About
Frederick Hyde is a History PhD student and Presidential Scholar at the University of Southampton. He specialises in Victorian British history, with particular emphasis on the relationship between foreign policy and national identity in this period, and how Britain's global role was understood by ordinary people.
Research
Research groups
Current research
Frederick is currently working on a thesis on foreign policy and national identity in mid-Victorian Britain, for which he is funded by a University of Southampton Presidential Scholarship.
The Victorian Age marked the zenith of Britain’s global supremacy. British manufacturers enjoyed an expansion of foreign trade without parallel in world history and the British Army fought more wars in the reign of Queen Victorian than it had done in the previous two centuries combined. Yet foreign affairs have traditionally been studied in isolation from domestic history, and this is especially true of electoral politics. Between 1857 and 1880, every British general election was either fought over – or fought against the backdrop of – a foreign crisis of some description. Yet the field lacks a broad, comparative chronology, notwithstanding the tried and tested use of Victorian elections to gauge the opinions of men and women on local and national issues.
The object of Frederick's research is therefore to answer two principal questions: Firstly, what does a study of election contests reveal about the relationship between foreign policy and British national identity during this period? Secondly, how did this relationship vary in form and intensity according to local and national circumstances?
Publications
Teaching
Frederick teaches seminars for first-year undergraduate students at the University of Southampton. He has also worked as a part-time lecturer for the University of Bournemouth, with responsibility for a second-year module, ‘The Victorians’.
His full teaching experience is as follows:
- Bournemouth University, BA 2nd year lecturer and seminar course, 2025, ‘The Victorians’
- University of Southampton, BA 1st year seminar course, 2024-25, ‘Voices from the Past’
- University of Southampton, BA 1st year seminar course, 2023-24, ‘Voices from the Past’
Biography
Frederick Hyde is a History PhD student at the University of Southampton.
He read History at Durham University and studied for a master’s degree in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is now in the third year of his PhD, for which he is funded by a University of Southampton Presidential Scholarship and supervised by Professor David Brown and Doctor John McAleer. He worked as a Lecturer at the University of Bournemouth and sits on the Council of the Society for Army Historical Research. His first peer-reviewed article, on the depiction of the British Army in Punch, was published earlier this year in Historical Research. His interests include hiking, rowing and cycling.