History Research Group

Dr Jonathan Durrant

There are very few comparative histories of witchcraft experiences in early modern Europe and none that examines them in the regions central to both witchcraft history and witchcraft historiography. Drawing on my research on both German and English witchcraft, I have been working towards the writing of a comparative history of witchcraft experiences in these two countries.  

Dr Jonathan Durrant

In the emerging witchcraft iconography of early sixteenth-century Europe, pitchforks were quickly established as a tool of the witches’ craft. Lacking a suitable contemporary interpretational context, historians have argued that they represent weather magic or attacks on fertility more widely.  

This article places the pitchforks in broader contexts than witchcraft and demonology, including women’s agricultural labour, the religious and cultural iconography of hay (notably in Bosch’s Hay-wain), contemporary proverbs, traditional religious practices, and biblical exegesis. It argues that pitchforks and the hay they represent were understood by contemporaries to mark witches out as the embodiment of vanity of human action, the ultimate withered souls to be cast, as Christ said in Matthew 6, into the oven and perish. I am currently writing Witchcraft in World History (to be published by Routledge). 

Professor Chris Hill 

An Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans was a landmark two-year project, led by USW in partnership with the University of Liverpool and National Life Stories, the oral history fieldwork charity based at the British Library.

Funded by the Office for Veterans’ Affairs, the £250,000 project aimed to formally recognise the service of test veterans seven decades on from their service in Australia and the Pacific, alongside the Nuclear Test Medal for UK and Commonwealth personnel.

Now in their eighties and nineties, British nuclear test veterans have shared their memories of experiencing nuclear explosions up to 200 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on 4 August 1945.

From the stunning appearance of the mushroom cloud to long-term health concerns linked to radioactive fallout, these veterans’ lives have been profoundly shaped by their encounters with nuclear weapons.

Across 41 in-depth life stories, the research explores the history of nuclear testing within the personal contexts of veterans’ lives, from their hopes as young servicemen to their reflections in later life. By doing so, the research contributes to the social history of post-war Britain, whilst also enhancing recognition of test veterans themselves.

The British Library has launched an online archive drawn from the oral history interviews, which is free to access and offers a foundation for further research, education and public outreach.

A short film, The Greatest Force on Earth, was also created for the project, edited and directed by BAFTA award-winning filmmaker Sasha Snow and focusing on the personal journey of royal engineer Frank Bools.

In addition, the project team has worked with LABRATS International – a campaign group dedicated to raising awareness of the Atomic and Nuclear testing programmes throughout history – to develop downloadable lesson packs for schoolchildren aged 14 and up, which form part of the Welsh Baccalaureate syllabus.

The final report from the project is available here: An Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans - final report

Dr Andy Croll

Barry Island was one of the most cherished leisure spaces in twentieth-century south Wales, a playground of generations of working-class day-trippers. 
 
Andy Croll’s book, Barry Island: The Making of a Seaside Playground considers its rise as a seaside resort and reveals a history that is much more complex, lengthy and important than has previously been recognized. 
 
I am currently interested in the history of animals, especially animals exploited for industrial purposes, like pit ponies in Welsh collieries.

Dr Ruth Atherton

I am a social, religious and cultural historian of early-modern Europe. My research interests focus on confessional identity formation and the nature of sin and salvation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, especially with regards to the development of early modern sacramental education. I am currently working on a monograph entitled ‘The invisible grace of God’: Sacramental Education in Reformation Germany, 1525-1610. 

This article stems from a workshop held at the Institut d’histoire de la Réformation in Geneva in 2020. The workshop was interested in exploring how the Reformation, in particular the Calvinist faith, experienced and described their bodies and souls. It questioned whether there was a specific Reformed culture of the body and, if so, how did it affect daily life. Was it based on specific theological tenets, and did it present a confessional dimension? The aim of the workshop was to re-evaluate Reformed attitudes to corporeality and the study of its “bodily” effects. 

Drawing on Dr Atherton's previous work on death and dying, her  article explores how Protestant clergy sought to comfort and instruct the living on how to prepare their bodies for their hoped-for spiritual elevation to heaven after death; it considers the relationship of the body to the soul and their respective states in the period after death but before the Last Judgement; and it examines what reformers taught about the nature of the soul after death. Based on an analysis of Protestant consolatory literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this article employs a cross-confessional approach to consider how Protestant clergy comforted and instructed the living through a targeted appeal to the emotions and reason. 

Professor Chris Evans

Professor Chris Evans is engaged in a study of light and industrial change in Britain in the period 1650-1800. His intention is to shift attention away from post-1800 technologies like coal gas and towards a more panoramic view of light in early British industrialisation that emphasises the exploitation of frontier spaces, be they Arctic waters for whale oil or the Russian steppes for tallow. He suggests that technological innovation has been over-emphasised in accounts of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The ability of Britons to seize control of distant energy reserves warrants more attention.   

Professor Chris Hill

Responding in 1960 to the prospect of French nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara, the leader of postcolonial Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, forewarned of a “new nuclear imperialism”. The exploitation of foreign lands for uranium mining and the legacies of nuclear testing has ensured the ongoing relevance of Nkrumah’s words. It is the subject of USW historian Chris Hill’s work. 
 
His research explores how the pursuit of nuclear power by Britain was enmeshed in empire. He is concerned not only with the structural connection between empire and nuclear power – the resources and sites that the British used to procure uranium or test weapons – but with imperialism as a knowledge system by which the British nuclear programme was operationalised. 
 
British nuclear ambition therefore provides a window into imperial thinking about diplomacy, ecology and race at the end of empire. 

Professor Maddy Gray

Research on the history and social anthropology of pilgrimage by USW Professor Emerita Maddy Gray has led to the development of the Cistercian Way, a round-Wales heritage route linking Cistercian abbeys and other historical sites.

The Cistercian Way is now recognised by Welsh Government, walking groups such as the Ramblers, and walking tourism providers, having received funding from Welsh Government for way-marking and a website.

Further work is taking place to develop a ‘Welsh Camino’ which includes sections of the Cistercian Way, in collaboration with  Rediscovering Ancient Connections - The Saints, and Celtic Routes.

Both are projects of the Ireland Wales 2014-2020 European Territorial Co-operation (ETC) programme. 

• Wales: A Pilgrimage Country
• Wales and Atlantic Slavery: Redressing Historical Amnesia

Professor Maddy Gray’s research on pilgrimage in medieval Wales has directly informed the Welsh Government’s policy on tourism. Her work has highlighted the potential of pilgrimage routes to attract visitors to Wales and to generate sustainable economic benefits in disadvantaged areas. Specifically, Gray has been the driving force behind the Cistercian Way, a long-distance footpath linking monastic sites in Wales, inaugurated in 2016. Designed in conjunction with The Ramblers, and with sponsorship from Visit Wales, the Cistercian Way dovetails with the Welsh Government’s Faith Tourism Action Plan (2013), which Gray helped draft.

Maddy Gray’s research has explored the key role of the Cistercian Order in the development of the Welsh landscape. Fifteen Cistercian houses were established in medieval Wales, the first of them in the 1130s. They were to have profound spiritual, political, and material effects. The Cistercians enjoyed the patronage of the Welsh princes, who bestowed lands on the order and sponsored the building of churches and monasteries. The Cistercians, for their part, were a force for economic change, not only through introducing new agricultural practices but by attracting and caring for pilgrims. The relics held at Cistercian houses, together with shrines and holy wells elsewhere in Wales, contributed to a strong sense of Welsh identity in the Middle Ages. Tapping into that sense of identity today and enticing more visitors to monastic sites and sacred places, can be an unexpected path to economic regeneration.

Work by USW historian Professor Chris Evans on the suppressed history of Wales and Atlantic slavery is affecting the ways in which public bodies and creative artists handle a difficult, contested past.

Evans is interested in the relationship between Atlantic slavery and industrial development in Europe, with a particular focus on Welsh industry. His book Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery, 1660-1850 (2010) revealed for the first time the significance of Welsh woollens in the slave Atlantic between the 1680s and the 1840s. Using material in British and US archives, Evans was able to demonstrate how Welsh fabric was (i) traded for captives on the Guinea coast, and (ii), more importantly, sold in large volumes to planters in the Caribbean and North America. Here, marketed as “Negro Cloth”, Welsh woollens were used to clothe enslaved workers.

Slave Wales was the inspiration for a community research project, From Sheep to Sugar: Welsh Wool and Slavery, supported by the National Heritage Lottery Fund. The project was based in North and Mid-Wales, the heartland of “Negro Cloth” production, and directed by Learning Links International CIC, a social enterprise specialising in educational initiatives linking Wales to the Caribbean and Africa. Community research groups were established in Bangor, Machynlleth, Dolgellau, Glyn Ceiriog, and Shrewsbury. Over fifty volunteers were recruited to conduct research on Negro Cloth and to disseminate knowledge of this overlooked Welsh product. The project’s volunteers were all trained using Evans’s Slave Wales as a set text.

The project has been recognised as an exemplary response to the Well-Being of Future Generations Act by the Learned Society of Wales in its 2020 report Wales Studies: Research about Wales, for Wales and the World.

There have been direct cultural outcomes. The award-winning Welsh-language writer Angharad Tomos, who attended one of the From Sheep to Sugar public events, was inspired to write a Young Adult novel, Y Castell Siwgar [The Sugar Castle] (2020), which explores the links between Wales and Jamaica through its two teenage protagonists, one free and one enslaved. Evans has also been able to engage with contemporary craft practitioners who have participated in the From Sheep to Sugar project. From Sheep to Sugar inspired several contemporary practitioners, recruited via weavers’, spinners’, and dyers’ guilds in Wales and the West of England to imaginatively recreate Negro Cloth. One textile artist, Jennifer Hodgeman, having read Evans’s Slave Wales, designed a textile installation, “Sugar(sic)k”, which was exhibited at The Weir Garden, a National Trust property in Herefordshire that attracts 35,000 visitors annually, in 2019. 

Mike Barnes, MPhil / PhD 
Title: Hampshire Militia: Defaulting 1625-1640. Family and Community Relationships.
 
Ross Grover, MA by Research 
Title: Three monarchs who ruled in sixteenth century Europe and the differences between Renaissance Monarch iconography and the iconography of the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor. 
 
Darren Macey, MA by Research
Title: The application of the ‘Crusade against Outrelief’ in Glamorgan 1870-1980. 

Douglas MacLeod, PhD
Title: ‘Dr Faust’s Fast Reactors: An International History of the UK’s Fast Reactor Programme’.

Gareth Bryant, MA by Research (graduated 2021) 
Title: ‘Ye Olde Englishe Communists’: Popular Front Historians and the Left, 1936-1940. 
 
Jessica Davies, MA by Research (graduated 2024) 
Title: The public history of Nazism in Britain. 
 
Hannah Fatkin, MA by Research (graduated 2022) 
Title: Justifying the Peace: the Versailles Treaty and British Public Opinion in the Early Interwar Years. 
 
Nazmia Jamal, MA by Research (graduated 2025) 
Title: 'Shouting Out Loud': Reading the development of queer lesbian feminisms in 1990s Britain through the Lesbians Talk Issues pamphlet series. 
 
Jill Maclean, MA by Research (graduated 2022) 
Title: Why and how did Newport devise an innovative post-war reconstruction programme, how were the plans financed and what legacy remains today? 

Douglas MacLeod (graduated 2024) 
Title: The Philosopher's Plutonium Stone: the Dounreay Fast reactor and the fall of Britain's Atomic Empire.

Joshua Bushen (graduated 2024) 
Title: Torn Between Two Nations: Joint Anglo-American Nuclear Testing in Operation Dominic and International Compensation.