The Oxford Historian

How might we make better use of historical evidence and expertise in shaping and evaluating foreign policy? It is one of the questions that lie at the heart of my Oxford Policy Engagement Network (OPEN) Visiting Fellowship,

On 13 January 2022 a new digital exhibition entitled ‘Oxford Reformed’ was launched on the website of the Museum of Oxford.

Throughout the lockdown, a number of History Faculty staff and students have been writing about Pandemics in history

Dr Ida Toth discusses her new AHRC-DFG funded research project, focusing on medieval and early modern donor epigraphy of Mount Athos (also known as the Holy Mountain) in Northern Greece.

The Re-imagining Democracy project addresses a simple question: how did it come about that, whereas in the middle of the eighteenth century people who talked about ‘democracy’ were normally talking about the ancient world -- about Greece or republican Rome, when a hundred years later they used the word to talk about modern circumstances and possibilities? Or, in short form ‘how did democracy become modern?’

This lecture, on the 500th Anniversary of the Battle of Frankenhausen when the peasants were defeated, explores how people at the time wrote the history of 1525. The answers they found raise for us the question: how do we write history today?

It has often been said that Ireland's is the best documented of all modern revolutions. The revolutionary generation of 1912-22 displayed a remarkable aptitude for creative writing, journalism, autobiography, correspondence and propaganda work.

In the early-twentieth century, sadness was being reimagined. Change was brought about by the rise of professional psychology, which gave policy-makers new means to shape how citizens felt.

Sarah Knott has been appointed as the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History and a Professorial Fellow of St John’s College.

For decades historians have disagreed about the impact of the Black Death of 1348-9. Some have dismissed it as an inconsequential blip in England’s long term historical development, others have regarded it as a turning point in the pathway to modernity.

In March 1915, to avoid the unsanitary transportation of war casualties, the British government issued a ban on the exhumation and repatriation of Imperial soldiers, which was to be observed until the end of hostilities.

Researchers in Residence offer a sustained programme of contact developing a relationship between local state secondary schools and the Faculty of History.

Readers will be saddened to learn that Stephen Baxter, Fellow and Tutor of St Peter’s College, Lecturer of Merton, and Professor of Medieval History, has died unexpectedly at the age of 56.

Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World. Stories of Survival, which is supported by a five-year grant of 1.5 million euros from the European Research Council, seeks to demonstrate the importance of Eastern Christianity to early modern European, Islamic, and global history.

Following the success of its trial run in 2017, the Faculty of History is expanding its creation of teaching resources for GCSE students, continuing its focus on ‘Migration, Empire and the Peoples’ and emphasising the long history (starting in 970 AD) of British inter-connectedness with the wider world.

James Belich, current Beit Professor of Commonwealth and Imperial History, takes a deep breath, and argues that the Black Death was good for Europe.

enry VIII fought many wars, against the French, against the Scots, against the Gaelic lords of Ireland, against rebels in his own realms, even against his traditional allies in the Netherlands. But how much did they really affect his subjects?

The Faculty of History is pleased to open the doors of our new Faculty Hub, housed within the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.

The Global History of Capitalism project is a platform for research across the collegiate university.

The arrival of Gender and women’s history has been the greatest development in the discipline of history since the Second World War. Those are not my words – they are those of David Cannadine, the new President of the British Academy.

All societies establish norms that regulate the environment, interactions and care of those who are most vulnerable, especially children. The boundaries used to categorise acts and impacts as harmful or unacceptable, however, are historically and culturally specific.

Bryan Ward-Perkins discusses the influences behind this book as well as the implications of what it raises.

In his latest book, Perry Gauci examines the societal impact of the London private bankers as they established a significant metropolitan presence between 1660 and 1825.

The Newton Project, which has recently moved to the University of Oxford, was created in 1998 by Rob Iliffe and Scott Mandelbrote (Peterhouse, Cambridge).

European political geography is the product of violent competition which has left the continent divided into distinct states, unlike China or (to a lesser extent) North America.

A century after Gallipoli, and two centuries after Waterloo, Adrian Gregory asks which war was better for Britain?

Rarely has power not been accompanied by violence and exploitation, and with the global prominence of the city and University, it is unsurprising that this violence must be conceptualised on a global scale.

What constitutes collective memory, and where should we look for it? My doctoral thesis aims to comprehend humanities teachers’ memory of the Holocaust, who have functioned as both ‘makers’ and ‘consumers’ of official and cultural historical memories.

Rowena Archer looks ahead to the Agincourt 600 exhibition opening at the Tower of London in October and considers ' the miserable, ,the resigned and the relieved.

During Lent of 1522, a baker and his friend snuck into a monastery church in Zurich. When discovered by the caretaker and a monk, the baker whipped a sausage out from underneath his cloak and began a heated theological argument. With some difficulty, the monk had the men thrown out of the church, but not before he kept a piece of the sausage as ‘evidence’.

The new Global Twentieth Century History paper aims to place the centre of gravity of the course outside Europe, whilst acknowledging multiple perspectives in exploring the period 1930-2003.

"History may or may not repeat itself; historians repeat each other": Jonathan Denby reveals that the tulip bubble was not what we have been led to believe

Benjamin Wardhaugh discusses his new AHRC-funded research project, which focusses on mathematics education in early modern England.

Project Hougoumont is an Anglo-Belgian initiative inspired by the military historian, Richard Holmes, with two objectives: to raise funds for the restoration of Hougoumont in time for the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo and to give it a secure future as a place of remembrance, education and reconciliation.

Ten years ago, my Dad gave me a notebook. It was small and square, hardback, with a flaking moss-green cover and paper-thin pages. On the front, it said, simply, “This is my life”, and then a name: J.H. King, my great-uncle.

My research focuses on women born in Britain in the long 1940s. This is a generation of women that has made a significant contribution to the intellectual and political life of Britain, yet we know surprisingly little about their lives- especially past the 1960s.

Whenever I work in the Bodleian’s Weston Library, I wonder at the lives of the site’s early modern inhabitants — who they were, what their houses were like, and their relationships to each other.

Edit WYSIWYG In September 1981, when my doctoral funding ran out, I left Oxford, with an unfinished DPhil thesis and no job: in September 2016 I returned, to take up the Chichele Chair of Medieval History and a fellowship at All Souls College.

For more than 200 years, research universities like Oxford have been distinguished by their mission to guide students in their encounter with the frontiers of knowledge, equipping them to become active contributors to society and, in many cases, producers of new knowledge themselves.