UNIQ+ research internships

UNIQ+ research internships are 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 2024 internships will take place 1 July - 16 August 2024

2024 Graduate Internship Opportunities

History 01 - 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.

History 02 - 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.

History 03 - What is the future of geothermal energy in the Caribbean?

We urgently need new sources of 'green' energy and raw materials to transition to a low-carbon world. The hot fluids from volcanoes could deliver both via geothermal energy, and new sources of dissolved metals. Our new interdisciplinary programme on 'rethinking natural resources' is looking at the challenges and opportunities of geothermal energy on Montserrat, in the Eastern Caribbean.

Find out more and apply on the UNIQ+ website.

Application deadline 12:00 on Wednesday 21 February 2024

2023 Graduate Internships

The Faculty of History had four research projects offering fully funded UNIQ+ internship opportunities in 2023:

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.

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).

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.