Overview
Our PhD research programmes will allow you to explore your own interests in history, supported by the expertise of our staff.
Find out more about studying during COVID-19 in the Entry requirements section, below.
Full description
You’ll be allocated two supervisors, with additional staff members available if necessary. Our supervisors are experienced in most areas of history, with a focus on Labour history, the British Empire, local history, the monarchy and aristocracy, Russian history and the history of popular culture.
We’ll provide you with a rich and stimulating research environment with strong links to research networks in Anglia Ruskin and the wider community, including the University of Cambridge's Centre for Research into Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH). We host the Labour History Research Unit (LHRU), which promotes fresh approaches to Labour history – both British and international – through seminars, conferences, postgraduate studies and scholarly publications, and contribute to many of the Faculty’s other research groups, including the StoryLab Research Institute.
We also host and take part in many other research events, including regular Faculty and departmental research seminars, which will allow you to present your research in a safe and supportive setting. These events, along with our online environment, will help you connect with other research students from a range of disciplines.
All your subject-specific studies will be enhanced and supported by our University-wide training sessions, where you’ll gain important research expertise in areas like ethics, presentations, intellectual property and digital scholarship.
Supervision and Support
Our permanent supervisory staff are recognised as international experts in their fields, and have produced a large number of influential books, journal articles and edited collections, and won funding for a number of prestigious research projects. Our history expertise includes:
Dr Jon Davis: Russian and Soviet history; British labour and socialist history.
Dr Sean Lang: history of the British Empire; social history of empire; imperialism in popular and children's literature; decolonisation.
Dr Rohan McWilliam: social and political history; popular politics and popular culture in the modern period; Victorian studies; the history of London (especially the West End).
Dr Nina Lübbren: nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century art, art and the fantastic, Bollywood cinema, visual narratives.
Dr Richard Carr: modern British history, the British Conservative Party c. 1867 onwards, impacts of the First World War, eugenics and fascism in Britain between the wars, the British Labour Party after 1918.
Dr Lucy Bland: late nineteenth- and twentieth-century British gender history.
Your department and faculty
At the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, we believe in thinking critically about the past, present and future to challenge perceptions and better understand communities and people.
With expertise from gender issues to literary analysis to exploring how the past has shaped our modern world, all our staff members are active researchers. This is reflected in our teaching, allowing us to support our students with the latest theories and practices, as well as essential employability advice.
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