Tag: PhD Theses

Categories
History

Related Projects of Interest

There are many others working on, or have already completed, theses that are also of interest to me as a researcher in this topic, and therefore may also be of interest to others.

  • Boon, T., ‘Film and contestation of public health in interwar Britain ‘, PhD, 1999
  • Chapman, J., ‘Official British Film Propaganda during the Second World War’, PhD, 1995
  • Carruthers, S.L., ‘Propaganda, publicity and political violence: the presentation of terrorism in Britain, 1944-60’, PhD, 1994
  • Davies, S.R., ‘Propaganda and popular opinion in Soviet Russia, 1934-41’, D.Phil, 1994
  • Efstathiadou, A., ‘The Art of Seeing: visual representation of women during WWII in Greece and UK’, PhD, in progress
  • Fisher, S. J. ‘The Blitz and the Bomber Offensive: A Case Study in British Home Propaganda, 1939-45’, PhD, 1993
  • Griange, P., ‘Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in 1990s America’, PhD, date?
  • Howling, I.R.C. ”Our Soviet Friends’: the presentation of the Soviet Union in the British Media 1941-45′, M.A., 1988
  • Kertesz, M.A. ‘The Enemy – British Images of the German people during the Second World War’, D.Phil, 1992
  • McCarty, E.A. ‘Attitudes to women and domesticity in England, c.1939-1955’, D.Phil, 1994
  • McPherson, E., ‘The impact of the Second World War on local authorities in South Lancashire 1935-45’, PhD, 1995
  • Noakes, L. ‘Gender and British national identity in wartime: a study of the links between gender and national identity in Britain in the Second World War, the Falklands War and the Gulf War.’, D.Phil, 1996
  • Parker, K.L. ‘Women MPs, Feminism and Domestic Policy in the Second World War’, D.Phil, 1994
  • Rennie, P., ‘An investigation into the design, production and display contexts of industrial safety posters produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents during WW2’, PhD, 2004
  • Royall, K., ‘Posters of the Second World War: The Fourth Arm of Defence?’, M.A., 1991
  • Ryan, S.F., ‘British perceptions of the meaning of the war: the government, the public and the fate of France: 1939-42’, M.Phil, 1993
  • Sinclair, G., ‘Propaganda and Churchill in the Second World War: the Making of an Icon’, PhD, in progress
  • Spears, L.W., An Enquiry into the use of propaganda on the Home Front during World War Two with special reference to the role and effectiveness of the poster as a means of conveying Government policy MA, 1998
  • Taylor, P.H., ‘The role of local government during the second world war, with special reference to Lancashire.’, PhD, 1992
  • Taylor, P.M., ‘The projection of Britain: British overseas publicity and propaganda, 1914-1939, with particular reference to the work of the news department of the Foreign Office.’, PhD, 1978

Please contact me with your details if you are also working upon a topic of interest, at any level, and wish to be added to the list. Please provide a link to a webpage if you have one, otherwise a synopsis of your project would be good.

See theses completed and in progress for more history theses. If your university is a registered user, you can access abstracts of theses online. Mine was completed in 2004.

Min.

Categories
History

Leslie William Spears: An Enquiry into the use of propaganda on the Home Front during World War Two with special reference to the role and effectiveness of the poster as a means of conveying Government policy

Original typescript, 1998.

Dissertation (M.A.) – University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art, Division of History of Art and Design, 1998.

No abstract.

I attended some sessions at Winchester School of Art, with Brandon Taylor, re: Art & Propaganda, and Leslie was inspired to write this MA. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never had a chance to read it, maybe now I’m back in the area, I might find time!

Categories
History

P.H. Taylor: ‘The Role of Local Government during the Second World War, with special reference to Lancashire’

Taylor, P.H., ‘The role of local government during the second world war, with special reference to Lancashire.’
Ph.D. completed 1992. Lancaster University

Abstract: This is a thesis concerning the effects of war on society and in particular that of World War Two on Local Government. It employs the idea of `test-dissolution-transformation’, brought about by the conflict, on the workings of the local authorities in a wide field of endeavour. These range from Civil Defence, evacuation and economic mobilisation, through the provision of a range of social services in general and those of education and housing in particular, down to aspects of post-war planning in a variety of areas. There is an emphasis on the geographical area of Lancashire and the differing administrative structure it contained in order to see how authorities in one of the largest areas of the country coped with the impact of war and the nature of their relationships with the central government. What emerges as a result of the war is a pattern of central government desiring to use local authorities as agents for the implementation of their own plans when they felt it necessary, but also a continuation of the semi-autonomous status for local governments as a reult of the essentially practical and useful nature of the local authorities exhibited during the war, and their expected functions in future administration. The thesis is not just one of central-local clashes of interest and power but rather a more complex story of changing inter-relationships not only between the centre and the localities but also within the local authority structures. The thesis raises the whole question of the extent of centripetal and centrifugal forces operating on structures with their own historical underpinnings, perceived roles and expected future developments. In an age with many questions on the issues of democratic accountability, devolved powers and financial responsibility and constraint the role of local government during a period of undoubted stress and uncertainty can give some insights into the factors at play.

Categories
History

G.Sinclair: ‘Propaganda and Churchill in the Second World War: The Making of an Icon’

Wonder if this thesis has been finished yet?

Sinclair, G., ‘Propaganda and Churchill in the Second World War: the Making of an Icon’
PhD Thesis, in progress. University of Kent at Canterbury

Looking at how Churchill was presented to the public in the media and how this image was controlled by party political interests, the government and commercial concerns. Also reassess the public’s opinion of Churchill during the war and how public opinion is used by historians.

Categories
History

Paul Rennie: ‘An Investigation into the Design, Production and Display Contexts of Industrial Safety Posters Produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents During WW2’

Rennie, P., ‘An investigation into the design, production and display contexts of industrial safety posters produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents during WW2‘
PhD thesis, completed January 2004. London College of Printing.

This thesis examines a group of posters produced by the Industrial Service of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) during WW2 (1939-45). The posters were commissioned to reduce factory accidents and raise awareness amongst workers of the potentially fatal dangers of workshop and factory. The posters were designed by a varied but distinct group of designers including Tom Eckersley, who was later closely associated with the London College of Printing. The thesis is supported by reference to the RoSPA archive at the University of Liverpool and other sources.

The circumstances of WW2 are presented as demanding a more urgent response in the production of propaganda than had previously been required of poster communications. The requirements of increased speed and economy in production could only be met by an engagement, on behalf of printers and commissioning agencies, with the processes of mechanical reproduction. This is described, in Part One, by reference to the administrative structure of RoSPA and the personalities that informed its Industrial Safety campaign. Chief amongst these characters are Ernest Bevin, Ashley Havinden, Francis Meynell and Tom Eckersley. The technologies of mechanical reproduction are described in relation to the production of the RoSPA campaign by reference to RoSPA’s printers, Loxley Brothers of Sheffield.

Part Two of the thesis examines the RoSPA campaign within a wider cultural context. The style and content of the RoSPA posters is used as evidence of communication and political engagement with audiences previously ignored by Government communications or propaganda.

The posters are proposed as evidence contributing to a programme of socially progressive reform that George Orwell recognised as both identifiably English and politically revolutionary and as a necessary, but in itself insufficient, condition for victory in “total war” (a war involving military combatants and civilian populations). The posters therefore make manifest a change in relations between capital and labour in Britain. This is presented as part of a transformation that accounts, in part, for the election of Attlee’s reforming Government in 1946 and for the subsequent policies of welfare reform and reconstruction.

The posters are presented as part of an evolving visual language that is effectively propagandistic and socialist. This visual language is presented as both radical and as drawing on diverse strands of existing imagery, such as the visual language of Surrealism and of Left politics, to address its new audiences of women and industrial workers. An unexpected alignment between Modernist design and Nonconfomist values is revealed to be at the heart of RoSPA’s project and is identified as significant in the configuration of English Modernism. This evolution is then suggested to have contributed to a change in the nature and significance of graphic authorship in Britain.

The RoSPA posters correspond to the hopes, expressed by Walter Benjamin in The Author as Producer (1934), for a socially progressive, politically engaged and mass-produced form of communication as a consequence of the emancipatory potential of Modernism. The Modernist credentials of the RoSPA campaign disabuse two powerful orthodoxies – that Modernism was resisted and rejected in England and that war propaganda marked a retreat to the banal and literal in terms of visual communications.

A catalogue of RoSPA posters is appended to the thesis. (Not a catalogue raisonné.)

web: www.rennart.co.uk
e-mail: p@rennart.co.uk