History research at Northumbria spans more than 700 years, and six continents. We are a team of 38 historians, including three Early Career Fellows funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), History at Northumbria ranked 18th amongst History departments nationally for the quality of our publications. Our team includes business, cultural, environmental, gender, migration, political, religious and social historians, and our expertise ranges from the study of medieval France and Spain to the nineteenth century Middle East and the contemporary Indian diaspora.
Our six research groups – Global and Transnational History, Environmental Humanities, Conflict and Society, American Studies, Histories of Activism, and Medieval and Early Modern Studies – are central to the research culture in History. They encourage synergy and cross-pollination of ideas across the History team, and we use them to share work in progress, build links with national and international networks, and engage with external partners and audiences.
Our current collaborative research projects include the following:
From 2021 Dr Felicia Gottmann will hold a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for her project ‘Migration, Adaptation, Innovation 1500-1800’. Felicia will lead a team of researchers investigating the role that immigration played in the development of new technologies. The project uses examples from Europe, the Middle East and South and East Asia, and involves collaborations with museums and community partners in the UK and internationally.
Leona Skelton is collaborating with partners at Liverpool University, Glasgow University and Historic England on the AHRC-funded project ‘Building Climate Resilience through Community, Landscape and Cultural Heritage’. The project aims to understand how future climate resilience can benefit from understanding how past communities have engaged with and adapted to the vagaries of extreme weather, and longer-term climate variability.
In 2019/2020, Dr James McConnel, Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities, is holding a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship for his project, 'The Fighting Race'? Contested Images of Irish Soldiers in the First World War’.
Among our recent publications are the following monographs:
Peter Hill, Utopia and Civilization in the Arab Nadha (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
James West, Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America (University of Illinois Press, 2020)
Katarzyna Kosior, Becoming a Queen in Early Modern Europe: East and West (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Neil Murphy, The Tudor Occupation of Boulogne: Conquest, Colonisation and Imperial Monarchy, 1544–1550 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Patrick Andelic, Donkey Work: Congressional Democrats in Conservative America, 1974–1994 (University Press of Kansas, 2019)
Anthony Webster, Co-operation and Globalisation: The British Co-operative Wholesales, the Co-operative Group and the World since 1863 (Routledge, 2019)
Anthony J. Badger, Albert Gore, Sr.: A Political Life (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)
Brian Ward, Patrick Huber, A&R Pioneers: Architects of American Roots Music on Record (Vanderbilt University Press, 2018)
We have a thriving postgraduate community, whose members take the lead in a range of North East PGR networks and initiatives, including HistoryLab North East, CNCS (the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies), and the annual Summer Speaker Series at Newcastle’ Mining Institute. We offer a dynamic postgraduate training programme, which includes teaching shadowing, workshops on publishing, course design and careers both inside and outside academia.
You can read more about our research groups and their activities by following the links on the right hand side of this page.
