Amber Tolley Ward

I completed my PhD at the University of St Andrews in 2024. My thesis studied industrial communities in Central Fife from the 1940s–1990s, and enquired into how deindustrialisation intersected with broader changes in culture, mentalities and social life. My PhD was fully funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (AHRC).

I'm broadly interested in how economic, political and social processes intersect, and in the relationship between global and local patterns of change. I conduct oral history interviews, and I'm interested in applying alternative methodologies to understand the the period of deindustrialisation, especially post-structuralist, Marxist feminist and decolonising lenses.

From August–December 2022 I was a visiting scholar (PhD exchange) at the University of California, Berkeley, where I worked under the supervision of Prof James Vernon. My time in North America was fully supported by a grant from the SGSAH Visiting Doctoral Researcher fund. 

I've given a number of conference papers based on my research since starting my PhD in 2020. These have included at the Northeast Conference on British Studies (NECBS) in Maine, the Oral History Society annual conference, the University of Oxford Oral History Seminar, the Institute for European Studies in Berkeley, California, and the Deindustrialisation and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT) annual conferences in Germany's Ruhr Valley, Nova Scotia, and Glasgow.

I'm a research affiliate with the Deindustrialisation and the Politics of Our Time (DePOT) transnational project partnership based in Montreal. In 2022, I was part of a team that organised DePOT's Summer Institute conference in Hattingen, Germany. I was a member of DePOT's student and postdoc caucus steering committee from 2021–2023.

Before my PhD, I completed an MA (Hons) in Modern History at St Andrews in 2018, graduating with a First Class. I stayed at St Andrews for an MLitt in Modern History, where I graduated with a Distinction in 2019. I graduated both degrees with the Dean's List award. 

HI2001 History as a Discipline: Development and Key Concepts

MO2008 Scotland, Britain and Empire, c.1700–2000

MO1008 Themes in Late Modern History, c.1776–2001