Centre for the Study of Modern and Contemporary History

Affiliated students

Details of students affiliated to the Centre

All taught and research postgraduate students who work in modern and contemporary history at the University of Edinburgh are welcome to join the Centre as affiliated students. Please contact us in order to be added to the website. You should send us a one-sentence description of your research field and a link to your external website and/or social media profile, if you have one.

  • Claire Aubin is a PhD student in History, researching the immigration and social integration patterns of Eastern European Holocaust collaborators in the US during the post-WWII and Cold War eras. 

  • Jessica Campbell is a PhD student in Economic and Social History. Her primary research interests lie in the social history of medicine. Her doctoral project 'From Moral Treatment to Mad Culture' seeks to explore the themes of creativity and patient expression through a historical enquiry into the nature of alternative psychiatric therapies in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.

  • Arran Claringbold is a PhD student in History. He is working on a biography of Zimbabwean nationalist leader Abel Muzoerwa, which is attempting to reassess his role in Zimbabwean nationalist politics during the Liberation War.

  • Mike Hally is an independent radio producer and part-time PhD student in Modern History. His research interests are the social history of the First World War, and local authority censorship of films post-WW2.  His thesis is about the creation and development of ex-service organisations during the First World War and up to their unification as the British Legion in 1921.

  • Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz is a PhD student in History. His research interests lie broadly in the history of the European left, political theory, political violence and historical memory. His thesis focuses on the political commitment of Eric Hobsbawm and his passion for politics in a transformed world (since 1977).

  • Robbie Johnston is a PhD student in History. His primary research interests lie in the twentieth-century politics of Scotland and Britain. He is currently working on a thesis which explores the development of Scottish Home Rule and Nationalism from the 1970s to the 1990s.

  • Tsiona Lida is a History PhD student at Harvard University. She is interested in emotions history, modern European intellectual history, and Israeli and Palestinian history. Tsiona holds an MA and MScR in History from the University of Edinburgh

  • Anna Lively is a History PhD student researching transnational connections between the Russian and Irish Revolutions, 1905-23. Her research interests include the translation of political ideas across borders and nationalism and socialism in early twentieth-century Europe. 

  • Marina Moya Moreno is a PhD student in History, working on the analysis of representations and memorialisation of the Spanish transition. Her research focuses on analysing the changes in the definitions of different narratives and portrayals of this period found within Spanish society.

  • Mathew Nicolson is a PhD student in Scottish History.  His research interests focus on the politics and culture of postwar Scotland with particular emphases on its ‘peripheral’ island groups and imperial connections.  His thesis explores the politics of culture, identity and constitutional change in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles from 1969 to 1999. 

  • Rory Scothorne is a PhD student in History. His research interests lie broadly in the history of social movements, the development and contestation of the public sphere in the twentieth century, and the political thought of the radical left. His thesis focuses on the relationship between the radical left and Scottish nationalism from 1968 to 1992.

  • Ramón Valdivieso is a PhD student in History, researching conflicts between modern nation-states and first-nations. He focuses on the Chilean-Mapuche conflict in southern Chile, specifically from the start of Pinochet's dictatorship in 1973, and how the creation of a regime-backed forest and hydroelectrical industries affected the relationship between the Mapuche and the Chilean state.

  • Hugo Zetterberg is a PhD student in History. He studies the histories of French and British decolonisation, with a particular focus on how the process was perceived in the metropolitan centre.