Dr Christoph Laucht

• From 'Atom Watchers’ to Atom Folk: Assessing the Construction, Maintenance, and Legacies of Nuclearized Communities in Clark County, Nevada, 1951-1992. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof Martin Johnes

• Techno-Military Diplomatic Crises and Cooperation in British-Soviet Relations during the Late Cold War. (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Eugene Miakinkov

• From Kowalski to Kowalski: Internal Identity Formation and External Perception of the Polish Diaspora in American Popular Culture and Immigration Policy During the Cold War and Beyond (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Eugene Miakinkov

• From Isolation to Vaccination: BCG and the Evolution of Tuberculosis Prevention in Britain. (awarded 2023)

  MA

  Other supervisor: Dr Michael Bresalier

• HI-M22 Dissertation

  Students produce a dissertation of up to 20,000 words on a historical topic, chosen in conjunction with their supervisor. This represents the culmination of the History MAs, and constitutes Part Two of the programme.

• HI-M39 Research Folder

  This module is designed to help students to identify a dissertation topic appropriate to their interests and expertise, and to tackle the problems of methodology, develop the research techniques, and undertake the project planning which are the necessary preliminaries to researching and writing a 20,000 word dissertation.

• HI-M77 Communicating the Past: Public History using Historic Collections

  Under the supervision of staff of the Department of History and Classics and of the Richard Burton Archive/ISS (or other relevant institutions outside Swansea University), students investigate a historical collection (or set of collections) with a view to producing written and oral commentaries about the collection aimed at non-specialist audiences.

• HIH121 Europe of Extremes, 1789-1989

  The nineteenth century saw the rise of a western European civilization, characterized, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, by capitalist economics, liberal politics, and the dominance of a middle class that celebrated morality and science. In the twentieth century this civilization faced unprecedented challenges from new political ideologies, and from a working class demanding the right to govern in its own name. The result was an eruption of violence not seen on the continent for centuries; in its wake, the Cold War divided the Europe with an Iron Curtain, and saw the continent become the client of two world superpowers ¿ the USA and the Soviet Union. This team-taught module relies on the specialist knowledge of its tutors to examine economic, political and social themes in the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe.

• HIH124 Britain and the World 1800 to 2000

  This module will provide an overview of the history of British politics, society, culture, and the economy from c. 1800 to the present, from a national and international perspective. The lectures and seminars for this module will give students the opportunity to engage closely with events, processes, and people - both male and female, from diverse ethnic backgrounds - who contributed to the making of the modern British state and society, and who defined Britain¿s relationship with the wider world. We will discuss the transformative impact of warfare, Empire and colonialism, industrial and technological change. We will also consider the significance of race, class, and gender, and how they relate to national sentiment and social and political emancipation movements in Britain and beyond.

• HIH3300 History Dissertation

  The History dissertation is a free-standing, 40-credit module that runs across both semesters of Level Three. Candidates conduct research upon a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of staff teaching for the degrees in History, and concerning a topic that falls within staff research and teaching interests.

• HIH3382 The Cold War

  The Cold War represented the chief global conflict during much of the second half of the twentieth century. While tensions between the two superpowers ¿ the United States and the Soviet Union ¿ over the status of Berlin or during the Cuban missile crisis bore the potential of escalating into all-out nuclear war, the conflict remained, by and large, an `imaginary war¿ (Mary Kaldor) in Europe and North America. By contrast, the superpowers indirectly engaged each other in violent proxy wars in other parts of the world such as Korea, Vietnam, Angola or Afghanistan. This third-year optional module examines this crucial conflict in twentieth-century history within a global perspective, shedding light on different arenas in which the Cold War was fought, including its origins and effect on international relations, its impact on the `Third World¿, its `home fronts¿, science and technology, its cultural representations as well as its manifold legacies that can be felt to the present day (e.g. political, socio-cultural and environmental). The course introduces students to chief debates and key secondary literature as well as a wide range of primary sources, including government documents, newspapers and magazines as well as popular culture and visual arts.

I have been interviewed about my work for the BBC Magazine, the BBC One Show, the Portuguese national newspaper Público and Austrian national radio (ORF). On several occasions, including the 2015 and 2017 British general elections, various Brexit-related assessments, the 2016 EU referendum and the Welsh football team in the Euro 2016, I have been interviewed by the German news agency Regiocast which produces news for a number of radio stations across Germany, including Radio Schleswig-Holstein. On average, their news casts reach about 2.2 million listeners through the various stations.

Recently, I co-published (with Dr Susan T. Jackson) an opinion article on the Coronavirus pandemic: ‘Soldiering a pandemic: the threat of militarized rhetoric in addressing Covid-19’, History and Policy, 24 April 2020, available here.