Doctoral School / UAM

The Inter-university Doctoral Programme in Contemporary History aims at the formation of highly qualified researchers in the field. Its identifying features are permanent learning, the development of technical skills in the discipline, compliance with the rules of historiography, thinking in critical terms, openness to debate, and internationalisation.

This programme that encompasses, apart from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, other six Spanish universities (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universidad de Cantabria, Universidad del País Vasco, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Universitat de València and Universidad de Zaragoza). The programme is taught by professors and researchers with a recognised prestige in modern history, both at a national and at an international level, who work in lines of research at the frontier of knowledge and who are backed by their publications, the direction of doctoral theses and their participation in research projects.

The main aim of the students who partake in the programme is completing their doctoral thesis. The achievement of this aim is supplemented by other formative activities that enable the students to acquire theoretical and practical competences to become proffesional researchers in Contemporary History. The basic framework that enables students to advance as historians and to join into current historiographic debates is made up of a permanent seminar of research, doctoral conferences every other year, research visists and stays in other academic centres - preferably foreign ones, and the attendance to conferences and scientific meetings. As a complement, the programme offers activities that supply the tools to improve personal formation in concrete aspects, such as doctoral workshops or courses on academic writing. 

Research lines

• The state and the public space
• Identities, nation and nationalism
• Rural societies, urban societies
• Cultural history and history of political ideas
• History of international relations
• Social change and economic transformations
• Historiography and politics of memory