Dr Simon Topping

Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) United States History

Exchange Co-ordinator, School of Society and Culture

British Association for American Studies (BAAS)

External Examiner at Northumbria University

My teaching concentrates on the United States. I teach the first year core module entitled America from Settlement to Empire (HIS4002) which examines American history from the arrival of Columbus to the end of the Spanish-American War. This module introduces students to the key themes in the first two hundred years of European settlement in what would become the United States and demonstrates how the country has been shaped by settlement, revolution, slavery, civil war, westward expansion and imperialism.

My second year module, America Since 1900 continues from where HIST406 left off, examining the key moments in the United States’ rise to superpower status, analysing the Progressive Era, the New Deal, two world wars (focussing on the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII), the Cold War, Vietnam, Watergate and America's role in the post-Cold War World.

I offer a second year module entitled: Dunkirk to D-Day: The Second World War in Europe. This looks at the war from a largely British perspective, and incorporates social history, for example, the civilian experience of the Blitz and the arrival of American troops in the UK, alongside discussions of the key moments of the war in the West.

In the third year I offer a module entitled The Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1970. This starts with the Brown decision of 1954 and concluding in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in 1968. In this module we examine the roles of ordinary people, leaders such as King and Malcolm X, important lesser known figures, notably women such as Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and those who opposed civil rights such as governors Faubus, Barnett and Wallace.

I recently worked with Breakwater Productions, a Plymouth based filmmaking company, to assist three teams of students in making documentaries about the Second World War in the Southwest. 

One of the films, on Australian airmen operating flyng boats out of Plymouth, can be found here: RAF Mount Batten