Postgraduate Funding Opportunities for 2012-13

The School of History is home to a large and diverse community of over 100 postgraduate students pursuing either one of a number of taught programmes on offer, or engaging in original research for an advanced postgraduate degree.

As one of the country's leading centres for historical research, the School of History provides an active and cohesive academic setting for postgraduate study. The School brings together over fifty members of staff - several of them leading, internationally recognised authorities - working in many different fields of History and is also home to a number of institutes, research centres, projects and research groups.

The School of History is pleased to be able to offer a number of scholarships for postgraduate study to be taken up in academic year 2012-13.

Click here for more details.

PhD Scholarship - Scotland and the Flemish People

The Institute of Scottish Historical Research at the University of St Andrews is pleased to announce a fully-funded PhD scholarship as part of a new research initiative focused on Scotland and Flemish People and funded by the Fleming Family Charitable Trust.

Click here for further details

Two fully-funded AHRC PhD studentships available in Modern History (19th-Century Europe)

As part of the major AHRC-funded research project “Heirs to the Throne in the Constitutional Monarchies of 19th-Century Europe” (led by Dr Frank Lorenz Müller), two fully-funded three-year PhD studentships are available at the University of St Andrews.

View details

Professor Andrew Pettegree elected as Vice President of the Royal Historical Society.

The Society, founded in 1868, is the foremost professional society in Great Britain representing historians, and it play an important role promoting and defending the scholarly study of the past. The membership of nearly 3,000 Fellows and members draws together individuals from across the world, engaged professionally in researching and presenting public history, whether in archives, libraries, museums or the heritage industry.

The Society aims to maintain professional standards within the discipline, and to represent the views of its membership to government bodies and to the public at large.  The society is also an important historical publisher.

Professor Pettegree has previously served as an officer of the Society, when, as Literary Director, he took charge of the Society’s programme of publishing historical documents, the Camden Society.  In 2012 he will chair the panel of judges for the Gladstone Prize, which honours the best first book published in Britain on any topic that is not primarily British history.

Professor Steve Murdoch's latest publication included in Choice Magazine's 2012 Outstanding Academic Titles List

Professor Steve Murdoch's book, The terror of the seas?: Scottish maritime warfare 1513-1713, has been included in the Choice Magazine 2012 Outstanding Academic Titles List. This year’s list includes 629 books and electronic resources chosen by the Choice editorial staff from among the 7,263 titles reviewed by the magazine during the past year. Of these, 600 are print products; the remaining 29 are electronic. These outstanding works have been selected for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as important—often the first—treatment of their subject.

"This excellent study is a model of how maritime and naval history ought to be written, from the sources of all the relevant countries, without any anachronistic assumptions of how naval warfare ought to be fought. It is important not only for Scottish history but for the maritime history of all northern Europe, to which the Scottish contribution can no longer be neglected.!
N.A.M. Roger
International Journal of Maritime History, XXIII, no.1, June 2011

Public Lecture to challenge Scottish piracy myths — University of the Highlands and Islands

USTC project wins further £1 million grant

The Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) project group has won a further research grant worth £983,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This will allow the project group to continue its work charting the publication history of the first centuries of print.

Welcoming the new grant, project director Professor Andrew Pettegree commented: ‘We are tremendously encouraged to have this new expression of confidence from the academic community for the work being done here in St Andrews. It is particularly gratifying to have this news just before the USTC is launched on-line for the first time.’

The project, which will continue under the joint direction of Professor Pettegree and Dr Malcolm Walsby, will allow for the appointment of three postdoctoral fellows and two doctoral studentships. The grant, which will extend the work of the project from 2012 to 2016, will provide for the USTC to continue its coverage into the seventeenth century, doubling the size of the database to around 700,000 editions. By extending the survey from 1600 to 1650, it will offer a full view of the first two centuries of print, a period in which print finally came of age as a mature and independent means of communication and information exchange. The early 17th century was a particularly dramatic time of explosive growth for print in northern Europe and the project will reflect this in increasing attention to pamphlets, broadsheets and the first newspapers.

Congratulations

• Dr Tomasz Kamusella:  On November 23, 2011, following the successful viva (defence) of his Habilitationsschrift (The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe, Palgrave 2009) and his other post-PhD academic research and output at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS, http://www.swps.pl/english/index.php), Warsaw, Poland.  Dr Tomasz Kamusella received the academic degree of ‘doktor habilitowany‘ (Habilitation or Habilitated PhD) in Cultural Studies, as conferred by the SWPS’s Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities.  In the Polish academic nomenclature, it entitles him to the title of “dr hab” in front of his name.’
  
  
• Dr Aileen Fyfe is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
  
  
• Our Honorary Professor Bill Miller's new book gets extensive coverage in Maclean's magazine
  
  
• Former PhD student Kathrin Zickerman has secured a full time post at the Centre of History, University of the Highland and Islands (UHI) .

400 Astrophysicists . . . and one historian

On 24 October, Professor Gerard DeGroot gave the keynote address at the biennial conference of the Council of European Aerospace Societies.  The week-long conference, held at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, was attended by around 350 aerospace professionals from throughout Europe.  DeGroot's talk, entitled "Science vs Politics: Key Decisions in the Space Race, 1955-62" was designed to "use the past to inform the present", namely by showing industry professionals how the emphasis upon competition and political prestige in the early years of the American space program has continued to shape perceptions of what can and should be done in space.  

Previously… Scotland's History Festival

Dr Katie Stevenson will participate in 'Previously… Scotland's History Festival', which launched on 17 December 2011. Dr Stevenson will be speaking about the medieval Scottish royal court during the sold-out performance of Dunbar and Kennedy's 'Flyting', to be performed by Scottish comedians Stuart Murphy and Garry Dobson. More details on the performance can be found here: http://www.historyfest.co.uk/events/the-flyting/

More information about Scotland's History Festival can be found here www.historyfest.co.uk/ The Festival closes on 30 November.

Dr Barbara Crawford awarded an OBE

In the Queen’s Birthday Honours this year Barbara Crawford, a retired Senior Lecturer in the School of History, was awarded an OBE. Barbara Crawford is Honorary Reader in History at the University of St. Andrews having spent over thirty years as a teacher in the Department of Mediaeval History. Since taking early retirement in 2001 she has continued to pursue her researches into the history and archaeology of the Scandinavian settlements in Scotland, and contacts across the North Sea in the Middle Ages. Dr. Crawford is a Member of the Norwegian Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She was a Commissioner of the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland from 1991-2001, chaired The Treasure Trove Advisory Panel for Scotland from 1993-2001, and is currently President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. As Honorary Director of the Strathmartine Centre for Scottish History (an independent charitable trust established by the late Dr. Ronald Cant before his death in 1999, for supporting research and education in Scottish History) she has been instrumental in encouraging  many different Scottish history research projects. Her book on the “The Northern Earldoms. Orkney and Caithness from 870-1470AD. Joint Earldoms and Divided Loyalties”, which reverts back to the subject of her original doctoral thesis, is currently nearing completion.

AHRC Grant to Fund Research into 19th-Century European Monarchies

Dr Frank Lorenz Müller has been awarded a research grant by the AHRC to lead a five-year project exploring the roles played by heirs to the throne in the constitutional monarchies of 19th-century Europe.

The grant will provide funding for a postdoctoral researcher, two fully –funded PhD studentships and two international conferences.

Please click here for further information

AHRC Early Career Fellowship

Dr James Palmer has been awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship for the next academic year. He will be working on his second book, Apocalyptic Traditions, Power and Society 400-1100, which will examine the relationship between beliefs about the end of time and social and political action, from the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West, to the First Crusade.

School Book Prizes

Congratulations to all students who have been awarded book prizes by the School of History for distinction level performance at subhonours in 2010-11.

Students who have received an award email can now select their prize by clicking here.

St Andrews PhD students have won two of the three annual Postdoctoral Fellowships
offered by the Society for Renaissance Studies

Alessia Meneghin, will be working on a new project, Shaping affordable fashion: Florentine mercers in the fifteenth century, which will expand on current knowledge of an occupational group that determined the access of urban workers to low-cost fashion in late medieval Tuscany. The project is based on a comparative study of the activity of four mercers in Florence between 1415 and 1479 whose surviving books make it possible to establish the number, volume and nature of transactions, the goods sold, the suppliers and their business turnover. This will allow both quantitative and qualitative analysis of issues such as the relationship between the mercers’ specializations and the demand of their clientele, the connection between that same clientele’s economic choices and their social identities, and how the choices and preferences for certain types of accessories reflect the dynamics of changes in fashion.

Stefan Visnjevac, will be working on a project entitled Speaking in Public in Late Medieval Italy – The Thought and Preaching of Leonardo Mattei da Udine (1399-1469). The aim is to produce an extensive study of the life and works of the Dominican preacher Leonardo Mattei da Udine (1399-1469) who was held in high regard during his own lifetime, but is now virtually forgotten. His diverse oral and literary output on subjects from philosophy to fashions, from speeches at the Council of Florence to sermons delivered in Florence and Udine, hold great potential for a better understanding of fifteenth-century culture, intellectual thought, and the developing processes of the transmission of ideas. An investigation of Mattei’s extensive activity in Friuli - as preacher, prior, Udine’s advisor on theological concerns, prolific book trader, and promoter of local devotional cults – will seek, moreover, to add significantly to the historical scholarship of this least-studied region of Italy.

Details of the Society for Renaissance Studies and the postdoctoral fellowships can be found on www.rensoc.org.uk

Postdoctoral Research

Fernando Arias Guillen was awarded his doctorate from the University of Castilla-La Mancha in December 2010, for a thesis on royal power in the kingdom of Castile in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He was supervised by Dr Ana Rodriguez.  He has been involved in the continuing collaborations between mediaevalists at St Andrews and at the CSIC in Madrid, and also spent some months in St Andrews during his doctorate.  He is now undertaking postdoctoral research funded by a Spanish government scholarship, with the intention of writing a book comparing the development of royal power in France, Castile and England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Chris Given-Wilson is acting as his mentor during his post-doctoral time in St Andrews.

Honours Pre-Advising 2011-12

Pre-advising information is now available online for all students entering Junior Honours courses or returning students entering Senior Honours in the School of History during the 2011-12 academic year. The website contains information on the application process and the degree programmes, including requirements for entrance to Honours and up-to-date details of all available course modules in Junior and Senior Honours.

Visit the Pre-advising website.

Imperial Sites of Memory (2 & 3 September 2011)

In co-operation with the University of Bonn, the St Andrews Centre for Transnational History is hosting a two-day international conference exploring the memory generated by the activities of imperial states in the 18th and 19th centuries and its subsequent developments. Please click HERE for further details.

Thinking about Postgraduate Study?

With over 50 members of staff, a large graduate community and extensive specialist library resources the School of History provides an ideal environment for postgraduate study.

For information on taught postgraduate programmes (graduate diploma, MLitt, MPhil) click here.

For information on funding for taught programmes and PhDs click here

Scholarships for intensive language tuition

Additional key benefits of studying as a postgraduate student at St Andrews:

• Research funds – individual allowances and discretionary awards
• Office space
• Opportunities for teaching