2025 Graduate Internships
There are 5 UNIQ+ History internships available in 2025. Please visit the UNIQ+ website to find out more and apply.
On Tour: Statecraft and the Politics of the “World Tour” across Empires
The final third of the nineteenth century was an era of the mass consumption of tall tales of global adventure from Nellie Bly’s seventy-two-day circumnavigation of the globe in 1889 to Joshua Slocum’s first solo circumnavigation of the earth by sail between 1895 and 1898. But, outside of mass popular adventure, world touring became a practice of knowledge-making, national and imperial development, and statecraft around the world.
This project examines case studies of world tours despatched from nation states, empires, indigenous polities, and transnational activists to understand this phenomenon. It examines the diversity of world touring as a diplomatic art as a way to break down the barriers between national historiographies and rethink how encounters across borders shaped societies around the world and seeks to develop new vantages from which to understand the phenomenon of globalisation.
Oral History in Global Epilepsy and Mind Brain Health
This project gives interns an opportunity to join a multi-disciplinary team of historians and medical/neurology professionals engaged in research and public outreach to improve the quality of life of people with epilepsy in resource poor settings.
Epilepsy is a highly stigmatised condition with a long history of social exclusion. It is often associated with additional mental health conditions and myths about its causes and treatment. The newly launched Centre for Global Epilepsy works with embedded oral history projects, technology development, and neurology in Oxford and across sites in Africa, India and Brazil.
We have previously hosted interns very successfully and can provide opportunities to work on research papers, public outreach communications, and website and database development. We are also happy to incorporate individuals’ skill sets and interests but a general interest in neurological health and/or health in resource limited or hard to reach populations is desirable.
African women and decolonisation: nationalism, transnational networks and sisterhood 1920s-1960s
This project explores how we might use archives and other sources held at the Bodleian Libraries to examine the role of African women in twentieth-century anti-colonial struggles – through strikes, street demonstrations, journalistic writing and transnational networks. As well as using finding tools, talking to archivists and accessing documents, you’ll have the opportunity to think about how historians deal with lives which have, in a few cases, been documented, but have mostly been unrecorded or have left archival traces in the accounts and through the lenses of others.
This research will be a key preparatory stage of an exhibition proposal to the Weston Library. Working with the project supervisors, the internship will thus also involve an element of scoping of similar kinds of exhibitions held elsewhere, making contact with potential exhibition partners in the UK (eg LSE Women’s Library) and abroad (Ghana, France, Algeria, Egypt, etc) and early-stage exhibition planning.
Feminism, democracy and transnational links in the early twentieth century
This project will give you the opportunity to investigate a key moment in feminist history and interrogate the question ‘which ideologies shaped early-twentieth-century feminist thought?’ Historians have long recognised that the movement for the Unification of Italy (c. 1833-1871) had a particular hold on the imagination of British feminists in the mid nineteenth century who were inspired by the liberal and emancipatory politics they detected among Italian Republicans. It is less widely known, however, that these links continued to exert a powerful pull well into the twentieth century.
This project is designed to map and examine this important moment in transnational feminist history. It considers how women’s rights activists in Britain drew on ideas and memories of Italian nationalism, unification and democracy during the course of the suffrage campaign, through attention to political, periodical and life writing, in order to better understand the transnational connections of both feminism and liberalism.
‘A word to the wives’: Letters from spouses in twentieth century British election literature
This project will give you an opportunity to interrogate how far gender continued to shape British politics in unexpected ways long after the enfranchisement of women. Election literature is used by political candidates to set out their values, priorities, interests and achievements. But throughout the twentieth century, many candidates drew on an unexpected source to endorse them: their spouse.
Letters from spouses—almost always wives—were used in many different ways: to position their husband as an ideal ‘family man’; to stress his frequent absences serving his constituency; to imply voters might get a ‘two for the price of one’ deal; and to make a direct appeal to women. Not only does this suggest a great deal about what candidates thought voters were looking for: it also indicates the ongoing barriers that women candidates, unable to offer this ‘package deal’, were up against.
Using the archives of election literature in the Bodleian, this project will document and analyse the extent, significance and belated decline of this essential electoral tool, with a view to enriching understandings of the political culture of electioneering in twentieth century Britain.
