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Research in Focus

Mike word cloud

Historians across boundaries: changing how we research the past

In this blog post, Senior Lecturer in History Mike Esbester introduces an important new seminar series he’s involved in leading: ‘Historians across boundaries.’ It’s based at the Institute of Historical Research, the London-based body that has promoted and championed historical research for nearly 100 years. This important new seminar series will help bring people together […]

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MoorishAmbassador_to_Elizabeth_I cropped

Elizabeth I seeks friends amongst the Eastern Islamic powers

After a talk with his eventual dissertation supervisor Dr Katy Gibbons, third-year UoP student Richard Grainger was inspired to enrich his knowledge of twentieth-century orientalism in a dissertation which applied his theoretical understanding to the study of a period when Islamic nations were the more dominant powers. The university’s history department prides itself on delivering […]

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The Battle of Culloden

The domestic colonisation of eighteenth-century Scotland

Third year student Kathryn Watts chose an original focus for her dissertation in investigating the eighteenth century attack on Scottish culture. As she argues below, colonialism is often looked at in the global context, but the domestic colonialism of Scotland (and Ireland) predated it, and provided a prototype for many of the colonialist ideas of […]

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Photos of Wehrmacht soldiers

Germans coming to terms with the crimes of the past: the role of the Wehrmacht in World War II

In his dissertation third-year history student Tim Marsella studied the changing understandings and representations of the role of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces in World War II) within modern Germany.  He shows how a landmark exhibition in the 1990s challenged perceptions about the breadth of involvement in war crimes, but also how coming to terms […]

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Hans Holbein ship with sailors

Cut-throat communities, angry noblemen, and a noseless pirate! My journey through the joys and horrors of writing a dissertation

Below, the first of a series on this year’s bumper crop of student dissertations, from my own supervisee Tom Underwood.  Tom was one of the most prepared and organised students I’ve ever supervised, but as he mentions below, also still honing his dissertation down to the wire, and we were blown away with the results.  […]

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IMG_4500 Amelia presentation cropped

From Margins to Centre? An undergraduate conference on marginalised histories

At Portsmouth we were delighted to have not one, but two students presenting their work at the recent ‘From Margins to Centre’ conference at the University of York – a testament to the innovative and exciting research our students are devising and doing. In this blog post our second contributor, third year student Amelia Boddice, […]

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