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Historians try to reconstruct the lives, minds, and cultures of people in the past, and historians at Churchill College are no exception. Studying History here involves imagination and a good measure of scepticism, requiring you to keep questioning and testing the limits of what we can reasonably know about other societies and eras. These are questions you can explore on a broad canvas: examining the experiences of the powerful and of the weak; imagining long-lost mental worlds, whether political, philosophical or mystical; from empires to cities to villages; in Mexico, Mozambique or Manchester. You can investigate why people killed for Christ in the Crusades, why they hunted witches in the seventeenth century, why they voted for Thatcher in the 1980s, or what the Victorians thought about sex. These diverse topics all present searching problems about how we should understand our ancestors and ourselves in time.
For the first two years of the course you will tackle such problems, weighing up the validity of historical sources: the scribal, the literary, the visual, the oral. By your third year you will reach the frontiers of professional historical research in a Special Subject using primary sources, or in a dissertation based on your own archival research - perhaps using papers in the Churchill Archives Centre, with its 3000 boxes of the great war leader's papers and over 570 other collections besides. To apply to this college, you need to love libraries and books, reading and writing, to have the patience to investigate, to have the discipline to govern your own time, and to care about the details as well as the big ideas. And if anyone ever asks you what the point is of studying History, remember you are liberating yourself from the parochialism of the present, and committing yourself to a rich but vanished past which can only be reanimated in the mind of the historian.
Churchill is famous primarily as a college devoted to sciences, mathematics and engineering, and by statute seventy per cent of its staff and students are required to represent those subjects. And yet thirty per cent involved in the Arts is a sizable minority. Furthermore, students of History here can expect to draw upon considerable strengths of expertise and experience in teaching and research. In any one year we will have the staff of the Archives Centre, numerous postgraduate students in history, one or more Junior Research Fellows, and usually a handful of Visiting Fellows. As a taught subject, however, History at Churchill is represented by Dr Mark Goldie, John-Paul Ghobrial, and Mr Richard Partington. The following potted biographies will give you a sense of what we have to offer, including a strong commitment to social, economic, political and cultural History.
Fellows in History
The College Fellowship also boasts two highly-regarded and extensively published historians: Mr Corelli Barnett CBE and Dr Piers Brendon. Both are past-Keepers of the Churchill Archives Centre, and now make a living from writing books, and do not teach for the College.
Further Information
Prospective candidates interested in learning more about taking a degree in History at Churchill may wish to click on the following headings. The remarks below try to avoid duplicating detailed information to be found elsewhere on the University websites (see the links listed at the top of the page), and instead provide brief and personal commentaries on: first, how we admit students to read History ("Getting In"); secondly, the typical experiences of historians studying at Cambridge in general, and at Churchill in particular ("Getting On"); and, thirdly, the benefits of a Cambridge History degree, and what you will take with you from your time here after you graduate ("Getting Out"). If anyone has any specific questions about any of these matters, then please don't hesitate to e-mail Mark Goldie, at mag1010@cam.ac.uk who will do his best to help.