Opportunity for a fully-funded 4-year PhD studentship, to begin in September 2025.

This studentship is available at the University of Warwick’s Department of History, in collaboration with Warwickshire County Record Office, through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

Overview of the project

Based in the historical town of Warwick, Warwickshire County Record Office provides a range of services to help local communities, schools, visitors, and professional researchers to engage with their local heritage and the history of Warwickshire. The archive contains a vast collection of manuscripts, printed sources and artefacts relating to Warwickshire and its people dating from the 12^th century to the present day.

This project examines how the people of early modern Warwickshire viewed and represented themselves in relation to their neighbours, the county community, wider political nation, and emerging global connections. It builds upon new research by historians, anthropologists and literary scholars to investigate the construction, representation, interpretation, and definition of local ‘belonging’ between c.1500 and 1750. For this purpose, the successful candidate will look for signs of – likely overlapping and competing – markers of identity at the levels of individuals, families, guilds, parishes, boroughs, manors and county.

It asks:

• What identities and expressions of identity can be located in the written, visual and material holdings of the Warwickshire County Record Office?
• To what extent did competing identities affect civic, parish and county communities?
• How stable/fluctuating were local identities over the course of the early modern centuries?
• What were the links with bonds of kinship, confession, profession, political allegiance in light of period conceptions of gender, honour, race, dis/ability and community?

Approach, sources and process

The project is based on the integration of records and artefacts held at Warwickshire County Record Office, along with supplementary materials in diocesan (Worcester), central (The National Archives, British Library) and family repositories (e.g. Sidney Papers in Kent).

During their doctoral studies, the successful candidate to acquire knowledge and expertise in record conservation; the planning and delivery of workshops; creation of learning resources for schools; integration of document sources and artefacts; and communicating with non-academic audiences (e.g. through blog posts or videocasts). There would be opportunities to contribute to the printed and online research guides aimed at members of the public visiting Warwickshire County Record Office.

The candidate would also be expected to engage in the wider research culture of the department, including the My-Parish network led by Prof. Kümin and the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre directed by Dr Pullin. These forums will provide the student with opportunities to present their work (at annual Symposia) and collaborate with an international body of scholars on projects relating to Warwickshire’s history, heritage, and culture.

About the partnership

Warwickshire County Record Office seeks to promote academic research into its archival collections, as well as engage a wide range of communities with its holdings. Following the Warwickshire Heritage and Culture Strategy (2020-2025), the Record Office is committed to celebrating the county’s past, whilst also providing a stronger statement about Warwickshire’s rich history and place within the world. Core strategies include celebrating Warwickshire’s diversity whilst also exploring the ways in which a ‘cohesive identity’ might be uncovered. There has been a recent guide published on LGBTQ+ history in the WCRO archives and there remains a strong thematic component on a sense of place. This project, which examines the different layers of identity within early modern Warwickshire and how these intersected and competed with broader national and international identities, will be timely.

The pre-modern material held in Warwickshire County Record Office is extensive and includes Quarter Sessions, manorial records, family and estate archives and charity collections (like the Lord Leycester Hospital, subject of an existing CDA). Some of these have been published in edited volumes.

The successful candidate will have access to all holdings and will benefit from the expertise of the archivist team and conservation staff, working closely with lead supervisor Amanda Williams (with a professional interest in medieval and early modern documents). The student will also benefit from supervision provided by University of Warwick staff with complementary expertise in early modern gender and religious life (Pullin) and communal and parish organisation (Kümin).

About the supervisors

In 2022, Dr Pullin and Prof. Kümin secured funding for a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick, this has been a successful partnership and has resulted in other impact and public engagement activities, including a Research Workshop programme for the Lord’s Leycester’s volunteers involving PhD students in the Warwick History department and Warwick County Record Office.

Naomi Pullin is Associate Professor of Early Modern History in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750 (Cambridge, 2018) and co-editor of Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1550-1800 (Routledge, 2021). She is the Director of the department’s Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre and is a member of the scientific council for an EU funded Horizon 2020-MSCA-Rise international project: GIS Sociabilités. 

Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick. A leading authority on parish organization and communal culture, he co-ordinates the Warwick Network for Parish Research - with its annual symposium and online My-Parish platform - and co-edits the Bloomsbury book series ‘Cultures of Early Modern Europe'. Kümin has worked with local records, especially those relating to urban, rural and ecclesiastical institutions, for several decades and is currently co-directing ‘Warwickshire Parish Accounts’, a collaborative project involving the Dugdale Society, Warwickshire County Record Office and a group of volunteer transcribers.

Amanda Williams is an archivist with more than 20 years’ experience of working with the wide variety of documents maintained at the Warwickshire County Record Office. In addition to her professional experience, she has a degree in Medieval Studies and has maintained a professional interest in medieval and early modern documents, giving her a unique skillset with which to understand and support the particular requirements of this research project. She has training in medieval Latin and a wealth of experience in dealing with early modern palaeography and so can guide the student in navigating the lesser-used collections. As one of the longest serving archivists on the Warwickshire team, she has an unparalleled knowledge of the collections and material that will be available to the successful student.

The applicant

The successful candidate will have some background in early modern history, preferably including experience of working with parish and other local records. The candidate should have some experience utilising early modern manuscript materials and will be expected to undertake the palaeography course run by the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. They will also be expected to engage in the History Department’s Graduate Forum in the first year of their studies, which will provide training and support to assist in the design and implementation of their project.

The panel would be interested to hear about ideas for potential events, workshops or other outreach activities that could be connected to this project. The candidate should use their application to outline the ways in which their research interests complement some of the core questions and ideas underpinning the project.

Applications should be made via the Midlands4Cities portal, which opens on 14th October 2024:

https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/apply/

The project is advertised on the M4C website after 14 October: https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Warwickshire-Identities-Early-Modern-Archival-Perspectives.pdf

Deadline: 13 January at 12:00 noon (UK time).

Please note that a separate application must also be made to the PhD programme of the Warwick History department by the deadline: https://warwick.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/apply/research/