Durham History Department

Current PhD students

Table showing names and contact details of current PhD students
Name	Research area
Aida Abbashar	Constitution-making in Sudan
Neil Achary	An assessment of Black Consciousness political parties in South Africa between 1994 and 2014
Natasha Anson	Nostalgia and the transformation of working-class heritage
Sahava Baranow	Projected Identities: Displaying and gendering Japanese objects in Europe and America, 1862-2013
Emily Bardgett	Objects of enchantment? The fetishisation of ‘dancing girls’ in the late Victorian periodical press
Sophie Bellamy	Northern Bridge CDA with Tyne & Wear Archives: The Growth and Decline of North East Jewish Communities, 1881-2000
Marie Bigotte	The politics of space applied to French and English princely gardens in the early modern period
Constance Booker	A Cultural Plutocracy? Transnational families and the display of luxury goods in Britain and in France between 1870 and 1930
Jacqueline Brooks	The Vipond family of Alston Moor and the City of Durham: the impact of non-conformity on family status in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Daniel Burrell	British cremation movement
Michaela Cardo	Gifted Lives: Dress Object Gifts and British Cultural Life, 1830-1870
Chi Chuk	Early Modern History of England: Religious politics of 17th Century England
Bridget Cox	The late medieval history of archives and record-keeping
Hana Cutts-Smith	Forcible Transfer of Children, Cultural Genocide in Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Daniel Doherty	Anti-Abolitionist Violence in the Antebellum North, 1840-1845
Toby Donegan-Cross	Food production and consumption on Durham Priory’s estate, c. 1250–1500
Emily Dunn	The Introduction of Cremation into Late Victorian Britain
Simon Feasey	Popular political speech in the 1530s
Gabriel Fidler	Comparative History of Norman England and Italy
Adam Fletcher	Learning for Salvation’s Sake: Durham Cathedral Priory and the Scholastic Revolution, c.1083-c.1200
James Goodwin	A bottom up approach to the art market: what was the influence of artists in the late 18th century British art market? The case of Johan Zoffany
Janet Gormley	Augustine’s historiography and its interpretation in the High Middle Ages with particular focus on the Spiritual Franciscans.
Isaac Heller	AIDS, inequality and religious ethics of care in 1980s and 90s Britain
Isaac Hillary	Tusks, spears, and stories: Exploring elephant-human interaction and coexistence in South Sudan
Lucy Jameson	Disabled Innovation and the British Post Office
Arielle Jasiewicz-Gill	The Influence of St Bridget of Sweden on the Textual Programme of Fifteenth-Century Books of Hours.
Ruoyu Jia	Blood Dilemmas and Taboos: Menstruation and Period Poverty under Communist China (1949-the 1980s)
Nancy Johnson	The Court of Mary Queen of Scots
Hasaam Latif	The Forgotten Sailors: Lascars, Homelands and 20th Century British Empire
John Livesley	John Pearson (1613-1686): the renewal of English Theological Discourse in the Age of Reason?
Matthew Lumley	Greek and Latin Monasticism in Southern Italy during the Crusader Era
Hugo Lunn	Premature Succession: Rebellion of Heirs Apparent in the 11th-13th centuries
Nicola McNeil	Landscape and Gender in Seventh to Tenth-Century England
Leila Marhamati	17th- and 18th-century British women's property and bodily history
Vivian Myron	Images and Empire in British Military Collections: The Photographic Archive of the Durham Light Infantry (DLI)
Avarna Ojha	Corruption in India-Evolution through moments of crisis
Joost Oosterhuis	Frontier zones and vagabonds: survival strategies of urban and village communities during the wars of religion in France and the Netherlands (1560-1630)
Michael O'Ryan	Byzantine history specifically focused on the role and agency of the Byzantine empresses from Theodora (527-548) to Theodora Porphyrogenitia (1042-1056)
Adam O'Taylor	Rethinking the entangled past of church landed classes and coalmining communities
Georgia Parkes-Russell	Chivalry during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Jamie Paterno-Ostmann	Making Chocolate in the British Atlantic World: Foodways, Consumption and Heritage
Ashleigh Percival-Borley	Oral History, the British Cultural Imaginary, and the Lives of the SOE’s Amateur Agents’ (as part of the Leverhulme Trust Research Project ‘The SOE, Covert Action, and the British Cultural Imaginary’)
Yaling Peng	William Laud's Thought of ‘Enriching the People’ and His Religious Reform
Ariana Preston	Northern Bridge CDA with Beamish Museum: A Woman’s Work: Photographic histories of Northeast England through the lens of Daisy Edis and the J.R. Edis Studio
William Raybould	The aristocracy and royal power in Scandinavia 900-1300
Friederike Schwelle	Modern Jews and Ancient Egypt: Patrons, Collectors and Scholars in Europe c1880-1950
Benjamin Sharp	The Earl of Danby, English absolutism and the origins of the English empire 1673-1679
Zoe Shipley	From Within, From Without: Perceptions in Britain of the technological transformation of Meiji Japan, 1868-1912
Isaiah Silvers	The institutional transformations of sensibility, or sympathy, in the 18th century Atlantic world.
Yifan Song	Reforming Weather: Phenology, Meteorology and Geoengineering in Modern China.
Harriet Claire Strahl	The Works and Worldview of Henry of Huntingdon
Zhaozi Sun	Eunuchs in the political systems of the Byzantine and Tang empires: comparative approaches
Rhys Sutton-Harry	Keeping Time: A Cultural History of Time and Timekeeping in Late Medieval England
Florence Swan	The Transmission of Taste c. 1200-c.1400
Avril Taylor	The interaction between the royal courts and households of James I, II, III and IV of Scotland
Camilla Thompson	Examination of royal patronized performance and literary publications during Mary Tudor’s reign
Stephen Twort	Human Sovereignty and the Animals that 'Defy Us': An Interspecies History of Territorialisation and Violence in the British Isles, 1858-2025 (Theory and Practice)
Joshua Whiteman-Gardner	Obedience and Subversion: The Divine Right of Kings and the Late Stuarts
Mark Wilson	Geographies of Persecution: Place, Space, Emotion and Memory in Personal Accounts of the Holocaust in France
Emma Yeo	Considering the existence/lack of a seventeenth century 'General Crisis', within the context of studies of individual communities within the North East of England
Bing Yu	More Choices in Practice: The Interaction of Western Obstetrics and Chinese Medicine in Canton, Shanghai and Hong Kong (1835-1912)
Jiarui Yu	Journey to Northumbria: Chinese Visit and Elswick Cemetery
Cara Zhao	Learning Art from the Soviet Union: Chinese Students in the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the 1950s

Return

PhD graduates

Return

Table showing names and contact details of PhD graduates
Name	Research area
Dr Daniel Adamson	The portrayal - in educational settings - of the relationship between Britain and the Holocaust
Dr Rachel Anderson	Keeping the Diseased: Plague workers, policy and the poor in early modern England and Scotland c. 1597- 1666
Dr Margaret Armstrong	The Medical Services of the New Poor Law in County Durham 1834-1910
Dr Katharine Bader	A Culture of Inquiry: Scientific Thought and its Transmission in the Severn Valley, c.1090 - c.1150
Dr Mark Bennett
Dr Matthew Sterling Benson	Taxation, Local Government and Social Control in Sudan and South Soudan 1899-1956
Dr Bethany Brewer	Women and the Rwandan Gacaca Courts: Gender, Genocide and Justice
Dr Adrian Browne	Classificatory violence: difference, discipline, and (de)gradation in Uganda's northern Albertine Rift, c.1860 to c.1991
Dr Ngala Chome	Moral debate and political action in Mombasa 1895-1990
Dr Walker Christian	Unio mystica and the aurora consurgens: mystical theology in a late medeival alchemical treatise
Dr Matthew Clayton	Images of Rome in Anglo-Norman and German Historical Writing
Dr S. Austin Collins	‘La ville eut l’éphémère honneur d’être comme la capitale du Royaume': A Spatial History of Charles IX’s Royal Tour of France, 1564–1566 (Angoulême, Lyon, Sens)
Dr Harry Cross	Banking and finance in Sudan 1956 to 1970
Dr Ana de Oliveira Dias
Dr Christian Drury	British Narratives of Arctic Travel and Exploration, 1875-1940
Dr Razvan Dumitru	Ploughmen’s Society: A Prosopography of an Agrarian Community from Transylvania on the Eve of Modernity
Dr Finola Finn
Dr Yotam Gidron	The Nuer Messianic Jewish Movement: authority and authenticity in Ethiopia's western frontierlands
Dr Sarah Gilbert	Anglo-Saxon medical recipes in non-medical manuscripts: matters of culture, context and community
Dr Andrew Green	Resistance and Rebellion against King Charles VII of France (1422-1461): A Study of Noble Networks and French Politics in the Fifteenth Century.
Dr Yundi Guo	Classical music culture in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and in Anglo-GDR relations under Honecker (1971-1989)
Dr Barbara Hargreaves	Not 'For Medicinal Use Only' Healthcare Narratives in Saints' Lives from Twelfth-Century England
Dr Rachael Harkes	Joining a Fraternity in Late Medieval England: The Case of the Palmers' Guild of Ludlow, c.1250-1551
Dr Lydia Harris	Vitam mortalem, mortem vitalem: Abortion and Contraception in the High Middle Ages, 950-1200
Dr Alexander Hibberts	The Sea is History: Estate Management, Land Use, and Risk Calculation on the Late Medieval and Early Modern English Coastline, c.1350-1600
Dr Katherine Holderith	Gendered Spirituality within Female Monastic Space in Britain, c. 800-1300
Dr Chi-Hsin Huang	Jeremy Collier and the Moral Reform of Politics, 1688-1722
Dr Jamie Irvine	Causal origins of the ‘Religious movement of the Middle ages’: Cluny, Tiron, and the New Orders, 910-1156
Dr Grant Jones	Arming for God: The Imagery of Spiritual Warfare from the Monastery to the Pulpit, c.1100–1250
Dr Alexandra Jordan	Breton hagiography from the ninth and twelfth Centuries
Dr Thomas Kearns	The intellectual history of the Anglo-Saxon Church
Dr Fergal Leonard	Faction, Patronage, and Political Networks in the West March, 1569 – 1603
Dr Carrie Long	‘Yours Humbly, Sincerely, and Obediently’? The Social Agency of Lone Women’s Petitions c.1789- 1850
Dr Maksymilian Loth-hill	The Politics of History and Culture in Stalinist Poland: Museology and the Construction of a ‘Usable Past’, 1945-1956
Dr Thomas Lowman	Beyond Idi Amin: Causes and Drivers of Political Violence in Uganda (1971-1979)
Dr Mark Markov	Wars not fought: Neutrality and European Navies in American Waters during the US Civil War
Dr Newby Mccabe	‘The real women’s party’: The social, cultural, and educational life of Labour Women between the wars.
Dr Lindsay Macnaughton	Archiving the Revolution: Collecting French History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Dr Antonia Miejluk	Snapshot Photography in the Interwar Soviet Union
Dr Kate Marlow	The Formation of Ethnic Identity in Anglo-Saxon England (700-1066) and Medieval Iceland (900-1264)
Dr Rachael Matthews	The Book, the Body, and the Mirror: The Use of Metaphor in the Writings of Marguerite Porete and Marguerite d'Oingt
Dr Sarah McCook	Reasonable Latitude: Learning and Adaptability in British Army Despatch Riders During the Second World War
Dr Marcus Meer	Cities, Citizens, and their Signs: Heraldic Communication and Urban Visual Culture in Late Medieval England and Germany
Dr Callum Murrell	Theories of Politics and the Politics of Theory: Aspects of Power and Discourse in Early Modern England
Dr Mathew Norman	Portrait Drawing in Three Generations of the Bacon Family
Dr Antonia Perna	Childhood, Politics and Patriotism in Revolutionary France, 1789–99
Dr Kirstyn Raitz	Urban Prostitution in London and Paris, 1650-1800
Dr Kathleen Reynolds	Sickness in Correspondence: gentry letter writing and the subject of health in eighteenth century Yorkshire and the North-East
Dr Natasha Shoory	From the Footnotes to the Focus: Reframing Women’s Art Collections in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Dr Caroline Smith	The Palaces of the Bishops of Durham: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives AD 1100 – 1550
Dr Rhiannon Snaith	The Politics of Noble Reputation in Late Medieval England, 1377-1437.
Dr Ciara Stewart	Irish Women and Political Petitioning, c. 1870-1918
Dr James Taffe	Reconstructing the queen’s household, 1485 – 1547: a study in royal service
Dr Marina Tymviou	Charlotte of Lusignan and Caterina Cornaro: The Politics of Queenship and Identity in Cyprus and Italy 1458-1861
Dr Ryan Wicklund	Agriculture Management and Market Responsiveness in Medieval County Durham

Return