Research

The History Programme at Dundee offers a wide range of courses in all our areas of expertise.

Liberty

The History Programme at Dundee is a team of enthusiastic and ambitious researchers which has enjoyed considerable success at the last two Research Assessment Exercises (RAE). We scored 5 in RAE 2001 and comparably in the most recent RAE 2008 . Our results in 2008 placed us joint 25th out of 83 History departments in the UK (Guardian league table) and make us one of the strongest History departments in Scotland.

Research Expertise

We offer research expertise in a range of areas, with particular strengths in Scottish, British, Irish, American and European history. For details of particular staff interests and expertise see our individual staff web pages.

Postgraduate Opportunities

We offer a range of taught and research-based postgraduate degrees in British, European and American history from the early modern period to the present which attract full-time and part-time postgraduate students from the UK and overseas.

History at Dundee is a member of an international doctoral programme in gender history, together with a consortium of prestigious European universities (University of Naples l’Orientale, University of Rouen, University of Vienna and University of Madrid Autonoma). The scheme offers transnational supervision as well as a semester of residence abroad in one of the partner institutions.

Research Excellence

The excellence of our research has been demonstrated in numerous ways in recent years, including strong RAE performances, our winning of various prizes and awards and an excellent record of securing research funding.

In 2007 Professor Chris Whatley won the Saltire Scottish History Book of the Year prize for his book on The Scots and the Union. In 2009 Dr Matt Ward won the Klein award for the best article in Pennsylvania History 2007-2009. Martine Van Ittersum is, in 2011-12, a visiting scholar at Harvard University as the Erasmus Lecturer on the History and Civilization of The Netherlands and Flanders.

Current and recent research grants include three major AHRC awards for research projects on:

• 'From Peaceable Kingdom to Wild West: Violence and Crime on the Early American Frontier'
• ‘Scottish Towns and Urban Society in the Enlightenment, 1745-1820’ (with Oxford University)
• ‘Robert Burns: Inventing Tradition and Securing Memory’ (with Glasgow University)

We have been awarded Leverhulme funding for a major project on ‘Managing the Decline of Jute’ (jointly with Economics at Dundee) and for a pilot study into 'Climate Change in Early Modern Scotland as Revealed in Church Records'.

Our other current grants include a Royal Society of Edinburgh Arts and Humanities Networking award for a series of workshops on "Crime and Policing in Scotland: Past and Present" (with Geography at Dundee) and an AHRC Networks award for ‘La Mamma: Interrogating a National Stereotype’ (with Glasgow University).