Research expertise videos
When you join a research programme with us, you are learning from, and collaborating with, experts in the field.
A selection of academic staff share their areas of expertise, in discussion with Dr Richard Goddard.
Professor Sarah Badcock - modern revolutionary Russia
I’ve been working on a range of periods from late 19th into early 20th century Russia. I’m interested in the experience of ordinary people in a range of different contexts. I’d describe myself primarily as a social historian, but I would also work in cultural and political and spatial histories as well.
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Dr Ross Balzaretti - medieval Italy and gender
Increasingly, funders of PhDs like people to be quite interdisciplinary, so one piece of advice I would give is don’t just think in terms of narrowly conventional historical work. You might be more likely to get the funding if you can straddle a bit outside of the discipline, or collaborate.
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Dr Dean Blackburn - contemporary politics
I’m not a traditional historian, partly because I’ve got one foot in politics and political theory. What I’m interested in are political ideas and the stories we tell about them. I’m really using the past as a bit of a laboratory for thinking about how we study ideas.
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Dr Onni Gust - modern imperial Britain, race and gender
Broadly speaking, what I’m working on is transgender history. I’m thinking about what role sex plays, and changing idea of sex plays, in what it means to be human. So can you be human if you don’t have a sex? In the 18th century, that’s kind of a debate.
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Dr Tarik Oumazzane - Middle Eastern and North African studies
Most of [the] scholarship tends to centre on the war, on conflict...so I notice there is a gap. There is a need to change that discourse because the region is so strategically important. I thought there needs to be some research that talks about political cooporation, economic integration, that can promote peace and stability in a region that needs it for itself but also needs it for the world.
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Dr Nathan Richards - modern black Britain
I myself don’t really specialise in a period, I’m more interested in methods and theories and ways of knowing. If you are a student that’s interested in exploring ways of understanding the past, using digital humanities, using black studies, that’s what I’m interested in.
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Dr Claire Taylor - medieval heresy
Within families you would have people supporting different heretical groups. It really breaks down this idea that heresy is transmitted through families. That is very important because these days we tend to put people in ideological boxes, and I think a lot more of it comes down to people finding answers for themselves.
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