Applications are invited for funded studentships in the School of Social, Political and Geographical Sciences at Loughborough University. Internationally renowned for its research excellence, the University has a vibrant research student community of around 1500 students supported by an £8 million annual investment. In the most recent Research Excellence Framework, every department was found to be undertaking research that is internationally recognised, with many regarded as ‘world leading’. Comfortably ranked in the top 20 of all major university league tables, the University was voted The Times Higher Education ‘Best Student Experience’ in England for the past six years.
The studentships are open to UK/EU graduates with backgrounds in relevant disciplines and who are articulate, well qualified and highly motivated. The minimum entry qualification is a 2.1 Honours degree or equivalent. International (non EU) students may apply but due to funding restrictions will need to find the difference in fees between those for a ‘UK/EU’ and ‘international’ student themselves. The studentship is for three years at the standard RCUK rate of £14,057 for the 2015-16 academic year.
You must identify and contact a potential supervisor in the School/Department before submission in order to discuss your proposal, which should relate to SSPGS staff expertise. Details are available here: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/study/finance/research/studentships/studentships/six-phd-studentships-in-the-school-of-social-political-and-geographical-science.html.
Dr Catherine Armstrong, Dr Marcus Collins, Dr Thoralf Klein, Dr Robert Knight, Dr Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Prof Chris Szejnmann would like to hear from anyone interested in studying for a PhD in Modern History.
Catherine Armstrong is Lecturer in Modern American History. Her specialism is the printed representation of the landscape of South Carolina and Georgia prior to American independence. She is especially interested in tracing the origins of a unique American identity throughout the colonial period. Her recent monograph 'Landscape and Identity in Britain's North American Colonies', published in 2013 with Ashgate, examines the intersection between print culture, landscape and identity. She is also a book historian, focusing on the production, distribution and consumption of print in England and North America in the long eighteenth century and she organises the Book History Research Network. She has co-authored a textbook entitled 'The Atlantic Experience' (Palgrave, 2013) asking whether the Atlantic History paradigm is useful for students today. A new interest is non-traditional slave holding in the Atlantic World. This research will challenge the idea that slave holders have to be rich white men. Dr Armstrong would welcome students with an interest in American social and cultural history prior to 1865, on transatlantic relations between Britain and her American colonies, and on the Atlantic world more broadly.
Marcus Collins is Lecturer in Modern British History. His interests include permissiveness, popular culture, national identity, gender, sexuality, historiography and the experience of modernity in twentieth-century Britain. His first book, Modern Love (2003), explored how women's emancipation changed the theory and practice of friendship, marriage and sexual activity from the fin de siècle to the present. He then edited The Permissive Society and Its Enemies: Sixties British Culture, out of which sprung his current book project entitled ‘Great Freedom: The Beatles and the Permissive Society’. He would particularly welcome enquiries from students wishing to research popular culture or identity politics in the 1960s and beyond.
Thoralf Klein is Senior Lecturer in Modern History. He is a specialist in the modern history of China from about 1800 to the present. His main interests encompass China’s relationship with the world at large, in particular the history and legacy of Western imperialism, the history of religion in modern China and the culture of Chinese politics in the twentieth century. His publications include “Die Basler Mission in der Provinz Guangdong, 1859-1931” (2002), a textbook entitled “Geschichte Chinas von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart” (2nd edition 2009) and (ed. with Thomas Jansen and Christian Meyer) "Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China" (2014). Dr Klein would welcome students with an interest in global/transnational history, the history of imperialism, media history, mission history and/or the history of political ideologies.
Robert Knight is Senior Lecturer in International History. His main research interests are the legacy of National Socialism in Germany and Austria, with particular reference to denazification, antisemitism, the restitution of “Aryanised” property and the treatment of Slav minorities. He is especially interested in the way the “high politics” of the Cold War interacted with national and regional politics in Central Europe. Recent publications include articles on on Denazification in the Austrian province of Carinthia (Journal of Modern History), the SOE (Special Operations Executive) in Austria and a review of Tom Segev’s biography of Simon Wiesenthal for the Times Literary Supplement. He was a member of the Austrian Historians' Commission, investigating Austrian restitution and compensation policy (1998-2003) and gave the 2006 Glasgow Holocaust Memorial Lecture on 'Austria and the Holocaust.' He is currently completing a study of the Carinthian Slovenes in post-war Austria and editing a collection on Ethnicity in the Cold War.
Siobhan Lambert-Hurley is Senior Lecturer in Modern History. She would welcome students interested in women’s history, Islam, autobiography, the culture of travel, education, and/or princely states in modern South Asia. Her current research project is on Muslim women’s autobiographical writing in South Asia with a focus on changing notions of the self. She also leads an AHRC-funded network on ‘Women’s Autobiography in Islamic Societies’. Her publications include Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (with Sunil Sharma) (2010), Muslim Women, Reform and Princely Patronage: Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal (2007), A Princess's Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum's A Pilgrimage to Mecca (2007)and Rhetoric and Reality: Gender and the Colonial Experience in South Asia (with A. Powell) (2006).
Chris Szejnmann is Professor in Modern History. His interests encompass modern Germany, the phenomena of anti-Semitism and fascism, and teaching and learning methodologies, in particular e-learning and the use of film. The main questions that have engaged him are how people responded to Nazism, how they behaved during the ‘Third Reich’, and how Germans and non-Germans have come to terms with the Second World War and the Holocaust after 1945. His main publications are: (co-edited with Benjamin Ziemann), "Machtergreifung”. The Nazi seizure of Power in 1933, Sonderheft Politics, Religion & Ideology, 14 (3) 2013; (co-edited with Maiken Umbach), Heimat, Region, and Empire. Spatial Identities under National Socialism (2012); (editor) Rethinking History, Dictatorships and War. New Approaches and Interpretations (2009); (co-edited with Olaf Jensen), Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective (2008); (co-edited with M.L. Davies), How the Holocaust Looks Now. International Perspectives (2006), Vom Traum zum Alptraum. Sachsen während der Weimarer Republik (2000); Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in ‘Red’ Saxony (1999). He is currently writing Contesting the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2015).
If you would like to discuss a possible research project informally,
please e-mail Catherine (C.M.Armstrong@lboro.ac.uk), Marcus (Marcus.Collins @lboro.ac.uk), Thoralf (T.E.Klein@lboro.ac.uk), Robert (R.G.Knight @lboro.ac.uk), Siobhan (S.T.Lambert-Hurley @lboro.ac.uk), Chris (C.W.Szejnmann @lboro.ac.uk).
Applications can be made online at: www.lboro.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/howtoapply/.