UNIQ+ research internships
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UNIQ+ research internships are fully funded summer internships designed to provide students from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds with the opportunity to experience postgraduate study at Oxford.
UNIQ+ aims to provide a real day-to-day experience of postgraduate research. During the seven-week programme students will undertake a research project, attend training skills sessions and receive information on graduate study.
Our intention, is that everyone who takes part will gain confidence, skills and experience that will enhance both their CV and any future postgraduate applications. During UNIQ+, students will live in college accommodation and experience life as a graduate student in Oxford. Social activities, including some organised lunches and dinners, will introduce students to our community and to some of the University of Oxford’s famous traditions and locations.
The 2025 internships will take place July - August 2025
Applications are now open for 2025
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.
2024 Graduate Internships
Mapping the rise of Christian kingship, 300 - 840
You will work on gathering materials for the appendices of a forthcoming book on Christian kingship in the late antique and early medieval worlds. You will help identify and gather a collection of relevant maps that will supplement the text; there is also a possibility of working with mapping software to produce new maps if the researcher felt that was necessary. You will undertake research for other supplementary materials (lists of rulers and family trees) and collate the required information.
Middle Eastern migration in 19th and 20th-century North and South America
This project will give you the opportunity to join a large-scale collaborative research project that explores the lives and experiences of Middle Eastern migrants who travelled from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th century.
2023 Graduate Internships
International banking connections and international commerce 1870-1980
International bank connections are a fundamental building block of globalisation. The Global Correspondent Banking 1870-2000 (GloCoBank) project aims to uncover how banks made these connections in the 19th and 20th centuries using primary documentary sources and compiling and analysing new data sets derived from historical sources. In the Summer of 2023, the project welcomed two UNIQ+ interns who focused on two aspects of the project’s research: 1) using data drawn from The Bankers’ Almanac to analyse the geographic distribution of countries with correspondent banking connections to London between 1901 and 1913, 2) writing a case study of Edward Holden’s role in the expansion of Midland Bank’s correspondent banking network between 1891-1920 using records from the HSBC Archive. Read more about their research below.
Childhood and Inequality in Modern Britain
This UNIQ+ project asked the three interns to design their own research projects to explore a little-known aspect of childhood and inequality in modern Britain. Most of what we know about the past tells the story of adult actions, beliefs, and experiences. Oxford University's History Faculty has hosted the UK's only Centre for the History of Childhood since 2003. Over the last twenty years researchers have sought to find sources to include the experiences and voices of the young in the histories we write. The UNIQ+ interns in summer 2023 focused on young people who were marginalised not only because of their youth, but also because of other characteristics, such as their class, gender, or sexuality. The interns developed projects that started to explore promising new archives and approaches to studying youth in 1960-90s Britain.
The Mighty Dead: Royalism and Popular Culture during the English Civil War
The noble deaths of English aristocrats become major news stories in the 1640s, sensationalised in the popular press as well as memorialised in stone and in literature. This research project explored how these moments of drama and tragedy became a crucial part of royalist popular culture, reflecting and shaping contemporary perceptions of honour, masculinity and virtue. Interns used printed pamphlets and newsbooks alongside portraiture and battlefield material culture, accessible in the Bodleian library and Oxford. The project was co-supervised of Dr David Scott of the History of Parliament Trust (HoPT).
Oral History and the lived experience of epilepsy in low to middle income countries
This project brings together a dedicated multi-disciplinary team of medical/public health professionals and historians to significantly 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 and discrimination. We work in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Brazil and India with local collaborators in order to implement 'embedded oral history projects' that inform public health initiatives.
2022 Graduate Internships
Exploring the Allestree Library
Tucked away above the cloisters in Christ Church is a large collection of books bequeathed to the University by Richard Allestree, a Regius Professor who died in 1681. Allestree lived through the civil wars and his collection offers a window into the scholarship, reading, and book collecting practices of early modern Oxford. In 2022 two UNIQ+ interns spent time examining the collection, especially the hand-written marks of annotation and provenance found in many of the books. Here they share the fruits of their research. This internship was supervised jointly by the Faculty of Theology and Religion and Faculty of History.