History’s research strengths and interests embrace a broad range of themes, periods and theories of history. History’s submission in REF2014 resulted in 50% of output being judged to be in the two highest 3* and 4* categories, ‘world leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’, a good result for a small team of committed researchers.
Areas of individual and collaborative research include the government and culture of the Ottoman Empire; women’s activism and radicalism in the United States of America and France; the French Revolution and Napoleonic Europe, statehood and state formation in 19th century France; Britain in the 1960s; History, memory, memorialisation and the Holocaust; Renaissance monarchy, the royal court and international relations of 16th century England and France.
The Centre for the Philosophy of History is a hub for activities that promote scholarly research and research-led teaching in the field of the philosophy of history.
Specifically, the Centre encourages and facilitates research activities that orient philosophical discussion of historical practices towards questions of ethics and social solidarity. To this extent its principal, but not exclusive, research agenda is to explore the theoretical dimensions and practical implications of the idea that the future of historical practices (broadly defined) may lie in their potential to encourage debate on issues of ethical and political relevance.
PhD students
Areas of research supervision
- Tudor Government and Society
- Early Modern Monarchy in Europe (including Ottoman Empire)
- Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe
- History Theory
- Public History
- Contemporary British Culture and Poltics
All research degree students at St Mary’s are part of the Doctoral College.
Selected publications
- Glenn Richardson, ‘Cardinal Wolsey (1470/74-1530)’; Field of Cloth of Gold (1520)’; ‘Treaty of Troyes (1420)’, Encyclopaedia of Diplomacy ed. G. Martel, forthcoming (New Jersey, 2018)
- Stewart McCain, The Language Question under Napoleon (forthcoming, 2018).
- Claire Norton and Mark Donnelly, Liberating Histories: Truths, Power, Ethics (forthcoming, January 2018).
- Glenn Richardson, Wolsey (forthcoming 2018)
- Mark Donnelly, ‘Public History in Britain’ in Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik (eds) What Is Public History Globally? Working with the Past in the Present (forthcoming 2018)
- Glenn Richardson, ‘Renaissance Cardinals: Diplomats and Patrons in the Early Modern World’ (ed.), Special Edition of the Royal Studies Journal (forthcoming 2017), including Richardson, ‘The King, the Cardinal-Legate, and the Field of Cloth of Gold’.
- Claire Norton, Plural Pasts: power, identity, and the Ottoman sieges of Nagykanizsa, (2017).
- Claire Norton, Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Lure of the Other (2017).
- Claire Norton, "Iconographs of power or tools of diplomacy? Ottoman fethnames," Journal of Early Modern History 20/4 (2016): 331-350.
- Glenn Richardson ‘Kingship’ in W. Robison (ed.), History, Fiction, and The Tudors: Sex, Politics, Power, and Artistic License in the Showtime Television Series, (2016).
- Claire Norton and Mark Donnelly, ‘Thinking the Past Politically: Palestine, Pedagogy, Power’, Rethinking History 20/2 (2016).
- Glenn Richardson, ‘The Royal Court’ in C. Richardson, T. Hamling and D. Gaimster eds. The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (2016).
- Stewart McCain, ‘Speaking like a State? Cultural Imperialism, Local Officials and Linguistic Particularism in the Napoleonic Enquiry into the Patois, 1806-12’, French History 29/4 (2015).
- Claire Norton, Rönesans ve Osmanlı Dünyası, (ed. with A. Contadini) ) (2015)
- Glenn Richardson, The Field of Cloth of Gold (2014).
- Claire Norton, “Sacred Sites, Severed heads and Prophetic Visions,” in Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, 2/1 (2014) 81-96.
- Mark Donnelly and Claire Norton,‘The siege, the book and the film: Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) ’, in Alex Macfie (ed) The Fiction of History (2014)
- Glenn Richardson, ‘Boys and the Their Toys: Kingship, Masculinity and Material Culture in the Sixteenth Century’ in S. McGlynn and E. Woodacre, The Image and Perception of Monarchy in Medieval and Early-Modern England (2014).
- Claire Norton, The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, (ed. with A. Contadini) (London: Ashgate, 2013).
- Mark Donnelly & Claire Norton, Doing History (2011).
- Glenn Richardson, (ed.), 'The Contending Kingdoms': France and England 1420-1700 (2008).
- Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (2005).