History of Crime, Policing and Criminal Justice

Award Award	Duration Duration	Start dates Start dates	Application Application
PhD (MPhil also available) PhD (MPhil also available)	Full-time: 3–4 years Part-time: 6–8 years Full-time: 3–4 years Part-time: 6–8 years	October October	January to April January to April

Within the History discipline at The Open University a specific research group is devoted to the study of criminal justice history: the Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice (CHCPJ). The Centre promotes and facilitate research into criminal justice history around the world and to generate the exchange of ideas between academics, criminal justice practitioners and serving police personnel. This is achieved via seminars, conferences, publications and the provision of specialist archive facilities.

We have links with police research centres in Europe and the Antipodes, our own police records archive, and links to heritage institutions in the UK. We have a record of securing major funding, and of successfully supervising postgraduate students. We invite proposals on any aspect of the development of UK, European or colonial police forces, on crime and/or deviancy, and on systems of punishment from 1750 to the present.

Members of the centre are also active participants in the Harm and Evidence Research Collaborative (formerly the Centre for Comparative Criminological Research), located in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. This cooperation brings together international cross-faculty expertise in areas as diverse as youth justice and forensic psychology.

For more information on the research interests of members, archival holdings, and recent doctoral research projects, please visit the ICHCPJ website.

We welcome applications in areas that correspond with current staff research interests. We look for detailed proposals, which set out specific research questions and outline the originality of your topic or approach. We strongly encourage you to contact us to discuss your ideas informally before submitting an application.

Most successful applicants to the PhD programme have a masters degree in history or a related discipline, and/or a first class history degree with a substantial original-source dissertation. However, applicants can still be considered provided they demonstrate evidence of the ability to pursue research and write at a high level in some historical field.

UK fee UK fee	International fee International fee
Full-time: £5,006 per year Full-time: £5,006 per year	Full-time: £12,705 per year Full-time: £12,705 per year
Part-time: £2,503 per year Part-time: £2,503 per year	Part-time: £6,353 per year Part-time: £6,353 per year

Some of our research students are funded via the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership; others are self-funded.

For detailed information about fees and funding, visit Fees and studentships.

To see current funded studentship vacancies across all research areas, see Current studentships.

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