Latest Posts

  • Placing the Emergence of the Scottish Labour Party in a Comparative Perspective

    By Jason Parry Scotland has always been a place of significance for the Labour Party. Many key figures in the party’s formative years were Scottish, including its first (albeit unofficial) leader, Keir Hardie, and its first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald.… Continue reading

  • Spotlight on: Dr Rebecca Rist

    I was born in Toronto, Canada and grew up in Cambridge (UK). I did my undergraduate degree in Literae Humaniores at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and then moved for my postgraduate work to Cambridge. I did my M.Phil. and Ph.D.… Continue reading

  • Spotlight on: Dr Elizabeth Matthew

    I was born in Swansea but grew up in London. I was an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Durham. My research interests and publications focus on the political and social history of late medieval England and Ireland. I… Continue reading

  • Spotlight on: Dr Heike Schmidt

    I was born in Germany, although I have spent most of my life living elsewhere. I joined the History Department in 2013 as Lecturer in Modern History. My area of expertise is nineteenth and twentieth century African History, in particular… Continue reading

  • Spotlight on: Dr Rachel Foxley

    Having grown up a few miles further down the Thames valley, coming to Reading in 2004 was a return to home territory. My academic path as a student took me through different subjects as well as three different universities, but… Continue reading

  • Great Britain and Britishness

    By Oliver Finnegan In popular memory, the UK was born in 1707, with both England and Scotland passing their respective Acts of Union creating Great Britain. Union is seen as the recognition of shared nationality by two previously separate peoples… Continue reading

  • 1707 and all that

    By Esther Mijers As a Scottish historian working on the seventeenth-century politician William Carstares, who took part in the Union debates of the early 1700s and who was a staunch proponent, I am probably more attuned to the current debates… Continue reading

  • The Military Mapping of Scotland in the Period of the Jacobite Rebellions

    By Alastair Noble ‘I am going in the dark; for Marechal Wade won’t let me have his map!’ (Quoted in Tabraham, 2007, 25). These words, reported to have been uttered by General Hawley, Commander of Chief of Scotland in 1745, evoke… Continue reading

  • Spotlight on: Professor Patrick Major

    I was born in Greater London but grew up in Yorkshire. I studied History and German at Magdalen College, Oxford, then went on to St. Antony’s, Oxford for a DPhil. I took Tim Mason’s course on the Third Reich and… Continue reading

  • Spotlight on: Professor Lindy Grant

    I grew up in the Thames Valley, but come from a mainly Scottish background, and did my undergraduate degree in Medieval History at St Andrews. Then I went to the Courtauld Institute, where I did an MA in Medieval Art… Continue reading