Research Projects: A-Z

As the defender of the Union during the American Civil War and the leader who oversaw the emancipation of the slaves, Lincoln would become – in many different places and at various times during the century and a half following his assassination – a cult figure and an ever-changing symbol. 

During a century and more after the Norman Conquest of England the most important evidence for the workings of the realm are the charters confirming to principal churches and higher aristocracy the legal rights to landed property or other privileges, such as tolls, and the writs issued by the king to protect the exercise of these rights.

A failed political revolution that led to an enduring cultural revolution? A disastrous attack on ethical values in the name of drugs, free love and violence? The events of 1968 in cities across Europe have been represented in sharply contrasting narratives.

The Second World War in China was the single most wrenching event in modern Chinese history. The conflict is often termed the second Sino-Japanese War, and known in China as the War of Resistance to Japan. There are arguments that the conflict began with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, but between 1937 and 1945, China and Japan were at total war. When Japan was finally defeated in 1945, China was on the winning side, but lay devastated, having suffered some 15 million deaths, massive destruction of industrial infrastructure and agricultural production, and the shattering of the tentative modernization begun by the Nationalist government.

Cultures of Knowledge is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Project is using a variety of methods to reconstruct and interpret the correspondence networks central to the revolutionary intellectual developments of the early modern period.

In the early Middle Ages the West experienced a crisis of its monetary economy. The magnitude and the chronology of this phenomenon raise numerous problems, since we are unable to establish reliable statistics for coin production.

Tudor England was a dangerous place. There were plagues and wars, perilous childbirths and shocking infant mortality. But what risks did people face as they went about their everyday lives? 

The study of Early Medieval Italy is currently a major international field of research. Late Antique, Lombard, Byzantine and Carolingian Italy have been written on extensively across the period 400 to 850, but the late 9th and the 10th centuries have been much less studied, though they constitute an essential component in the development of medieval and modern Italy, and Europe more generally.  

The British Empire depended on its navy to survive and grow. For its operational success, the Royal Navy in turn depended on the health of its sailors, who were frequently exposed to ‘exotic’ and dangerous new infections. At the University of Oxford, a team of researchers are exploring naval health in the 19th century and the contribution of naval officers to Victorian medicine.

The Dacre Trust was established by the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford (1957-1980). It is an educational charity, concerned primarily with the promotion of historical and classical studies in Oxford University.

Why do I need a passport to travel? Why do I have to have so many passwords online? Why should I be fingerprinted to enter the USA? Should there be national DNA databases? Is my identity safe? Questions like these have multiplied in recent years, especially in the aftermath of the events of 9/11. New ways of identifying people on the move, buying goods and services, and preventing crimes have been developed in the UK as well as globally. Do these protect our rights, threaten our privacy, or make us safe?

How did early international organizations address problems of geopolitical competition and transnational risk, not dissimilar to those we face today?

In the summer of 2005, the History Faculties of Oxford and Princeton Universities launched a joint research project intended to dig beneath the surface of the post-1945 world. The project was funded by a grant from the Oxford-Princeton partnership and ran for two years from 2005 to 2007.

In the eighteenth century England changed from a net importer of books to a net exporter and one of the premier book publishers of the world.

For the remains of medieval British libraries, the scholar must deal in fragments. Libraries are attested first by their surviving books and second by surviving medieval catalogues of the collections. This project’s aim is to bring together these complementary fragments in a resource that will enable an integrative reading of the evidence.

Replacing and extending the original Victorian Dictionary of National Biography, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (as it has become) is probably the largest collaborative research project ever undertaken in the humanities.

Oxford Historical Monographs [OHM] is a series for the publication of Oxford University D.Phil. theses whose content is historical. It is published by Oxford University Press [OUP]. The Committee meets once a term; it also conducts much business on paper. It receives the examiners’ reports on all successful D.Phil. candidates in History, and it considers relevant reports from adjacent faculties when these are drawn to its attention. Its catchment area is thus wide, and its role an active one. Examiners in History are specifically invited to comment in their reports on the suitability of a thesis to be considered for publication in the series, and they often do so. Supervisors are likewise encouraged to draw likely publications to the Committee’s attention. Members of the Committee consult extensively and informally with examiners, supervisors and others.

Prosopography examines the whole of a past society, its structure and the individuals who made it up, in order to trace the evolution of the social and cultural perception of nationhood embraced by persons lived within defined regions, perhaps separated from others by language and law and perhaps not, but whose chief claim to distinctiveness reposed in the recognition of the legitimacy of their ruler, who was not necessarily born in the region and who usually married outside it.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, ‘democracy’ was a learned word, used primarily in discussions of the ancient world – Greece and republican Rome – or to denote one element within mixed constitutions: that is, constitutions (including the British) which combined monarchical, aristocratic and democratic elements.

In 1934, large-scale excavations on the site of the ruins of Thetford Priory produced hundreds of late-medieval and Renaissance sculptural and architectural fragments. Today, those fragments are still in storage, in an English Heritage warehouse in East Anglia. In response to a call from Simon Thurley, CEO of English Heritage, for all curators to determine exactly what was in store, Dr Jackie Hall was called in to compile a handlist of these fragments. She sought specialist advice and Dr Phillip Lindley visited the site three years ago, with exciting results.

Scottish towns changed dramatically during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They grew in size and altered in character. But was there, as in England over the course of the 'long' eighteenth century, what has been described as an 'urban renaissance'? 

In 1152 the future King Henry II Plantagenet of England married the divorced wife of King Louis VII of France, Eleanor of Aquitaine. This brought the great duchy of Aquitaine into the possession of the Plantagenet kings of England with momentous consequences for the history of Europe, particularly for relations between England and France.

The ‘Arts and Humanities Research Council’ is funding a major project in Oxford on ‘The Last Statues of Antiquity’, directed by Professor R.R.R. Smith and Dr Bryan Ward-Perkins.  The Project began in January 2009 and will run for three years, employing two Research Assistants, and incorporating the work of a doctoral student.  

The nineteenth century witnessed a huge expansion in the number of people in Britain and in Europe, described as members of a profession. Industrialisation, the growth of the state and overseas colonisation, coupled with a rapid rise in population, led to an ever-increasing demand for lawyers, doctors, even clergymen, and a host of new service providers such as bankers, accountants, surveyors and engineers.

How did ordinary medieval people understand the world around them? To what extent did the landscape in which they lived shape their sense of identity?

A collection of documents and information made by Robin Briggs, All Souls College and History Faculty, University of Oxford.

Kevin O’Rourke has received a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant to study “Trade and the Great Depression in a Long Run Perspective”. The project, which runs from 2010 to 2015, involves collecting a range of data on the interwar economy: monthly data on a range of economic variables for as many countries as possible; bilateral trade data broken down by commodity; and aggregate bilateral trade data, at a monthly frequency. A dataset on interwar election results has also been compiled, as well as a long-run database on manufacturing production.

The Second World War and Japanese occupation had a devastating economic impact on Southeast Asia. With support from the ESRC, Professor Gregg Huff is undertaking the first comprehensive, comparative analysis of Japan’s wartime economic policies in Southeast Asia and the consequences of Japanese occupation for the economies and welfare of the peoples of Burma, Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia, Indochina, and the Philippines.

With support from the Sanderson Fund, Dr Patricia Clavin is exploring the history of war, peace, and poverty in the twentieth century.