OMT Graduate Travel Award Report – Mitchell Robertson

After receiving an OMT Graduate Travel Award, I was fortunate enough to visit the United States for a conference and archival research in May 2018. My first stop was Tempe, Arizona for the 2018 Policy History Conference. I greatly enjoyed the four-day conference and found the opportunity to present my work an incredibly useful experience. I presented a paper entitled “As if the previous Administration were still in command”: How Legal Services Lawyers and Saved the War on Poverty as part of a panel on “Conservative Challenges to the Great Society” with another student from Oxford and one from Duke University.

I was also fortunate enough to be awarded at the conference the Hugh Davis Graham award, which provides funds for graduate students to assist in conducting archival research. It was very humbling to be presented this award in front of so many academics who I greatly admire.

After a very fun weekend road-trip from Arizona to San Francisco, I arrived at Stanford University to conduct a week of archival research at the Hoover Institution. The collections housed at the Hoover Institution center on conservatives across a variety of sectors – in elected politics, lobby groups, and journalism. I found a great deal of exciting material there. Perhaps most important for my research were the papers of Fred Malek, who was responsible for the monitoring, hiring, and dismissal of bureaucrats, which is a central theme of my dissertation.

I am very grateful for the support of the OMT Graduate Travel Award fund for enabling me to undertake this very enlightening conference and archival research trip.

Find out more about the range of travel grants and scholarships available to assist Univ students on our Travel Grants page or read further travel reports.

Published: 12 June 2018

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