The University offers individual supervision leading to a DPhil in Early Modern History.

We invite research proposals in all aspects of early modern history and have particular strengths in British and French social, cultural and intellectual history. All research is individually supervised by members of the history department and the programme has been consistently successful in attracting AHRC and other funding. In later years, students may get the opportunity to teach undergraduate courses. A weekly work-in-progress seminar gives a platform for Sussex historians, visiting speakers and research students to present their ideas and scholarship. Sussex history research students have in recent years organised a highly successful annual postgraduate conference, 'Fresh Perspectives'.

Research students are located within the School of Humanities Graduate School, in which there is a thriving and animated research culture, regular seminars, workshops and conferences on interdisciplinary research, and specific courses on research methods and skills. Intensive language courses in the major European languages are also available.

History research students play an active role within the buoyant interdisciplinary research centres which exist within the School of Humanities, such as the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History and the Centre for Early Modern Studies Recent doctoral research attached to the latter includes the following topics: Continuity and change in an English rural settlement: Porchester, c.1500-c.1750; 'Contending for laurels': intellectual women and the British Enlightenment; Anglo-French cultural identities in the eighteenth century; Soldier spirituality in the Thirty Years War; "Is't thus you squander time?" What do accounts of the restless dead tell us about notions of eternity in early modern Britain and France?; The city printer and the development of the London printing industry during the mid-17th century: commercial opportunities and partisanship; Cultural Symbols: pagan and Christian influences on literary and visual representations of women in early modern Europe; Theatre of blood: changing haematic discourse in medieval and early modern drama; Anti-catholicism and the English stage, 1580-1642; Facial hair and the performance of masculinity in early modern England; Memento mori portraiture: painting, protestant culture and the patronage of middle elites in England and Wales 1540-1630; Narrative and figurative imagery in the English domestic interior c.1558-1640; Commemoration and self-fashioning: funeral monuments to professors at Oxford, Tübingen and Leiden 1580-1700; Linguistic currency: metaphor and translation in the bilingual dictionaries of sixteenth-century England; The architectural patronage of William Cavendish, First Duke of Newcastle.

Core faculty and their research interests

The following faculty are particularly associated with the programme:

Peter Campbell (Senior Lecturer in History) (Research expertise: seventeenth and eighteenth-century French political, intellectual and cultural history, with a current interest in the relationship between patriot ideology or rhetoric and the politics of the end of the old regime)
Rafe Hallet (Tutorial fellow) (Research expertise: sixteenth and seventeenth century European culture, particularly Puritanism and print in the 16th century, the epistemology of Francis Bacon and the Royal Society, and the philosophy of religious toleration in early modern and enlightenment Europe.)
Knud Haakonssen (Professor of Intellectual History, director of the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History (Research expertise: the history of early modern philosophy with special emphasis on moral, political, and legal thought)
Robert Iliffe (Professor of Intellectual History and History of Science) (Research expertise: early modern history and the history of science, in particular The Newton Project)
Jim Livesey (Reader in History) (Research expertise: the cultural history of France and the British Isles, especially Ireland, from 1640 to 1900, with a particular interest in the growth of democratic values in society, the economy and politics)
Naomi Tadmor (Lecturer in History) (Research expertise: British social and cultural history c.1500-1800, currently working on the language of social and interpersonal relations in early modern biblical translations)
Richard Whatmore (Reader in Intellectual History) (Research expertise: eighteenth and nineteenth century British, French and Swiss intellectual history)

For links to individual faculty member's profiles, see the University's staff directory.

Further information

For further information on the MPhil or DPhil programmes, please contact the Programme Convenor, Dr Claire Langhamer, email C.L.Langhamer@sussex.ac.uk, tel. +44 (0)1273 606755 ext. 2163. See also the separate web page for the MA programme.