Patrick Doyle

I joined Royal Holloway in September 2014 as Lecturer in Modern American History. I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester, where I also obtained an MA in American Studies. My undergraduate education was completed at the University of Southampton. 

I am a convenor for the North American History seminar hosted by the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and a reviews editor for H-CivWar, a H-Net network. From 2017-2022, I served as book reviews editor for American Nineteenth Century History, a Routledge/Taylor & Francis journal that is affiliated with the association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH). I remain a member of BrANCH and am also a member of the Society of Civil War Historians and the Southern Historical Association. 

I am a historian of nineteenth-century America with specific research interests in the Civil War era and the society and culture of the U.S. South.

My forthcoming book (Cambridge University Press, 2025) explores the interwoven matters of class, family and nation in Confederate South Carolina. The research for this book (and the PhD thesis on which it is built) was supported by the AHRC, US-UK Fulbright Commission and other funding bodies. By focusing on South Carolina, the state persistently at the vanguard of southern proslavery separatism, this work addresses the paradox in which one of the most significant Confederate states remains one of the least studied – and thus least understood – by historians. Through a focus on the sensibilities of lower-class whites, my work posits that class hierarchy and frustration were a central, inescapable part of the world in which they lived but, equally, ordinary people did not construe the Confederacy as being an illegitimate entity that represented the interests of selfish elites. A portion of one chapter, which was published in the Journal of Social History, won the 2022 Southern Association for Women Historians’ A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for the best article published during the preceding year in the field of southern women’s history.

My future research will focus upon the bitter personal conflicts that erupted between some white Confederate officers, conflicts that occasionally led to duel challenges and even shots being fired. Provisionally titled “Officers at War: Rethinking Southern Masculinity, Honor and Violence in the Civil War Era,” this new project will take a micro and macro approach to such masculine conflict; it seeks to excavate several of these feuds and use them as illuminating case studies, while on the other hand properly situate them within the society and culture of the nineteenth-century U.S. South. Some of my initial ideas and findings in this regard can be found in my 2023 Civil War History article.

I teach on an array of different modules here at Royal Holloway, including:

HS1004: History in the Making

HS2217: An Empire of Liberty? History of the USA, 1787-1877 

HS2045: Concepts in History (specifically on "War" and "Class" as historical concepts)

HS3382: A Nation Torn Asunder: Civil War America 

HS5435: (Micro)Histories of Race and Conflict in North America