In addition to our new BA programme, Northumbria is also dedicated to creating a strong postgraduate profile at PhD level and on MA and MRes courses, where there are ample opportunities to pursue US interests.

Our American Studies MA, MRes and PhD students are studying a diverse range of topics. Below is a list of our current and former PhD candidates, as well as further information on our former students' post-PhD publications.

Current PhD candidates 

Lewis Kimberley
Rumour and Racial Violence in the United States, 1863 to 1908
Supervisor: Prof. David Gleeson
Email: lewis.kimberley@northumbria.ac.uk

Damien Shiels
Recovering the Voices of the Union Irish: Identity, Motivation & Experience in Irish-American Civil War Correspondence, 1861-65
Supervisor: Prof. David Gleeson
Email: damian.shiels@northumbria.ac.uk

Completed PhDs

Jack Hodgson, Socioeconomic Discrimination Against Transient Youths in California, 1928-1940 (2021)

Gabriel Hogg, Race and the Labour Movement in San Francisco, 1934-1955 (2021)

Rowan Hartland, Black Power Culture in the American South, 1967-1977 (2020)

Simon Buck, Old Age and Ageing in Musical Culture of the US South (2019)

Sarah Collins, A comparative study of urban space in Newcastle upon Tyne and Charleston, South Carolina, 1740-1840 (2019)

Natasha Neary, Fun and Facts About American Business: An Animated Education in the Free Enterprise System (2019)

Allan Symons, Male Control and Female Resistance in American Roots Music Recordings of the Interwar Period (2018)

Christopher Wallis, The Thinker, The Doer and The Decider: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance and the Bureaucratic Wars of the Carter Administration (2018)

Jack Weatherston, How the West has Warmed: Climate Change in the Contemporary Western (2018)

Brian Langley, Dissent and Discontent in the Confederate South, 1861-1865 (2017)

Megan Hunt, ‘Southern by the Grace of God’: The Menace of Southern Religion in Hollywood Cinema (2016)

Anne Zetsche, The Quest for Atlanticism: German-American Elite Networking, the Atlantik-Brücke and the American Council on Germany, 1952-1974 (2016)

Jonathan Coburn, Making a Difference: The History and Memory of ‘Women Strike for Peace’, 1961-1990 (2015)

Jude Riley, ‘Idiot-brained South’: Intellectual Disability, Eugenics and Southern Identity in Southern Modernism (2015)

Stephen Bowman, The Origin, Formation, and Activities of the Pilgrims Society, c.1895-c.1930 (2014)

Peter O’Connor, ‘The Inextinguishable Struggle between North and South’: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863 (2014)

Publications by former PhD students

Megan Hunt (with Benjamin Houston, Brian Ward and Nick Megoran), Journal of American Studies (2020), pp. 1-31, doi:10.1017/S0021875820000742

Simon H. Buck, '' The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, 12:1 (2019), doi: 10.1080/17541328.2019.1603937

Stephen Bowman, (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)
Stephen is a lecturer in the Centre for History at the . 

Megan Hunt, '"Men and women of God and goodwill everywhere": Selma and the role of religion in civil rights filmmaking,’ in , edited by Joe Street & Henry Knight Lozano (University Press of Florida, 2018).
Megan is a Teaching Fellow in American History at the .

Peter O’Connor, (Louisiana State University Press, 2017)
Peter is a Teaching Associate and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Nottingham.