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Application process

Applying for a phd, introduction.

Known as a research degree, the PhD is usually a four year (full-time) or five to seven year (part-time) course of independent and original research which is supervised by an academic specialist in the subject area. 

You will contribute new research in the form of a thesis suitable for publication which is usually around 100,000 words. It is examined by two examiners, one internal and one external who read your work and then ask you to defend it in an oral exam, the viva voce. 

PhDs are traditionally research based, although the integrated PhDs, also known as New Route PhDs, combine research with more vocational training. Increasingly taught courses are compulsory in the first year. 

Professional doctorates are useful for students interested in careers outside academia and consist of a taught core and incorporate both professional practice and academic knowledge. They are available in education (EdD), engineering (EngD or DEng) and business (DBA). 

Why do a PhD?

People complete PhDs for a variety of reasons: 

love of a particular part of their subject

springboard into a new career

access to excellent resources/training useful for non-academic careers

as a pre-requisite for academic careers.

As well as planning then conducting research and writing the thesis, PhD students will often teach undergraduate or master’s students, support more senior academics in their research work, publish articles, attend and present at conferences, work with business or other organisations to explore the value of their research in other fields outside academia (impact), collaborate with organisations or individuals (knowledge exchange) and contribute to their field in voluntary capacity (for example, as a reviewer, event organiser, network co-ordinator). 

When can I do a PhD?

You can do a PhD if you have at least an Upper Second relevant first degree or a relevant master’s. You must have in-depth knowledge of your subject area and be able to present a comprehensive research proposal. Some people start the PhD straight after completing a master’s, other people work outside academia for a few years and then apply for the PhD. 

Before starting a PhD you could apply for a job as a graduate research assistant where you would support the research of an academic in your department, teach, take part in laboratory work and complete your own research. You could also consider completing a PhD part-time whilst in a job. 

Researching into PhDs

Choosing the right programme takes time and research. It is important to apply to departments that specialise in your topic. Check the research quality assessed in the  Research Excellence Framework  (REF 2014) and also the quality of the teaching in the department via the  Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)  ratings. 

Talk to people who know the field about where they recommend is a good place to study. 

You can apply in one of two ways. You create the topic yourself, pitch it at your preferred institution in a Research Proposal and hope to gain funding via the institution. Alternatively, you can apply to work on a topic which has been agreed between a funding council and an institution and then advertised as a PhD position. If you are accepted funding will be assured. 

We recommend you take time to: 

ask for help from a current or recent academic tutor 

think about the people whose work you like, or who you read regularly, look at their department 

speak to the PhD administrator in departments that you think interest you 

use information on  Find a PhD

book on to a   LSE Careers further study event  

talk through your options with a careers consultant 

use the LSE Careers blog ,  So you’re thinking about a PhD? 5 tips for prospective PhDs .  

Making an application

Read the  LSE guidance on applying for a PhD .  

You will need to write a research proposal, personal statement and have a CV. 

The referees you choose are important as they will write about your academic achievements and potential. Get in touch with them early and ask for their advice too. 

Search  programmes with spaces at LSE . 

Useful publications in the LSE Careers physical library

Your PhD Companion, Stephen Marshall and Nick Green, 2004.

The PhD Application Handbook, Peter Bentley, 2006.

How To Get a PhD: third edition, Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh, 2001.

Useful online information

Prospects.ac.uk:  postgraduate study and research . 

Find a PhD . 

The Fulbright Commission  for applications and funding in the USA.

Related pages

Watch our latest session on thinking about doing a phd, explore our further study events, book a one-to-one appointment to discuss your application.

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January 23rd, 2024

Why i chose lse for a phd in international history.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

When it came time to start applying for postgraduate research programmes, I knew exactly what I wanted to research, but I was not completely sure which institution would best be able to support me in doing that research.

I consider myself very fortunate to have had a master’s supervisor who completed the MPhil/PhD in International History at LSE and encouraged me to apply. It is not common to find universities which have a specific International History department; usually, you will be in a general department of History and within that department, there will likely be a cluster group for international history. However, at LSE, International History is an entire department , which means that all the professors and all my peers, while working on a wide variety of topics, themes, regions, and time periods, all approach history from the perspective of an international historian. While many history departments may have a few professors and graduate students who work on topics related to the Global Cold War and Contemporary International History, at LSE, there are so many people who work on topics under that heading, that the department is able to have its own research cluster group based on that overarching theme.

I knew that I wanted to be in a department where, in addition to my supervisor, there would be a range of other professors who had the knowledge, experience, and skills to help me conduct the research that I outlined in my proposal. LSE is a world-renowned institution with a strong tradition of excellence. The Department of International History , for example, tied for 5th in the world and ranked 3rd in the UK, in the 2022 QS World University Rankings . While rankings can definitely help to understand the strength of a particular institution or department, I have found that LSE International History has so much to offer that cannot be adequately reflected in a ranking system (impressive as the result is). The department has a friendly, welcoming, and collaborative atmosphere which made it easy to settle in quickly and feel comfortable.

There is never a dull moment at LSE. There are constantly different events happening on campus and they are often accessible online as well, for those who might not be able to make it into LSE on any particular day. In the Department of International History specifically, we have two weekly research seminar series where PhD students and faculty from LSE and many other international universities can present their research. My favourite thing about these seminars is getting to hear about research that will be published in an upcoming book or article. It feels a bit like getting a sneak peek into some of the cutting-edge research that scholars are conducting in the field.

One of the best initiatives that LSE offers to postgraduate students is the PhD Academy. It is essentially the hub for all LSE doctoral students and offers support from enrolment through to graduation. I feel so fortunate to have access to one central location that offers career guidance, specific research assistance, and practical research skills training. The PhD Academy even provides day-to-day advice to help students stay balanced, such as healthy eating workshops and techniques for managing stress.

Upon graduating, students become part of the LSE Alumni community, which includes over 200,000 former students from over 200 different countries. Students can access LSE Careers services for up to five years after they complete their degree. A strong alumni community and the ability to continue accessing institutional support even after graduation are both important and valuable benefits that come along with studying at LSE.

Overall, I am thrilled with my choice to pursue a PhD in the Department of International History at LSE. The strengths and support of the department, and the wider university community, are truly unparalleled. I cannot recommend the programme enough to any students who are wondering if LSE might be the right place for them to pursue postgraduate research.

Learn more about the MPhil/PhD in International History

About the author

Hi, I'm Mina Rigby-Thompson and I'm in the first year of my MPhil/PhD in International History. I'm from Canada and am really enjoying my first year of living in London. Outside of academics, you'd most likely find me exploring new coffee shops or taking a swim!

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Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation

• London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
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LSE-NUS Double Degree in Asian and International History

International and asian history, modern history, financial history.

• Department of Economic History

LSE-Leipzig Double Degree in Global Studies and Economic History

Theory and history of international relations, lse-columbia university double degree in international and world history, political economy of late development, economic history, history of international relations, international history, lse-pku double degree in international affairs, philosophy of science.

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Philosophy of Economics and the Social Sciences

Economic history (research), the london school of economics and political science.

Business History at LSE: An Empiricist Voice

• First Online: 11 July 2019

Cite this chapter

• Leslie Hannah 2  

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Many pioneers of economics blended empirical work effortlessly with their theoretical work, though critics alleged that theory became increasingly divorced from empirics after 1945. Yet many LSE academics—from Ronald Coase and Edith Penrose to Geoffrey Owen and John Sutton—consistently rooted their work in the founders’ aims of studying ‘the concrete facts of industrial life’, generating and testing important ideas in industrial economics. A distinctive LSE initiative in 1978 was the foundation of the Business History Unit, a wellspring of later developments in the subject of business history within the UK and internationally. The core staff and the Unit’s students and diaspora at home and abroad contributed to the analysis of entrepreneurship, technical innovation and comparative business development.

The author is grateful (without implicating them in the result) for comments on an earlier version from David Edgerton, Howard Gospel, Terry Gourvish, David Jeremy, Geoffrey Jones, Colin Lewis, Jonathan Liebenau and Kazuo Wada. Memories of the author and other subjects of this chapter may mislead, but details have been checked against independent sources and against records retained in the LSE Library, including the Annual Reports and Newsletters of the Business History Unit in the Pamphlets Collection.

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For an authoritatively global survey of business history as an academic discipline, locating it firmly within this tradition, see Kipping et al. ( 2016 ).

Published in 1919 and 1923 respectively.

This resulted in three volumes by Wilson: The History of Unilever: A Study in Economic Growth and Social Change (Wilson 1954 , two volumes) and Unilever, 1945 - 1965: Challenge and Response (Wilson 1968 ). A fourth and fifth were later completed by one-time members of the BHU: Fifty Years of Unilever, 1930 - 1980 (Reader 1980 ) and Renewing Unilever (Jones 2005 ).

See the chapter in the current volume on LSE and economic history by Colin Lewis.

Compare, for example, the published work on joint-stock companies of the Fabian economic history lecturer, H.A. Shannon, who favoured German-style regulation to prevent excessive corporate risk-taking (Shannon 1932 ), with the—at the time—unpublished theses of Alan Essex-Crosby ( 1937 ) and James B. Jefferys (1938 thesis, later published as Jefferys 1977 ), exploring the creative roles of capital markets. See also Hill ( 1950 ).

Hayek ( 1954 ) was largely an attack on socialist history as empirically faulty. Hayek was at LSE from 1931 to 1950 and Chicago from 1950 to 1962 (see the chapter in the current volume on Hayek by Boettke and Piano).

Housed at Harvard, this was essentially an informal group of interested Cambridge and nearby professors with some project staff and junior visitors, attending a (‘post-cocktail’) seminar and publishing the journal Explorations in Entrepreneurial History . It was mainly funded by a Rockefeller grant of $230,000, coordinated by Arthur H. Cole and others (see Crandall 1960 ).

She left the USA for Australia and Iraq to study the oil industry, with her British husband, after defending her Johns Hopkins colleague, Owen Lattimore, falsely accused by McCarthy of being a Soviet spy; the couple then fled the Baathist Revolution in Baghdad to London in 1959. She held a joint University of London Readership at SOAS and LSE from 1959 to 1964, spending her later career at SOAS and INSEAD. Her Theory of the Growth of the Firm was first published in 1959.

Coase’s later work on whether lighthouses are a public good remains a masterpiece of applied British business history (Coase 1974 ). For a fuller list of his writings in business history, see Landes et al. ( 1983 ).

Lord Robbins ( 1971 : 126–127) notably praises Plant, Coase, Yamey and Edwards (as well as more obvious theoretical giants like Hicks and Hayek), yet fails to mention Tawney, Power, Ashton or Penrose (though he praises the labour historian/economist, Henry Phelps-Brown and the economic historian/development economist Arthur Lewis). Both Beveridge and Robbins successfully opposed the use of the Harvard case method, except for short executive courses (Howson 2012 : 221–222).

See Coase ( 1973 ), a shortened, compiled version of a series of 12 articles which appeared in The Accountant between October-December 1938, and for Coase’s later reflections on the benefits of interaction between accountants and economists, based on his LSE experience, see his ‘Accounting and the Theory of the Firm’ (Coase 1990 ). For his other articles on public utility pricing, see Landes et al. ( 1983 ).

Some were published in Edwards and Townsend ( 1958 , 1961 , 1966 ). A full set of the 452 papers delivered in 1946–1973 is in the LSE Archives, Reference MISC 332.

Its Financial Markets Group was not established until 1987.

They had become acquainted while Barker was writing Barker ( 1976 ) which, amongst other things, clarified that Sir Alastair, a Cambridge-trained engineer, was no relation to the family which founded and still owned the firm.

Richardson was then writing his seminal (Richardson 1972 ). The second supervisor was John Wright (who doubled as economist and economic historian) and his external examiners were G.C. Allen (pioneer management researcher and student of Japan’s rise) and Aubrey Silberston (an industrial economist specialising in patents and monopolies). As an undergraduate historian, Hannah had been strongly influenced by his tutor, Keith Thomas (both Hannah and Paul Johnson in LSE’s Economic History Department later contributed to the Festschrift for this pioneer of using anthropological insights to understand early modern society and beliefs, who inspired work far beyond his own specialisms). John Kay, an Edinburgh mathematics graduate and contemporary postgraduate economics student at Nuffield and St John’s, was also a formative influence: he and Hannah had co-authored Concentration in Modern Industry: Theory, Measurement and the UK Experience , which showed the emptiness of the variance of logs as a measure of concentration, located the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index as an arbitrary point on a theoretical continuum and demonstrated that mergers (not the Gibrat effect) mainly accounted for Britain’s unusually high levels of concentration. Between Oxford and Cambridge, Hannah had been an economics Lecturer in the remarkably young department fostered by Tony Atkinson and Christopher Bliss at Essex University, most of whose members became Ivy League economics professors.

The Rise of the Corporate Economy was published in 1976 (Hannah 1976a ), with various subsequent hardback and paperback editions, including a Japanese translation by Takeshi Yuzawa entitled Dai Kigyo Keizai no Kouryu , which appeared in 1987.

See the chapter in the current volume on Morishima by Naoki Matsuyama.

Major synthetic works on the subjects that Jones made his own included Jones ( 1988 , 1993 , 1996 , 2000 ) and Hertner and Jones ( 1986 ).

At various stages, they included, from academia, Leslie Pressnell, Sir Douglas Hague, Donald Coleman, Rupert Hall, Dorothy Wedderburn, Basil Yamey, John Smith, Ben Roberts, Harold Edey, Susan Strange, Fred Halliday; and, from outside, the Labour politician Edmund Dell, freelance writer William Reader, and businessmen including Sir Peter Parker of British Rail, Sir Donald Barron of Rowntree, Sir Arthur Knight of Courtaulds and the National Enterprise Board, Sir Michael Caine of Booker McConnell and Sir Anthony Part of Orion Insurance.

On two exceptional occasions, the Chairman of a company sponsoring research attempted to censor or change results intended for publication. One complained of low-quality research and an internal enquiry agreed he was right: the wrong was remedied by redoing the work (whose extra costs the company generously and voluntarily funded). Another threatened to initiate a libel suit that would bankrupt the researcher, if conclusions that he (wrongly) considered unsupported were not excised. The BHU Director, who had good press contacts from his time on a student newspaper, informed the complainant that the offending results would be published regardless and advised him to contemplate that his crude blackmail might be exposed in The Sunday Times the following weekend. No more was heard of the complaint, the offending report was published uncensored, and no more funding was received.

This funding preceded the Director’s appointment as Chairman of the ESRC’s Economic and Social History Committee and membership of the Industry and Employment Committee. Unaccountably, the ESRC later refused funding for the data analysis which it was intended should follow, but for initiatives that made up for this (see Jeremy 1984 , 1990 and Section 5 below).

His PhD was published by MIT Press as Transatlantic Industrial Revolution: The Diffusion of Textile Technologies Between Britain and America, 1790 – 1830 , and in 1981 received the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology and the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. Jeremy later coedited Farnie and Jeremy ( 2004 ).

The Dictionary received a commendation from the judges of the Colvin Medal for reference works, and many contributors further strengthened the business elements of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (published by OUP from 2004 onwards). The most prolific contributors were Richard Davenport-Hines (64 entries), David Jeremy (51), Christine Shaw (50), Geoffrey Tweedale (29) and Robin Higham (25). Richard Davenport-Hines’s larger study Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior was published by Cambridge University Press in 1984 and won the Wolfson Prize. Geoffrey Tweedale’s later studies— Steel City: Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Technology in Sheffield, 1743 – 1993 (1994) and Magic Mineral to Killer Dust: Turner & Newall and the Asbestos Hazard (2000), both published by Oxford University Press—twice won the Business Archives Council’s Wadsworth Prize. Useful by-products of the Dictionary’s systematic sampling included lists of the largest employers in 1907, 1935 and 1955 (see Shaw 1983 ; Johnman 1986 ; Jeremy 1990 ).

The Department’s PhDs included (in alphabetical order, with their later university affiliations in brackets): Tony Arnold (Essex, Exeter and Leicester), Gerben Bakker (Essex and LSE), Rosineida da Silva Bentes (Pará, Brazil), Andy Bielenberg (Cork), Michael Aldous (Belfast), Sergio Birchal (FGV Rio de Janeiro), Susan Bowden (York), Gordon Boyce (Newcastle NSW), Carlos Brando (Bogotá), Rajeswary Brown (Royal Holloway), Francesca Carnevali (Birmingham), David Chambers (Judge Institute, Cambridge), Martin Chick (Edinburgh), Chris Colvin (Belfast), Harold Dutton (Lancaster), Roy Edwards (Southampton), Anthony Gandy (London Institute of Banking and Finance), Andrew Godley (Reading), Eric Golson (Warwick), Francis Goodall (BHU), Regina Grafe (North-western and EUI Florence), Nicolas Grinberg (Buenos Aires), Naveed Hasan (Lahore), Richard Hawkins (Wolverhampton), Peter Howlett (LSE), David Jeremy (Manchester Metropolitan), Lewis Johnman (Westminster), Terrence Lapier (Wharton Business School), Giuliano Maielli (Queen Mary London), Gregory Marchildon (Johns Hopkins and Toronto), Ulrich Marsch (Munich), Helen Mercer (Greenwich), Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglu (Athens), Carlo Morelli (Dundee), Timo Myllyntaus (Turku), Sarah Palmer (Queen Mary London and Greenwich), Natacha Postel-Vinay (Warwick and LSE), Duncan Ross (Glasgow), Catherine Schenk (Glasgow and Oxford), Max-Stephan Schulze (LSE), Hiroshi Shimizu (Hitotsubashi), James Simpson (Carlos III Madrid), Peter Sims (Warwick and LSE), Anna Spadavecchia (Reading), Toshio Suzuki (Tohokudai), Kevin Tennent (York), Nick Tiratsoo (Luton), Adam Tooze (Cambridge and Yale), Ali Tunçer (UCL), Geoffrey Tweedale (Manchester Metropolitan), Maki Umemura (Cardiff), Aashish Velkar (Manchester), André Villela (Rio de Janeiro), Kazuo Wada (Nanzan and Tokyo), James Walker (Henley), Lorna Weatherill (St Andrews), Leonardo Weller (São Paolo), Timothy Whisler (St Francis College Pennsylvania), Jong-hyun Yi (Gachon) and Nuala Zahedieh (Edinburgh). In addition, four Cambridge PhD students were supervised in the BHU by special arrangement: James Bamberg (Cambridge and Warwick), Wayne Lewchuk (McMaster), Ratna Sudarshan (Delhi) and Steven Tolliday (Leeds). Peter Scott (Reading) and John Singleton (Wellington and Sheffield Hallam) did Master’s at LSE and PhDs elsewhere. The Unit’s first administrative secretary, Shirley Keeble, completed an LSE PhD part-time in 1984. Some PhDs chose careers in government, consulting, finance or as entrepreneurs: Robin Cohen joined London Economics, a business consultancy established by LSE professors and others, eventually becoming its Managing Director, while David Kynaston became a freelance writer, his multi-volume history of London as a financial centre combining fine historical scholarship with the readability of a trade book (for more than a decade he vied with Michael Porter on the bookshelves of senior executives I visited).

The BHU’s supporters included Rupert Hall in the History of Science Department and Aubrey Silberston and Dorothy Wedderburn in the Department of Social and Economic Studies. Among Imperial College PhDs, John Hendry converted to business history at the London Business School under the BHU/ESRC initiative and subsequently ran the Cambridge Judge Institute of Management MBA and was Dean of the Reading University Management School (publishing on general management and business ethics) and Mari Williams, after working in the BHU, transferred to the BP corporate history team in Cambridge.

Email from David Edgerton to the author, 12th December 2016. Among his publications as a visitor to the Unit was Edgerton ( 1984 , 1987 , 1988 ).

The 1980 BHU conference is reported in Turner ( 1984 ).

His commissions, among many others, included Reader ( 1970 / 1975 , 1976 , 1979 , 1981 ).

See Gospel and Littler ( 1983 ). Littler was then a Research Officer at Imperial College, and among those attending were Hugh Clegg from Oxford, Jonathan Zeitlin from Birkbeck, Joseph Melling from Glasgow, Heidrun Homburg from Bielefeld, Wayne Lewchuk from Canada and Reiko Okayama from Japan. See also Gospel ( 1988 , 1992 , 2005 ) and Gospel and Fiedler ( 2013 ). In the USA, a parallel line of development was promoted by Sanford Jacoby and others.

The Business History Society of Japan, founded in 1964, had within a few years enrolled 350 members, earlier than American and European equivalents.

Professor Yonekawa was a pioneer of global business history, with comparisons of the UK, USA and Asia (see, for example, Yonekawa 1987 , 1990 , 1994 ; Farnie and Yonekawa 1988 ; Okochi and Yonekawa 1982 ; also see Suzuki 1991 ; Yuzawa 1985 , 1994 ).

An early example was Van Helten and Cassis ( 1989 ).

Hannah was the overall series adviser. The book of the series was Pagnamenta and Overy ( 1984 ). While such initiatives are now lauded under the rubric of ‘impact factors’, they were rarer at the time and were not limited to enhancing public understanding: many years later these documentary films were still being used as teaching materials in history courses both at Harvard and in Cambridge, England.

Attracting both Eric Hobsbawm (an unreconstructed Marxist) and Arthur Seldon (of the free market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs) to its meetings (providentially not at the same time!) was no defence against the partisan labelling of the day.

The Harvard Center closed because its multiple funding applications were rejected in 1957/1958. It had hosted (albeit in some cases briefly (see Crandall 1960 ) some of the most distinguished economic historians of two generations, including Hugh Aitken, Bernard Bailyn, Noel Butlin, Alfred Chandler, Thomas Cochran, Lance Davis, Alexander Gerschenkron, Hrothgar Habakkuk, David Landes, Henrietta Larson, Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, Douglass North, Fritz Redlich, Henry Rosovsky, Barry Supple, Sylvia Thrupp, Charles Wilson and William Woodruff.

From 1993, at its new Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, which transferred in 2013 to King’s College London, opposite LSE. Edgerton deepened an earlier theme in questioning Whiggish, techno-nationalist interpretations of business history and current science policy, notably Edgerton ( 1991 , 2008 , 2010 ) and Edgerton and Horrocks ( 1994 ).

And later a closer neighbour to LSE, as founding Professor of Management at King’s College London.

Promoted to Professor in 1991, in 1993 he set up the Centre for International Business History (which still thrives), enriched by synergy with leading Reading economists studying multinationals. In 2002, he moved to the Harvard Business School, where he was soon appointed to the profession’s historic pinnacle, the Chair in Business History that Chandler had once occupied.

See footnote 24 above for students. Richard Davenport-Hines, after a spell as a Visiting Fellow at Reading, became a widely admired freelance writer and public intellectual. Stephanie Zarach, Stephanie Jones and Theo Barker set up companies operating bespoke corporate history services. Christine Shaw returned to her earlier career as a Renaissance historian at Warwick. Geoffrey Tweedale gained a Wellcome Trust grant to study the business response to asbestos-related diseases, later becoming a Professor at Manchester Metropolitan. Margaret Ackrill and Judy Slinn completed several firm histories and taught at Oxford Brookes University.

His colleagues marked his achievements in a Festschrift (Coopey and Lyth 2009 ). He remained a Visiting Fellow and became President of the Business Archives Council in 2015.

For example, the Centre for Business History in Scotland, initially under Professor Tony Slaven, on its establishment in Glasgow in 1987, and now under Professor Ray Stokes, had a large initial endowment and continuing support for operational expenses (from the Aggregate Foundation (now the William Lind Foundation) and Ballast Trust) and close integration with Glasgow’s Economic and Social History Department and Adam Smith Business School.

Among the archives which the BHU placed in the LSE Library were the much-cited papers of the Management Research Group No 1, donated by Mr. Harry Ward, its secretary. See: https://archives.lse.ac.uk/TreeBrowse.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&field=RefNo&key=MRG .

Carlos Davila (Colombia) and Domingos (Brazil) were BHU Visiting Fellows and Colin Lewis in Economic History coordinated other links.

Anson later worked for Forrest Capie on the official history of the Bank of England and is now that Bank’s Archive Manager.

The former undertaken by Davenport-Hines and Slinn ( 1992 ) and Jones ( 2001 ), the latter by Fitzgerald ( 1995 ). There were also histories of Leopold Joseph (a City private bank), Tannoy, Abbott Laboratories (a US pharmaceutical business with operations in the UK) and the Timber Trade Federation as well as studies of mail order selling and the popular music industry.

At the time, Nicholas was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the LSE Economic History Department, but soon joined the Entrepreneurship Unit at Harvard Business School. He is now Professor of Business Administration there, responsible for teaching the ‘Coming of Managerial Capitalism’ course on the MBA, established by Chandler, McCraw and Tedlow.

Blanchard was then visiting from MIT where he was Professor of Economics; he was later Chief Economist at the IMF. See also Hannah ( 1992 ).

He is now a Senior Fellow in the Department of Management.

Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2016. Clark completed his undergraduate degree in Economic History (1990) at LSE and is Chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in China and a major donor to LSE.

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Hannah, L. (2019). Business History at LSE: An Empiricist Voice. In: Cord, R.A. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to LSE Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58274-4_4

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Class teaching

The information below is intended as an aid for students interested in teaching opportunities in the Department of Economic History, and provides answers to those questions that are most commonly asked.

If you have any comments or suggestions regarding this information, please email Jennie Stayner: [email protected]

1. Why teach during your PhD

Teaching is one of the core skills you will learn as a PhD student at the LSE. It is one of the most challenging, enjoyable, and stimulating parts of academic work.  For those of you who plan to pursue an academic career, gaining a variety of teaching experience is crucial for the job market. Even for those who do not, however, teaching experience provides several useful skills, particularly in presenting research findings to a variety of audiences. Whatever your career goals, teaching will improve your research by helping you to frame it a way that is relevant to your chosen readership.

There are clear trade-offs in terms of the time you spend doing research, teaching or other activities. Students should not take on so much teaching that it compromises the quality of research. PhD students normally teach in their second and sometimes third years, when they have defined their topic and are learning to manage research tasks alongside other activities such as teaching and seminar organising. Archival work overseas or other research-related travel may influence this. However, we regard teaching experience as a key investment in your development as a researcher, and you should speak with your supervisor about the best time to make this investment. 

Please note, some PhD funding bodies will expect you to teach as part of your PhD training.

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Undergraduates students take four ‘full unit’ courses each year (or three full units and two half-units). Most courses are taught on a lecture plus class basis, with 20 one-hour lectures, one per week, in each of the weeks of the Autumn and Winter Terms. Classes last for 50 minutes (starting at 5 minutes past and ending at 5 minutes before the hour) and are usually held weekly from the second week in term Autumn term up to and including the first week of the Spring Term.  

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The time students spend in class should be engaging, active and stimulating. How you teach will shape how they think about our discipline and the topics they study. You are also often the first to learn about areas where students may need additional pastoral support. Finally, you will give students the majority of the feedback they receive on their written or class work. Marking work, writing meaningful comments and helping students learn how to improve their performance is a key part of the class teacher’s role.

Your duties in the department include:

• Conducting effective, high-quality teaching that supports the course syllabus
• Preparing appropriate teaching materials, such as discussion questions for each class
• Offering advice and feedback to students during weekly office hours
• Reporting academic problems to the course convener
• Marking formative and assessed student work
• Assisting with marking exams (this will be within the two main exam periods of January and June, as well as the IRDAP in-session re-sits)

  Administration

• Participating in teaching meetings with academics and administrators
• Participation in LSE and Departmental training programmes
• Keeping up to date records of student attendance and grades on LSE for You
• Regularly checking your e-mail and responding to student queries in a timely manner
• Writing termly reports on your students performance.

A more detailed list of duties and responsibilities can be found in the handbook . In addition, the obligations and responsibilities of GTAs (and also faculty and students) are laid out more fully in the Code of Good Practice for Undergraduate Programmes .

4. GTA training

You will receive training on how to teach from both the Department and the School. During their first year in the PhD programme, prospective GTAs will participate in a departmental training programme working alongside experienced GTAs. As part of this programme, you will shadow a class teacher to observe their teaching and have them observe you, providing feedback.

In addition, the Eden Centre at LSE runs an annual GTA induction course for new teachers at the beginning of each academic year, which teaches you how the school works, and how to teach effectively. It is compulsory for all newly appointed occasional teachers to attend these courses, even if t hey have attended similar courses elsewhere, or if they have prior teaching experience, unless they have a specific exemption from the GTA mentor. The course covers effective teaching, feedback and assessment. Feedback on the course is highly positive. 

5. Applying to teach

Class teaching assignments are allocated during the Spring Term of the previous academic year by the Deputy Head for Teaching (who manages teaching allocations for the Department and acts as GTA mentor), currently Professor Neil Cummins ( [email protected] ). If you would like to express a preference for teaching a specific course or in a specific area, you need to e-mail Professor Cummins by Week 1 of Spring Term.

As we regard teaching as a crucial part of your training, we aim to ensure that all PhD students will have the opportunity to teach. However, it is not always possible to accommodate preferences for a specific course. 

6. Time commitment and salary

GTAs vary in how may classes they teach per year. We recommend teaching at least 2 classes on a single course, as it makes most effective use of your preparation time and gives you as a teacher experience of managing differences between class groups.

More experienced GTAs may teach more than 2 classes or may teach classes for more than one course. We recommend that students do not teach more than five or six classes. Please also note that students are generally restricted to working a maximum of 20 hours per week during term time. This is particularly relevant for overseas students on student visas.

In considering how to structure your teaching, you should factor in the time required each week for preparation, marking and related administration, and office hours. As a guide, if you teach two classes per week, the time for preparation and other duties is included in your contract, which works out at around 7 hours per week. For three classes it is around 8.5 hours per week.

Pay for GTAs varies depending on how many classes you teach. You can see examples of salary for teaching two, three, four or five classes per week here . 

Handbook for Graduate Teaching Assistants

Teaching Q and As Interviews with class teachers at LSE

Professor Sara Horrell +44 (0)20 7955 7075

Ms Tracy Keefe +44 (0)20 7955 7860

Professor Sara Horrell, Doctoral Programme Director [email protected]

Tracy Keefe, PhD Programme Manager [email protected]

Department of Economic History, London School of Economics

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LSE top in London for Social Science and Management subjects

I am immensely proud of LSE’s achievements in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024.

LSE has been ranked the top university in London and sixth in the world for Social Science and Management subjects in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024 published this week.

LSE came in the world top five in eight subjects including Communications and Media Studies (2nd); Geography (2nd); Philosophy (2nd); Development Studies (3rd); Social Policy and Administration (3rd); History (4th); Sociology (4th); and Politics and International Studies (5th). In addition, the School was ranked 6th worldwide for Accounting and Finance, 7th for Economics and Econometrics, and 7th for Law.

Published annually since 2011, the QS World University Rankings by Subject are based on academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact. The rankings use data from 1,559 institutions.

Commenting on the news, LSE’s Vice President and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) Professor Susana Mourato said:

“I am immensely proud of LSE’s achievements in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024, leading in London and performing so highly on the global stage.  Our exceptional rankings are a testament to LSE’s unwavering commitment to research excellence and real-world impact, and to the amazing work of our staff, in collaboration with our students and alumni, funders and partners. Together, we continue to shape the world’s future for the better.”

These new rankings are consistent with other recent league tables. In the autumn, LSE was ranked the top university in London and fourth in the UK in the Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024 as well as the Guardian’s Best UK Universities league table 2024.

UNC-Chapel Hill graduate programs ranked among best in nation

U.S. News & World Report’s 2024 “Best Graduate Schools” list named multiple Carolina graduate degree programs in the top 10, including UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at No. 1.

Numerous UNC-Chapel Hill graduate programs received high rankings – 20 were among the top 10 in the nation in their respective categories – as part of U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools” list.

For the third time in a row (2016, 2020 and 2024), UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy is the top pharmacy school in the U.S. The rankings are based on a survey of peers from accredited pharmacy schools across the country and are published every four years.

The Gillings School of Global Public Health was ranked second out of 213 schools and programs of public health in the U.S. for the seventh consecutive rankings period. The Gillings School has also maintained its position as the top public school of public health and has been ranked among the top schools and programs of public health by U.S. News since the magazine first ranked public health schools in 1987. U.S. News & World Report does not rank all graduate programs each year.

“Carolina’s graduate programs are exceptional, and it’s no surprise that our schools are ranked so highly among peer institutions by U.S. News and World Report, as well as other measures,” said UNC-Chapel Hill Interim Chancellor Lee H. Roberts. “Carolina is always proud to be recognized for our dedication to a world-class education. Every one of our graduate programs contributes to making us the leading public research university.”

Altogether, 23 programs increased their rankings, including multiple programs in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, School of Nursing, School of Education, Kenan-Flagler Business School and UNC School of Law.

“These rankings represent the hard work of our faculty, staff and students who are dedicated to moving Carolina forward through their incredible efforts each day,” said UNC-Chapel Hill Provost Chris Clemens. “It is gratifying to see this public recognition of their commitment to the mission of our graduate programs in research, teaching and public service. Even more than in the rankings, the proof of their work is the quality of our students and our passionate alumni who lead in so many fields.”

The School of Social Work moved up three spots in the latest rankings to a tie for fourth overall and is tied for second among public universities.

This year marks the first time since U.S. News & World Report began ranking law schools in 1987 that UNC School of Law has reached No. 20 out of 196 law schools. The UNC School of Law is also the seventh-ranked public law school.

Additional UNC-Chapel Hill rankings for 2024 follow.

Please note: Not all graduate programs are ranked by U.S. News & World Report every year. For a complete list of rankings for UNC-Chapel Hill, visit the U.S. News & World Report website .

UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy

Gillings school of global public health.

• First public, second overall

Specialty Areas

• Health Behavior, second
• Biostatistics, third
• Epidemiology, third
• Health Policy and Management, fourth
• Environmental Health Science, eighth

School of Social Work

• Tied for fourth

School of Nursing

• Nursing Schools, Master’s Programs, tied for eighth
• Nursing Schools – DNP Programs, tied for 17th
• Nursing Master’s, Administration/Management, fourth
• Nursing Master’s, Nurse Practitioner: Psychiatric/Mental Health, fourth
• Nursing Master’s, Nurse Practitioner: Family, tied for sixth
• Nursing DNP, Psychiatric/Mental Health, third
• Nursing DNP, Family, tied for sixth

UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School

• Tied for 20th
• Real Estate, ninth
• Accounting, tied for 13th
• Executive MBA, 14th
• Management, 16th
• Production Operations, 16th
• Finance, 20th
• Marketing, tied for 25th

UNC School of Education

• Tied for 25th
• Special Education, tied for 13th
• Elementary Teacher Education, tied for 14th
• Educational Psychology, tied for 15th
• Education Policy, tied for 16th
• Secondary Teacher Education, tied for 17th
• Educational Administration, tied for 17th
• Curriculum and Instruction, tied for 22nd

College of Arts and Sciences

Computer science.

• Overall, 27th

Public Affairs

• Overall, 39th (Master of Public Policy)

As part of the public affairs category, U.S. News and World Report ranked Carolina programs and specialty areas based in the School of Government and the College of Arts and Sciences’ department of public policy.

School of Government

• Public Affairs, 23rd (Master of Public Administration)
• Local Government Management, second
• Leadership, 10th
• Public Finance, 18th

UNC School of Law

• Legal Writing, tied for 20th
• Criminal Law, tied for 20th
• Tax Law, tied for 20th
• Business/Corporate Law, tied for 22nd
• Clinical Training, tied for 23rd
• Contracts/Commercial Law, 23rd
• Health Care Law, tied for 28th
• Constitutional Law, tied for 29th
• Environmental Law, tied for 45th
• International Law, tied for 52nd
• Intellectual Property Law, tied for 53rd
• Trial Advocacy, tied for 118th

UNC School of Medicine (additional Rankings will be available at a later date)

• Audiology, tied for third
• Occupational Therapy, fifth
• Physical Therapy, 11th
• Speech Language Pathology, 12th

School of Education students networked in Raleigh with representatives from 11 state agencies.

Global studies scholar aspires to diplomacy

After earning a master’s degree, Kat Goodpaster became assistant director of Carolina’s Russian Flagship Program.

Public Service Awards go to 7 people, 2 groups

The Carolina Center for Public Service honored work on health disparities, refugee aid and more.

Broadway writer brings new comedy to PlayMakers

Fresh off the debut of her musical adaptation of “The Notebook,” Bekah Brunstetter ’04 will debut “The Game” in Chapel Hill.

Arts Everywhere Day set for April 12

The eighth annual campus-wide event celebrates artists creating in all mediums.

Are you ready to run, hide and fight/defend?

Active Shooter and Critical Incident Response training customizes emergency preparedness to your workspace.

EcoStudio matches Tar Heels with internships

Since 2018, the program has helped 466 students explore careers in environment and sustainability.

Morrison Art Studio provides place to create

In this video, learn how one student uses this residence hall space to pursue her passion outside the classroom.

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