Since being founded in 1912, the School of History has been dedicated to producing research that is both world-class and impactful. Not just for academic purposes, but because our research is intrinsic to our teaching.
Members of the School of History are always engaged in innovative and consequential research. They operate within local and global networks, and train future historians by supervising researchers towards their PhD, the gold standard of academic history.
They are also regularly engaged in communicating history, the rough public lectures, and blogs, on TV and radio programmes, and by influencing policy and heritage institutions. Their research spans continents and periods, from medieval Europe and the Islamic world to the history of the 20th and even 21st century. They use many different approaches: from economic history to digital methods, from the analysis of material objects to the study of film, they conduct oral histories and analyse visual sources. Their books have won prizes, and their research helps make history more inclusive. Our histories resonate with contemporary concerns even as they attend with great care to the difference of the past.
As a student in the School of History you will benefit from our research since our teaching is led by it. We are encouraged, and are expected, to turn our research into rigorous and interesting modules. This means that our students enjoy the freshness and innovation of our research and contribute to it with their questions and insights. This is a unique experience that our students really appreciate.
Thinking Black
Dr Rob Waters's research on the Black experience of British History has offered innovative, and timely, interventions, like his book Thinking Black. Dr Rob Waters chart black radical Britain’s wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. Thinking Black was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's 2020 Whitfield Prize.
He has developed a Special Subject Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration. Britain from the 1905 Aliens Act to Brexit. He continues to innovate with a new project on the history of modern Britain's borders, in ideas and in practices.
Marking Refugees in India
Ria Kapoor is a Lecturer in History and a fellow of QMUL’s interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She completed a DPhil in History at the University of Oxford, has previously held posts at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester.
Ria Kapoor's book ‘Making Refugees in India' offers a global history of India’s ideas and practices surrounding the refugee. In focusing on one of the first states to formally decolonise in the middle of the 20th century, the book examines how the shift from colonial to postcolonial – both within the subcontinent as well as the shifting nature of the international order– led to a rewriting of the global idea of the refugee. Though India has not signed the two key United Nations instruments pertaining to refugees, it has offered sanctuary for millions over the course of the twentieth century. Examining the period from the so-called ‘Wilsonian’ moment all the way to the East Pakistani refugee crisis of 1971, Making Refugees extends the timeline of India’s history with refugees well beyond the Partition of 1947. Doing so reveals that India’s seemingly inconsistent refugee policy is actually representative of an ongoing tension between self-determination versus individual rights in a former-colony-turned-nation-state even as it worried about colonial inequities being reproduced in the postcolonial world order of the United Nations. The refugee thus became both constitutive and destructive of Indian citizenship, and any share of rights accorded to them by India – rights born from an anti-colonial battle for self-determination – had to be measured against the sovereignty that gave India both the power to grant rights to Indian citizens but also to argue for an equitable world order in global forums.
A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle.
Professor Julian Jackson won the prestigious The American Library in Paris Book Award for the biography, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle. The biography received a huge amount of coverage in the media and was also met with huge critical acclaim. As well as The American Library in Paris award, Julian was also awarded the Duff Cooper Prize for History, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and the Franco-British Society Literary Prize.
Julian has written extensively on de Gaulle in the past and for the biography, he made full use of the former French President’s archives.
He said: “De Gaulle’s influence is greater than similar political figures in the UK such as Churchill because he still casts a shadow. Churchill does not really have influence today; he is a memory of a great moment in history – as is de Gaulle for the role he played as leader of the Free French during the German Occupation of France – but de Gaulle also created the constitution that France still has today.
“De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, whose institutions are being used to great effect by President Macron, fundamentally changed France’s political culture.
“The French president has more power than any other head of state in Europe and indeed the president of the United States and that is a result of the constitution that de Gaulle created in 1958. If there is one lasting legacy of de Gaulle it is the constitution that France still has today,” said Professor Jackson.
Informing Policy
Dr Martyn Frampton is a renowned historian of the Troubles in Ireland as well as of Islamist extremism. His scholarship and knowledge of these areas have seen him comment on the nature of terrorism and government policy responses to this pressing issue.
In 2016, Martyn led a project that produced the most extensive survey to date of British Muslim views across the UK, and, in 2017, he directed a major study into the scope and availability of extremist material online.
Martyn is also the author of The Muslim Brotherhood and the West: A History of Enmity and Engagement.