The majority of research in UoA 62, History is officially classified as world-leading, internationally excellent or recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour, having been placed in the three highest categories for quality in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.
| Quality Level | 4* | 3* | 2* | 1* | Unclassified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| % of research activity | 15 | 25 | 45 | 15 | 0 |
The renewal of History at Newcastle which began just before RAE 2001 has had dramatic results. Our Category A staff have increased in number from 19 to 28.3, only 11 of whom figured in our last submission. We have added the History of Medicine and the History of Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Ireland and Southern Europe to our longstanding interests in Britain as a whole, North East England in particular; Western and Eastern Europe and the USA. We focus to a greater extent than formerly on the centuries since 1500. We prioritize social, economic, intellectual and cultural over political history.
Material support for our research and opportunities for interdisciplinarity have greatly increased at Newcastle since the fundamental reorganisation of our University in 2002, when we joined Classics and Archaeology in a new School of Historical Studies in a new Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Our work is in six main fields:
Collaboration is a feature of our research at School level. If it is particularly evident in the collaboration between History and Classics in the study of the History of Medicine, it is also exemplified by the joint work of Paton and Dr Jane Webster of Archaeology on Remembering Slave Trade Abolitions, a project whose purpose is to examine, in collaboration with scholars from the Caribbean, the USA and Africa, the commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade.
Collaboration is also evident in the involvement of historians in the University's Centre for Gender and Women's Studies (now replaced by the Gender Research Group), its Early Modern Studies group, and its Postcolonial Research Group
Apart from its regular expenditure on books and serials in history, the Robinson Library has spent a further £75,000 on History-related electronic resources (notably J-STOR), and £25,000 on strengthening provision in the field of Chinese history.
A University-funded public lecture series enables us to increase the number of eminent historians we can invite to Newcastle. Recent lecturers have included Professors Anthony Badger (Cambridge), David Brading (Cambridge), John Merriman (Yale), Ludmila Selezneva (Moscow), Alexandra Walsham (Exeter), and James Walvin (York).
Our external research grant awards have doubled per person per year in the present RAE period.
Major studies under way in the present RAE period but that will come out after 2007 are Ashley on Vikings (Yale), Baldoli’s history of Italy (Palgrave), Boulton’s monograph on welfare and death in early modern London, Campbell on elites in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Ireland (OUP) and Smith Finley’s book on the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.