Modern and Contemporary History

The University of Brighton has a thriving research culture for Modern and Contemporary History PhD students. Our primary strength as an academic community is in modern history, including global perspectives on the twentieth-century. 

Our  Modern and Contemporary History Modern and Contemporary History students from University of Brighton University of Brighton historians use a wide range of interdisciplinary methodologies that draw on social, political and cultural history and investigate the complex interconnections between present and past, evoked by concepts of memory.  

Key facts

Your Modern and contemporary history PhD will be supervised by expert academics who will also guide you towards career decisions and allow your work to draw on and contribute to the wider academic society at Brighton and at partner universities.

As a Modern and contemporary history PhD student, you will

• have a supervisory team comprising two members of academic staff. Depending on your particular area of study you may also have additional supervisors from other research institutions or external partners.

• become part of an active and engaged community of research learning, leading talks, and social events with opportunities to present your work as it progresses and network with other researchers.

• You will also be part of the interdisciplinary School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton.

• have access to a range of electronic resources via the university’s online library, as well as to physical books and journals at St Peter’s House Library in central Brighton and other campus libraries.

Our community of experts particularly welcomes projects addressing:

• concerns around the nature, structure and scope of violent conflict including the social and cultural history of modern warfare, with reference to the total wars of the twentieth century, legacies and memories of warfare, truth, justice and reconciliation in ‘post-conflict’ societies

• colonial and postcolonial cultural and social history with reference to the histories and legacies of transatlantic slavery, forms of migration, diasporic identity, the anglophone Caribbean, the Black Atlantic, and twentieth-century US cultural history, especially histories of ‘race’ and civil rights

• histories of identity formations such as gender, ‘race’, nation and class and the role of cultural memory in these formations