair and the Politics of Violence in interwar Guyane', ASMCF, SSFH and ADEFFI study day, University of Sheffield, 3 March 2012.
Teaching experience
The Making of the Modern Mind: European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Freud (2013).
Contact details
- Email: sarah.wood-2@manchester.ac.uk
- WordPress: Locating Guyane
Research project
Thesis: 'Cameralism, Confucianism, legalism and the global development of economic thought in the last millennium AD
Supervisors
Research project
Thesis: Mediating China's second world war, 1945-1949: Regional memory in history and film