The Oxford Historian

On arriving at Budapest airport, the traveller is confronted by the greeting ‘Welcome to Family-Friendly Hungary’ in multiple languages.

On 7th June 2020, amid global Black Lives Matter protests, a petition appeared on change.org, calling for the removal of a stained-glass window from the dining hall of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

During the 2026 Holberg Week, held from 1 to 4 June in Bergen, Lyndal Roper was award the prestigious Holberg Prize. The week also included Symposiums, masterclasses and lectures.

“I am a historian devoted to humanitarian diplomacy”. This is how I have been introducing myself over the past year.

What is dyslexia? It seems a simple question, and one perhaps best answered by psychologists, rather than historians.

To me, as a medieval historian, Oxford is rather like the Holy Roman Empire.

This spring, the Bodleian Library’s new Weston Building will host an exhibition entitled A Renaissance Royal Wedding, marking the 500th anniversary of a landmark sixteenth-century match.

I first went to Algeria in 2001, when my DPhil research was almost complete. Like almost everyone else from outside the country trying to work on its history in the late 1990s, and like almost everyone then writing about its ongoing crisis, I had previously seen it only from a distance.

Most previous books on the revolution, especially popular histories, focus obsessively on the national story of the United States, on the development of its republican institutions at the national level.

Generations of undergraduates, especially of Lady Margaret Hall, will remember Anne Whiteman, or more probably ‘Miss Whiteman’, History Tutor of the college from 1946 to 1985.

Hanging in the senior common room of Oriel College, above the fireplace and in pride of place at the heart of the room, hangs a rather curious painting. Surrounded by dark portraits of former provosts and fellows, the painting catches the eye if for no other reason than its incongruity with the surrounding works. Depicting six men in intense discussion, its crowded frame and bright, almost fresco-like quality immediately mark it out as something different.

I study, among other things, the fifth century. Normally, this is the definition of a niche activity; but it’s not normal right now. For some fifteen months—since the killings in Paris in November 2015, since the EU Referendum, and since the US election—the fifth century has gone mainstream. For it was in the course of these hundred years that the Roman Empire partially collapsed as a political structure.

I’m delighted that my first monograph, Bloodsuckers of the Commonwealth: Monopolies, petitioning and the public sphere in early modern England (Manchester, 2025) was longlisted for the 2026 Royal Historical Society First Book Prize.

Fear stalked the city! Already a religious revolution was in train – traditional practices were being abandoned, images torn down and smashed, new vernacular forms of worship came into use.

Catherine Jenkinson has been shortlisted in the 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for the Breakthrough Researcher Award for ‘Transforming Heritage Research through Exemplary Collaborative Practice’.

The Government of Ireland Act, 1920 and Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 had elevated the old county limit into a boundary between states.

In 2004 a Siberian shaman, Toizin Bergenov, was hired by deputies in the Russian duma to purge the parliament of evil spirits drawn by the negative energy of angry debates; while in China over one million members of the Eastern Lightning sect, led by a peasant woman who styles herself ‘Almighty God’, readied themselves for the last days.

As a historian of the United States in Oxford, there is no escaping countless hours crammed into an economy airplane seat en route to conferences and research trips across the Atlantic. If there is glamour in long-haul travel, it quick wears off as soon as the person in front of you reclines.

Bowie’s keen interest in musical theatre is well known. In 2002 he told the BBC’s John Wilson that he had wanted to write for the theatre from the very start of his career. But why early eighteenth-century London and why ‘The Spectator’?

Few subjects have experienced such a dizzying ride on the rollercoaster of intellectual fashion as the academic study of modern imperial history.

Carved into a rock crystal medallion, the Sasanian King of Kings (Šāhanšāh) confronts the viewer from his elaborate couch. Around him, circles of garnet and rock crystal decorated with rosettes are set in a gold openwork cup, interspersed with green glass. These inlays encircle the king in three rows, increasing in size with each row as if emanating from the centre.

‘When the history books come to be written’ is a favourite trope used by politicians anxious that the verdict of history may not be as kind to them as they would like.

From politics to poetry, and pots to palaeography - Veronique Thouroude reports the rude good health of Oxford Medieval studies, and of the society founded in 1927 to promote them.

The Great Fire of London was a true catastrophe. Over the course of four days (2-5 September 1666) the ‘most horrid malicious bloody flame’ destroyed 373 acres of the area within the city walls (about 85%)

The last few decades have witnessed increasing alarm from scientists from numerous areas of research on the climate and sustainability, particularly on the lack of action and response we have made to rising crises.

Lucy Kilbey graduated with a BA in Ancient and Modern History in 2011. She now works within the University and continues to study and write on history when she has time.

As a light rain began to fall at Botley Cemetery, Brigadier Evan Williams reminded me that, for Mãori, rain during a sacred ceremony symbolised divine sorrow. New Zealand’s most senior military representative in Europe had joined us to commemorate the lives of the nine New Zealand soldiers who fell during the First World War and who were buried in Botley Cemetery.

The richest and most politically complex regions in Italy in the earliest middle ages were the Byzantine sections of the peninsula, thanks largely to their continued links with the Byzantine empire. But what happened to them when those links broke?

The language of anti-colonialism has historically been dominated by a desire to acknowledge the humanity and therefore equality of all peoples, its critique often turning on the threat imperialism posed to the lives of its subjects.

One of the most popular and famous British portrayals of eighteenth-century imperial war is Benjamin West’s The Death of Wolfe, first displayed in 1771.

Christina de Bellaigue talks about her new publication

Early in the New Year, the Faculty was shocked to learn of the sudden death in post of Hubert Stadler, its Graduate Officer, and one of the longest serving members of the admin team.

Victorian politicians and writers engaged with the empire, channelling wider anxieties about Britain’s imperial systems and responsibilities. We tend to think of this, however, as a phenomenon of the later decades of the nineteenth century – when competitive European imperialism was at its height, and when empire was a consistently important political issue.

Judith Brown, former Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, casts a historian's eye on last year's landslide that brought Narendra Modi to power.

Jeremy Catto was one of the most important and fertile historians of the Late Middle Ages, and particularly of the worlds of learning, religion and government, worlds whose numerous interconnections he delighted in demonstrating.

Between 1940 and 1942, the regime invited young French Jews across the non-Occupied Zone to take part in a host of new initiatives alongside their non-Jewish peers that aimed to revive the nation in the aftermath of the national defeat to Germany.

This series of six events ran from the autumn of 2019, initially at the offices of our co-hosts Sarasin and Partners in London, and latterly online.

Working with a number of heritage sites across the country, the project seeks to ask who was in prison, why they were there, and how, other than execution, they died.

Dr Peter Frankopan discusses what influenced him to become an historian, why he chose Oxford and his recent activities

It is said that when John Maynard Keynes met someone new, he would ask himself whether that person would make it into the Dictionary of National Biography.

In a small, darkened room above the north entrance of Ham House, Richmond, a solitary glass case displays a single painting. It hangs there not as an act of restoration, since there is no evidence the painting was ever kept in this closet, but as the culmination of a knowledge exchange project between the University of Oxford and the National Trust.

In 1850, William was caught stealing a coat, for which he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) for seven years.

In January this year the Divinity School saw a celebration to mark the publication of an Historical Map of Oxford: the work of a team of historians and cartographers, themselves successors to an impressive array of Oxford antiquarians and topographers who have struggled to excavate, record and map the origins and development of the Saxon burgh into a medieval University town and, later, into a factory city.

Professor William Whyte gave the following speech at Mark Whittow's Funeral, which was held on Monday 12 February 2018

Each year the Faculty of History awards prizes to those graduate students who have achieved the best performance overall within their cohort as well as those that have produced the best disseration within their cohorts.

Each year the Faculty of History awards prizes to those graduate students who have achieved the best performance overall within their cohort as well as those that have produced the best disseration within their cohorts.

When I came down from Merton in 1961, a history degree was simply a passport to your first job. Few graduates kept up an interest unless they intended to teach it.

Shouldn't the Faculty have an eight on the river? Kathryne Crossley explores the precedents

Six hundred years ago, on Friday 29 September 1419 – Michaelmas Day – the dowager queen of England, Joan of Navarre, was arrested on the orders of her stepson, Henry V.

The 2014 James Ford Lecturer, Susan Pedersen, Shenton Professor of History and the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, explains how a New College historian, William Ormsby-Gore, fell out of love with the League.