Past PhD projects

Browse our past research theses below, or see our current PhD students and their projects.

2023

Eduard Abrahamyan - Understanding and explaining NATO’s partnerships with the nations of South Caucasus region between 2008 and 2016. 

Agnieszka Korus - Beyond restitution? Gender-just remedies for displacement and dispossession in Sudan and Ethiopia.

Blerim Mustafa - The extension of the right of self-determination in the post - Cold War era. 

Tunji Namaiko - State of conflict prevention in Africa: An analysis of collaboration between the African Union and African Regional Economic Communities early warning systems. 

2022

Richard Ilett - When Two Tribes Go To War, politics, protest and violence 1980s Britain.

Juan Carlos Fernandez Casas - A new theoretical framework for HUMINT, a method of gathering intelligence on terrorist groups. 

Pasar Abdullah - Opening the Pandora Box The Evolution of the Iraqi Sunni Insurgency From the Roots to the Caliphate (2003 - 2014).

James Howe - Intercepting terror: the evolution of U.S. nuclear detection policy, 1990-2015.

Allen Hyam - The inherent imperial presidency: presidential decision making and the abuse of power.

Itaj Shapira - Israeli national intelligence culture.

Evripidis Tantalakis - Defending "free peoples": Intelligence and the advisory, logistical and operational role of the joint United States Military Advisory Planning Group in the Greek civil war 1947-1949. 

2021

Jamie Banks - British Imperialism, Labour Migration, Local Resistance, and the problem of Indian Opium Use, 1858-1912.

Rory Booth - The Realm of Bohemia: Masculinity, the press and Clubland in Late Victorian Manchester 1860-1914.

Janet Couloute - Visual Images of Madness and Distraction in Western Artistic Traditions: Mid Seventeenth Century-Eighteenth Century.

Melvin Josse - Repression and Animal Advocacy. 

David Caudill JR - Doomed from the Beginning: A Post-Mortem Analysis of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. 

Barrack Muluka - The dilemma of exercising the right of return: The case of Burundi refugees in Tanzania. 

Annie Platoff - Symbols in Service to the State: The Role of Flags and Other Symbols in the Civil Religion of the Soviet Union.

Jeff Pym - What made possible the first global import of liquefied natural gas from Louisiana into a new North Thames Gas cryogenic storage terminal on Canvey Island in Essex during the winter of 1959? 

Sana Rahim - Western Security discourse and nuclear weapons: The experience of Pakistan nuclear physicists.

Salvatore Valenti - Water in the making of a modern socio-natural landscape: Rome and its surroundings. 1870-1922.

Liz van Wessem - 'Shiten Shepherde and a clene sheep'? Clergy-lay relationships in seventeenth-century Herefordshire.

2020

Philip Batman - A comparison of core family survival in Swaledale and York in the nineteenth century.

Denise Bonnette-Anderson - What makes a church or chapel redundant or marked for closure in the modern era in England?

Carrie Crockett - Penal Sakhalin: Forging identity in the Euro-Asian Borderlands.

Anna Harrington - 'The grand object of my Parliamentary existence': William Wilberforce's abolitionism.

Sally Ann Hartshorn - The Heritage of Home:  the role of history in the socio-economic development of Leicester, 1945-2013.

Rebecca Lawton - Anglo-Saxon perceptions of the city of Rome: correspondence and exchange in the 7th and 8th centuries.

Liam McCarthy - BBC Radio Leicester, the 630 Show: How did the social, political and broadcast worlds of 1970s Leicester collide to form the genesis of the BBC Asian Network?

Anna McKay - War and Peace: The History of British Prison Hulks, 1776-1864.

Tamar Moore - Household Medicine, Charity and Welfare: Boughton House and the Montagu Family Estates, 1700-1850.

Janice Morris - The role of elite women in the reception of French émigrés in England, 1789-1815.

Alister Sutherland - Peasant seals and sealing practices in eastern England, c.1200-1500.

Scott Weightman - The "Outward Face" of Massive Resistance: Segregationists’ Media Strategies during the 1950s and 1960s'

2019

Nicola Blacklaws - The Twentieth-Century Poor Law in the Midlands and Wales 1900-c.1930.

Katie Bridger - The Leicestershire Gentry, c.1460-1560: Identity, Locality, and Landscape.

Jill Caine - A study of migratory patterns of four settlements in Lincolnshire, 1851 – 1901.

Joshua Cohen - 'Never Again!' - a command not a slogan: The impact of the Holocaust on British anti-fascism, 1945-67.

Kevin DeYoung - The Problem with John Witherspoon: Reassessing the Presbyterian pastor-president and his relationship to the Scottish Enlightenment.

Cara Dobbing - The Circulation of the INsane: The Pauper Lunatic Experience of the Garlands Asylum, 1862-1913.

Trixie Gadd - Survival strategies of the clergy of Dorset in the 17th Century: economic, political, social and geographical.

Elias Kupfermann - The role of the Castle and Town of New Windsor during the English Civil Wars (1642 – 1650).

Laura Mainwaring - Bringing Regulation to the Market.

Sadie McMullon - Migration to Feltton 1841-1911, An Exploration of Family Migration, the Creation of Community and Social Mobility through Marriage.

Christopher Mitchell - Astrology in England in the Twelfth Century.

Patricia Yewande Okuleye - Selling Health on the World Stage.

Ian Riddell - Kinship Collation: Trends in 19th Century UK kinship networks evidenced from rural Aberdeenshire.

Mrunmayee Satam - Governing the Body- Public Health and Urban Society in Colonial Bombay City (1914- 1945)

2018

Ranjdar Al-Jaf - British policy towards the government of the Mosul vilayet from 1916-1926.

Aaron Andrews - A History of Urban Decline in Britain: Glasgow and Liverpool c. 1960-1990.

Helen Bates - The impact of John, 2nd Duke of Montagu's colonial, industrial and commercial ventures on his national estates, with a particular focus on how his Northamptonshire estates were affected (1700-1770).

Stewart Beale - The experience of war widows and orphans in the Midlands during the mid-seventeenth century.

David Helm - The healthcare economy of Gloucester in the Age of Reform, c.1815 - c.1870.

Sophia Kotzer - Russian Orthodoxy, Nationalism and the Soviet state during the Gorbachev years 1985-1991.

Alessandro Laverda - Revising the Supernatural: The Inquiry on Miracles in Early Modern Canonisation Trials.

Adnan Mohammed - British Representations of the Kurds and the Armenian Question 1877-1908.

Kellie Moss - Convict Connections: The British Empire and the Establishment of the Swan River Colony.

Adam Prime - The British Officer in the Indian Army 1861-1945.

Emma Purcell - Houses and Homes: The Management of a Network of Great Households c. 1709-1827.

Jacqueline Richards - Rethinking the makeshift economy: A case study of three market towns in Dorset in the later decades of the Old Poor Law.

Katherine Roscoe - Island Chains: a spatial history of Australian convict islands.

Matthew Rowley - Godly Violence: Providence, Scripture and Puritan Belief-Formation in War in England, Ireland, Scotland and Colonial America.

Christopher Side - The rise and fall of Hathersage hacklepin making and its effects on the community.

Ann Stones - Charnwood Circles: the role of boundaries in the relationship between people and place in medieval Charnwood Forest.

2017

Musaed Alenezi - Political and economic relations between the Ashraf of the Hijaz and the Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria, 1171–1517.

Charlotte Ball - The symbolic value of the image of the snake in Anglo-Saxon culture, 700-900.

Jennifer Brosnan - A century of bridled behaviour: The transmission of sexual knowledge in Britain 1811-1911.

Matthew Blake - Perceptions of a Mutable Landscape: Dwelling on the Edge, Early Medieval North-West Staffordshire.

Hilary Crowden - The Development of Rutland as a County Community in the Modern Age.

Renato Da Silva - The Northumbrian elite in the 7th and 8th centuries.

Michael Gilbert - The Changing Landscape and Economy of Wisbech Hundred - 1250 to 1550.

Ines Hassen - Inner cities and globalisation: the example of Rheims and Leicester.

Hawkar Jalil - The British Administration of South Kurdistan and Local Responses 1918-1932.

Richard Morris - Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in Cape Town and Hong Kong.

Brenda Mortimer - Penal Reform, The Royal Prerogative of mercy and Robert Peel, Home Secretary 1822-7, 1828-30.

Qadir Muhammad - Kurds and Kurdistan from the viewpoints of British Travellers in the decades 1830-1840 and 1890-1900.

Andrew Ollerton - The Crisis of Calvinism in Cromwellian England: Arminian Soteriology in Anglican and Puritan Thought.

Jane Rowling - The farming community in Yorkshire, 1914 - 1951, through oral history.

Anna Scanlon - Post-war Theatrical Images of Anne Frank in Britain, United States and France.

Martin Watkinson - The microhistory of a Lincolnshire parish: Humberston, 1750-1850.

Hannah Worthen - The experiences of war widows and orphans in mid seventeenth-century England

Valerie Bagnas - Micro-History of Poor Relief Response to Crisis and Dearth: Quainton 1796-180.

Rachel Bennett - Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland 1740 to 1834.

Joseph Harley - Material lives of the English poor: a regional perspective, c.1670-1834.

Stephen Ling - Canonical Rules in the Carolingian World (Francia and Anglo-Saxon England c. 750 - 987)

Robert Love - Somerset: the journey from Parish Constable to County Police 1835 – 1856.

Philippa Mapes - The Trade and Consumption of English Wallpapers, 1700 – 1830.

Claire Melland - The Anglo-American Special Relationship and the Central African Federation 1957-63.

Kristin O'Brassill-Kulfan - Illicit Mobilities and Wandering Lives: The Criminalization of Indigent Transiency in the Early American Republic.

Matthew Parker - Making the City Mobile: The Place of the Car in the Planning of Post-War Birmingham c. 1945-1973.

Richard Talbot - North South Divide of the Poor in the Staffordshire Potteries 1871-1901.

2016

Ben Harvey - Pauper Narratives in the Welsh Borders: 17500-1840.

2015

Carol Beardmore - The Rural Community through the Eyes of the Land Agent on the Marquis of Anglesey's Dorset and Somerset Estate: William Castleman and His Sons c1812-185.

David Benjamin - Paid Service in Crusading Armies, 1095-1241.

Anna Brueton - Illegitimacy in South Wales, 1660-1870.

Natasha Coveney - Moats in the Landscape: New Perspectives on Moated Sites.

Jonathan Duck - Expressions of meaning and belief in domestic buildings of southern fenland from Burwell in East Cambridgeshire to Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire, between c.1500AD and 1850A.

Maureen Harris - 'A Schismatical people': conflict between ministers and parishioners in C17th Warwickshire.

Richard Harrison - ‘British traffic planning and the urban environment in the 1960s: the cases of Leicester and Milton Keynes’.

Michael Wallace Heaton - A study of how mixed farming fared financially in the interwar years in the area of the Midland Clays.

Geoffrey Monks - Land Management: Welbeck and Holkham in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Roger Morris - Local government, local legislation: municipal initiative in parliament from 1858 to 1872.

Stephen Murray - Bankside power station: planning, politics and pollution.

Adam Richardson - The Fabric of Disintegration – Thomas Manton among interregnum and restoration Presbyterians.

Kinda Skea - Identities and Networks of Nonconformist Ministers (1658-1674)

Emily Whewell - British Extraterritoriality in China: the legal system, functions of criminal jurisdiction, and its challenges, 1833-1943.

Christina Winkler - The Holocaust in Rostov-on-Don: Official Russian Holocaust remembrance versus a local case study.

2014

Alison Brown - Social History of Homicide in Scotland 1836-1860.

Gary Davies - The Rise of Urban History in Britain, c. 1960-1978.

Emma Folwell - From massive resistance to new conservatism: opposition to community action programs in Mississippi, 1965-1975.

Gavin Freeman - Beyond Westminster: grass-roots Liberalism in England, 1910-1929.

Stuart Galloway - The American equal Rights Association, 1866-1870: gender, race and universal suffrage.

Stephanie Gudrun Rauch - The Holocaust in British Popular Culture: Interpretations of Recent Feature Films.

Tom Hulme - Civic Culture and Citizenship: the Nature of Urban Governance in Interwar Manchester and Chicago.

Janiece Johnson - In Search Of Punishment: Mormon Transgressions & the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Susan Kilby - Encountering the Environment: Rural Communities in England, 1086-1348.

Stefanie Rauch - Making sense of Holocaust representations: a reception study of audience responses to recent films.

2013

Robert Dockerill - Local Government Reform, Urban Expansion and Identity: Nottingham and Derby, 1945-1968.

Geoffrey Hooker - Llandilofawr Poor Law Union 1836 - 1886: 'The most difficult union in Wales'.

Gillian Murray - Women and the work of cultural production in ATV' regional television news, 1956-1968.