I’ve finally reached the stage in my academic career where I get to make my own original contribution to scholarship, and ideally to the publics understanding of this most infamous monarch!

I’m really excited about this project – titled ‘Henry VIII and English cosmopolitanism.’ The dissertation will explore how King Henry VIII of England (you know the one with all the wives) cultivated an image of himself as a worldly, outward looking king, in order to challenge the persistent notion that Henry and his court were inherently insular and nationalistic.

This project intends to explore the relationship between the global and the national as reflected in Henry’s performance of Kingship. It begs important questions about their co-existence and interdependence, questions which have continued significance in our own global age that struggles with the nations place within it.

Could it have been that Henry was both a national monarch and a worldly king? Why have we come to assume that these two ideas are somehow contradictory? And how do these discourses continue to effect British national identity? I hope my work can shed some light on these ideas.

I’ll also be building a 360 tour of Hampton court palace as part of this project and of course I aim to make it into a doc!

For those interested here is my prospectus which provides a detailed explanation of the goals and scope of this project.

hinchliffe-prospectus-henry-viii-and-english-cosmopolitanism