Postgraduate Research

Join Our Thriving Research Community

We welcome applications from applicants for our Master's programmes and from prospective PhD students wishing to join our thriving postgraduate research community. You can find details of all our courses on the School of History and Heritage web pages.

 

Current Postgraduate Students

Niti Acharya

AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral PhD. Gender, empire and material culture. Women Collectors of South Asia. The British Museum/University of Lincoln

Using the British Museum’s collections as a starting point, Niti is focusing on women collectors of South Asian material culture. The research seeks to uncover the role female donors and vendors to the British Museum played in the formation and representation of the empire through their cultural activities. This includes their interactions with people in South Asia in the accumulation of their collections, and also their relationships with museums through their collections.

Niti is a social and community history curator and has researched, developed, and produced more than 50 exhibitions and associated public programmes on a variety of subjects over the last 15 years in a range of London museums. Her focus is on highlighting underrepresented histories through material culture, personal testimonies and public history.

As the Manager of Hackney Museum in Hackney, east London, Niti has investigated the former Ayahs’ Home nearby and is part-way through a project to identify ayahs entering and leaving the UK based on ship passenger lists from the 1890s to the 1960s. In 2020, she founded an Ayahs and Ammahs international research network which supports those with similar research interests to collaborate across disciplines.

 

Nicola Meyrick

Thesis Topic: Continuity, martyrdom and assimilation: remaining Christian in Al-Andalus

Nicola is a part-time MPhil/PhD student researching a thesis on the lives and practices of Christians living in the parts of the Iberian peninsula under Muslim rule between 711 and 1085. She is particularly concerned with examining how the boundaries between Christians, Muslims and Jews were maintained and, sometimes, breached. Her approach involves examining liturgical and material ev​idence as well as written narrative sources and she aims to focus on non-elite Christians as well as their leaders.

Nicola studied for a BA in American History and Politics at Manchester, and then worked for many years at the BBC as a current affairs producer and editor. She took early retirement in 2015 and then did an MA in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College, London. She still has some involvement in journalism and is a trustee of a broadcasting charity. She has seen leaving the BBC as an opportunity to follow her lifelong passion for Spain and for medieval history.