About
Frederick Hyde is a PhD student and Presidential Scholar at the University of Southampton. He specialises in Victorian British history, with particular emphasis on mid-nineteenth century British politics and foreign policy.
Research
Research groups
Current research
Frederick was awarded a University of Southampton Presidential Scholarship for a thesis on foreign policy and national identity in mid-Victorian Britain. He is particularly interested in public perceptions of foreign affairs in this period, and how Britain's global role was understood by ordinary people.
The mid-nineteenth century, which has often been regarded as an interval between the more dramatic acts of the Victorian Age – an ‘Age of Equipoise’, as it has been referred to by historians – also the marked the zenith of Britain’s global industrial supremacy and was characterised by a series of turbulent events overseas. British foreign policy has traditionally been studied in isolation from domestic history, however, and this is especially true of electoral politics, a field which lacks any kind of broad, comparative chronology of the period from the 1850s to the 1880s.
The object of Frederick's research is therefore to answer two principal questions: Firstly, what does a study of foreign policy reveal about British national identity during this period? Secondly, how did the relationship between foreign policy and national identity vary in form and intensity according to local and national circumstances?
Publications
Teaching
I teach seminars for first-year undergraduate students at the University of Southampton. I also work as a part-time lecturer for the University of Bournemouth, where I run a second-year module, ‘The Victorians’.
My 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, where he was encouraged to pursue his interest in history to doctoral level. He worked for two years in business, before being awarded a scholarship by the University of Southampton for a PhD on nineteenth-century British foreign policy.
He sits on the Council of the Society for Army Historical Research and is a part time Lecturer at the University of Bournemouth. His interests include mountaineering, cycling and rowing.