History MA

Professor Darren Oldridge

Darren Oldridge is a specialist in sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious history. His interests include witchcraft and the Devil, the supernatural, and the religious context of the English Civil Wars. A recurring theme of his work is the rationality underpinning apparently strange beliefs: this is reflected, most recently, in the new edition of Strange Histories (Routledge: 2017). More broadly, he is interested in the relationship between poetry and film and the past.

At Worcester Darren teaches modules that reflect these interests, including The Early Modern World and Witchcraft and the Devil. At present he is editing the third edition of The Witchcraft Reader, to be published by Routledge in 2018.

Dr Paddy McNally

Paddy McNally's teaching and research interests are focused on Irish history from 1690 until 1848, German history from 1870 to 1945, and the history of political thought. He is author of the book, Parties, Patriots and Undertakers. Parliamentary politics in early Hanoverian Ireland and numerous articles on eighteenth-century Irish history. He is currently writing From the Boyne to the Famine. A thematic history of Ireland, 1690-1848, to be published by Routledge. He teaches specialist modules on Irish history 1690-1848, German history 1870-1945, and Nationalism. He has successfully supervised PhD and MPhil students to completion and welcomes expressions of interest from prospective postgraduate researchers in most aspects of British and Irish history from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Professor Neil Fleming

Neil Fleming's research and teaching focusses on aspects of British, Irish and imperial history since the late nineteenth century.

Dr Wendy Toon

Wendy Toon is an historian of the United States of America, specialising in the twentieth century. She is currently writing Images of the Enemy: American Constructions of the Germans and Japanese in World War Two (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).

Wendy joined the University of Worcester in September 2002. She previously held positions at Staffordshire University and Keele University, and was a Royal Historical Society Fellow (Peter Marshall Fellowship) at the Institute of Historical Research.  

Professor Michael Bradshaw

Michael is the Head of School of Humanities, having previously worked at Edge Hill University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Bristol University and the University of Tokyo.

Michael is a specialist in Romanticism, especially poetry and drama of later Romantics. His published critical work includes authors such as: Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Clare, George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Keats, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Walter Savage Landor, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley. 

He has also published on Romantic drama, ‘Romantic generations’, Romantic fragment poems, and the periodical press in the 1820s, as well as the contemporary author Alan Moore.

Dr Luke Devine

Luke is currently Course Leader for Sociology

Professor John Parham

John is Professor of Environmental Humanities and course leader for the Arts and Humanities MRes programme. He teaches modules in green media, the new humanities and research methods. John also leads the university’s Green Voices Research Group who have held events, in Worcester, with the nature writers Caspar Henderson and Richard Kerridge, and the photographer David Plummer.

For 20 years, John was co-editor of the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (published by Taylor & Francis).

Dr Anna Muggeridge

Dr Anna Muggeridge is a historian of modern Britain with a particular specialism in women’s and gender history. Her doctorate was funded by the University of Worcester, and she has also undertaken research projects funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Historical Society, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Dr Elspeth King

Elspeth King joined the university in August 2022 after 8 years of being an Associate Lecturer. Her research and teaching interests are in twentieth-century British history, especially the First and Second World Wars and Women’s History.

Professor Suzanne Schwarz

Suzanne Schwarz’s teaching at the University of Worcester focuses on the transatlantic slave trade and West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She also focuses on developing historical research skills for students through the study of regional and local history. She was the recipient of two student-led teaching awards in 2013 and 2014.