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• PhD History, University of Essex
• BA Hons History, University of Cambridge

I moved to the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡ in September 2013, after working at the Universities of Liverpool and Oxford for over a decade. Since then I've been Head of Postgraduate Studies for the School of History and Cultures and Head of the Department of History for four years. I've also aged a lot.

I grew up just outside Scunthorpe, in South Humberside, and went to my local comprehensive school and sixth form college, before going to university in Cambridge and getting my PhD from the University of Essex.Ìý

I like greyhounds and riding bikes.

I offer PhD supervision across the cultural history of Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly in areas relating to my own research interests: histories of gender and sexuality, culture and self-fashioning, urban history, and Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Feel free to get in touch if you’re interested in discussing potential projects. I'm currently or have recently co-supervised projects including women's sexual autonomy and desire in the twentieth century (Phoebe Gill), crimes of passion and the making of modern heterosexuality (Jacob Fredrickson), Lesbian SM in the 1980s and 1990s (Bethan Downs), the embodied experience of pregnancy (Sydni Zastre), the R101 airship disaster and British culture in the 1930s (Jonny Allard), the League of Nations Union in Cheltenham (Adrian Courtney), and the military use of photography during the Great War (Nicole Chiccarelli).

I have been Head of Postgraduate Studies for the School of History and Cultures (and done similar roles in Oxford and Liverpool in the past). I am committed to ensuring the highest quality in PGR supervision and professional development. In 2017 I received the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡ Graduate School Award for Excellence in Doctoral Researcher Supervision for the College of Arts and Law, after being nominated by some of the scholars I was lucky enough to work with.

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡.

Overview

I am a prize-winning cultural historian. Over the past twenty years I have become known for work which combines academic rigour and theoretical sophistication with accessibility and creativity. My first book (University of Chicago Press, 2005) received the Longman-History Today Prize and the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for the best book in modern British history. Almost twenty years later, Queer London has sold around 10,000 copies and remains influential: it appeared in the Evening Standard’s recent ‘’ list. (University of Chicago Press, 2016) was Guardian ‘Book of the Day’ on publication. While these are conventional academic books in some ways, they exemplify my commitment to writing histories that are engaging and engaged with pressing contemporary issues.

As this suggests, I research and write about twentieth century Britain, particularly histories of sexuality and gender, the politics of cultural life, and the 1920s and 1930s. Sometimes I even about these . I have come to realise that my real interest is in the changing relationship between capital, culture, and selfhood – how ordinary people make sense of the world and their place in it, and how this is shaped by markets and money. Queer London explored how modern urban culture and markets in property, leisure, and labour shaped queer lives and communities between the Great War and the 1950s. Telling stories about the lives of a flamboyant confidence trickster and writer, Prince of Tricksters turned to the effects of commercial mass culture on social relations, self-fashioning, and politics.

Current stuff

The book projects I am working on now explore this relationship from different vantage points and across much broader chronological and geographical terrain.

Opening with a rancorous 1927 libel trial, is a new history of Britain in the twenties and thirties. Setting a Sierra Leonean café owner and his wife against the newspaper that destroyed their business, the trial pivoted around escalating conflicts over the redevelopment of the cosmopolitan London neighbourhood where its protagonists lived and worked. Through a rich ethnography of Seven Dials, I show how the claustrophobic tensions that exploded in court betrayed the fissures of a city on the move and the national and imperial politics of the ‘colour bar’. A forgotten trial was animated by the ferocious struggles through which a modern metropolis came into being. The stakes were high, because underlying the case were explosive questions that would define Britain’s twentieth century – about race, class, and the boundaries of belonging, the course of what we now call gentrification, and the kind of city London should become. Songs of Seven Dials will be published as a trade book by Manchester University Press in October 2025 and is now available to .

The Self-Improvers: The People Who Remade Themselves – and Made the Modern World traces the remarkable rise and fall of the Pelman Institute and the correspondence course known as Pelmanism. From the 1890s to the 1960s, tens of thousands of people across the world committed themselves to the task of ‘improving’ their personality. Lured in by adverts promising social and professional success, they industriously read textbooks and completed worksheets — or, perhaps just as often, gave up on the course within days. The project follows the Pelman Institute and its members between its offices in Britain, France, India, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. In so doing I hope to explain why self-improvement became a global business, and how, in turn, Pelmanism disappeared from popular memory as anything other than a children’s card game. It is a book about the global movement of psychological knowledge, ideas of personhood, advertising techniques, and corporate capital. It is also an intimate history of what self-improvement meant to the ordinary men and women who signed up for the Pelman Institute’s courses — about the changing nature of aspiration and anxiety in the modern world. I have been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2023-2026) to complete this book.

The Fable of the Beagle and the Rabbit and On Humberside are my ongoing narrative non-fiction writing projects, which use my own family archives and histories to explore the politics of class, region, and memory in modern Britain. I'm interested in how our histories of modern Britain might look different if we take marginal places like South Humberside or South Yorkshire - rather than, say, London, Manchester, or Edinburgh - as a starting point.

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Collaborative stuff

I am involved in a number of ongoing research collaborations with colleagues from across disciplines or civic organisations and communities in Birmingham and beyond.

Co-edited with Katie Jones and Ben Mechen, reflects on what histories of masculinity in modern Britain have been and where they might go next. Addressing the constant contemporary talk of crisis around men’s lives, the book argues that we need histories of masculinity which are present-centred and politically engaged. In so doing, it sets out a new agenda for the field. Ranging over the past 130 years, a series of engaging and original essays trace how men, like masculinity, were made. In exploring that process, contributors demonstrate the radically different ways in which men made sense of the world and their place in it. The book provides compelling evidence of how individual life-stories can transform how we think about the time- and place-specific formation of men’s experiences and ideas of masculinity. Through vivid case studies that include trans men’s encounters with the welfare state, the experience of wounded Jamaican servicemen, and the social world of the public librarian, the book interweaves histories of masculinity with wider histories of society, culture, economy, and politics. It is on that basis that the book shows how thinking critically about histories of masculinity also provides new ways of understanding the making and remaking of modern Britain. The book was published as an open access title by Manchester University Press in 2024 and is .

The Persistent Prison: Alteration, Inhabitation, Obsolescence, and Affirmative Design is a collaboration with Professors Dominique Moran (Geography, UoB), Yvonne Jewkes (Criminology, Bath), and Jennifer Turner (Geography, Trier) in partnership with the Howard League for Penal Reform. The project was supported by an ESRC Standard Grant. The project explores the continued operation of Victorian prisons in Britain and the implications for the contemporary Prison Service and controversial policymaking debates. We have written a policy briefing with the Howard League (2024). We have also curated an exhibition at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham that interweaves our fieldwork and archival research with new work by the photographer Andy Aitchison and creative work by incarcerated people in HMP Liverpool and HMP Lincoln. Incarcerated: Contemporary Arts from the Victorian MuseumÌýaims to shift public perception of the nature and experience of prison and will form the basis of a forthcoming book with Bluecoat Press.

Creative Histories / Storying the Past: over the past few years I’ve worked closely with Will Pooley (Bristol), Alison Twells (Sheffield Hallam), and Helen Rogers (Liverpool John Moores) exploring the relationship between creativity and history as an academic practice. We’ve been interested in how the collaborations between different practitioners of history and different forms of history making might transform our understanding of both the past and what history as a discipline might be. These conversations have formed the basis for a think piece on ‘undisciplined history’ in and a collection online features in the UCL Press series s. Prompted by our encounters with the rich and vital histories made by schoolchildren, community groups, filmmakers, and songwriters, our aim is to show what more playful and experimental approaches might add to our practice as historians.Ìý

I am the academic lead of the new partnership between the Department of History and Bournville Village Trust.