Emily Jays graduated in Summer 2021 with a 2:1 in History and Sociology. Her dissertation was titled “Transgressing Gender Norms and National Identities Through Dress: Three 20th Century Case Studies”. This explored how clothing was used by flappers within 1920s America, butch lesbians and transgender women in post-1950 Britain and Muslim women and the veil […]
Tag Archives | dissertations
King Charles I – a man of principle, not a “man of blood”?
Many people instinctively blame King Charles I for the British Civil Wars. So recent UoP history graduate Connor Scott-Butcher’s decision to use his dissertation to challenge the idea, perpetuated by the regicides, that Charles was a “man of blood”, and the weight of historical argument ranged against him, always seemed to me a risky and […]
“Let’s start at the very beginning”: an attempt to explain the dissertation and provide reassurance
By James Farrar, final-year history student at the University of Portsmouth. James’s supervisor Dr Fiona McCall writes: James was an exemplary dissertation student, always ahead of schedule in planning and carrying out his dissertation work, making him ideally placed to advise others on how to go about it. James’s dissertation, ‘“This creature not deserving […]
The Forty Elephants – a forgotten female gang of South London
Last year Emily Burgess produced an outstanding dissertation on the all-female working-class gang from South London known as the Forty elephants. Here she writes about how she came up with the idea and carried out the research, with Rob James as supervisor. Emily concludes with some useful advice for all our students currently writing proposals […]
Coping with your second year of history studies – time management is the key
Charlotte Lewis chose the History with Politics pathway in her second year of studies at Portsmouth. She found the second year to be a ‘step-up’ from the first year, and gives three suggestions for ways to meet the challenge. This time last year I began my second-year studies in History with Politics at the University […]
Third-year history – don’t be daunted and have confidence you will be OK
Ben Humphreys, who graduated in history with the UoP this year, expected to find his third year of history studies hard but actually found he had acquired the skills and resilience in his previous two years of study to get through the third year smoothly. There are a lot of assumptions that the third year […]