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Our research projects

Our research projects

We’re engaged in a rich and varied rangeof research projects, from ‘Tracing the Holocaust’ to ‘Medical Prognosis in the Middle Ages’. Here’s a flavour of what we do:

Our research into Muslim society in modern Britain has contributed to legal changes regarding discrimination on the grounds of religion. Led by Professor Humayun Ansari and Dr Akil Awan, the research is also being used by the British and US governments as a source of guidance on Muslim community affairs and Islamic activism.

Continuing the legacy of the late Professor David Cesarani’s (1956-2015) research on modern Jewish history and the Holocaust our Holocaust Research Institute continues to influence Holocaust education in the UK and influenced policy debates around Holocaust memorialisation and post-Holocaust issues domestically and internationally.

This project is a study of African-American labour in the post-emancipation American South. The research aims to address questions that have as much to do with the changing nature of work and effects of class-based alliances and tensions, as they do with issues of race.

After Slavery revisits and refines an analysis of the period pioneered by W.E.B Du Bois in his 1930s work Black Reconstruction, a book that broke with the conventions of its period by placing African Americans at the centre of the narrative and considering them first and foremost in their capacity as workers.

 

 

This major research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is led by Dr Jane Hamlett alongside Professor Julie-Marie Strange from the University of Manchester. Pets and Family Life is the first large-scale historical study of the relationships between families and their cats, dogs and other companion animals in modern Britain.

The project will track the changing position of animals in the home, in relation to broader shifts in family life, including transformations in size, relationships, intimacy, housing and living conditions that took place in this era.

The research for the project comprises a major new archival survey, focusing on the cultural representation of pets and families, consumption and the growing market for pet-related products, and their everyday presence in households across the social spectrum.

A study of the vigorous and long-lived medical culture of the Byzantine empire, as a conduit of ancient medicine to medieval Islam and Europe, through its medical manuscripts.

Just a fraction of the over 2,000 Greek medical manuscripts that survive have been properly catalogued and analysed.

The project seeks to uncover those patterns of organisation and show how the texts could have been deployed in a variety of historical settings, educational and therapeutic.

 

This research project analyses how a ‘universal’ late antique Church was constructed despite the context of political fragmentation that precipitated the end of the Western Roman Empire and its division into smaller polities. A team comprising five researchers and three software developers will adapt existing network analysis and GIS software to explore how informal relationships among distant clerics contributed to disseminating common ecclesiastical laws, visions of the church, and patterns of clerical behaviour, which ultimately strengthened a supra-regional ecclesiastical organisation.

'Genocidal captivity: (Re)telling the stories of Armenian and Yezidi women survivors' (AHRC £201,950).

This project explores stories of Armenian and Yezidi women held in genocidal captivity, using humanitarian records of Armenian survivors from the 1920s and recent interviews with and compelling portraits of Yezidi survivors in Iraq.

 

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