Featured Historian: Andy Flack

Andy Flack is Lecturer in Modern and Environmental History. He is an environmental historian who specializes in histories of human relationships with animals and their wider environments in Britain and the US across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He teaches environmental history across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, as well as contributing to team-taught units on a wide array of subjects relating to the period since 1800.  Continue reading

Featured Historian: Robert Bickers

Robert Bickers is Professor of History and also the University’s Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Postgraduate Research. As well as supervising nine PhD students with colleagues in the Department, he coordinates the University’s work with all its research postgraduates. He works on the history of modern China, and within that specifically how this intersects with the wider history of colonialism and imperial power.

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Featured Historian: Simon Potter

Simon Potter is Professor of Modern History and Head of History. His research focuses on the global history of the mass media, and the impact of the press, radio and television on politics, society, and culture. His work on radio and internationalism, and on the BBC and empire, grows out of his wider interest in the history of imperialism and decolonization.

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Featured Historian: Benjamin Pohl

Benjamin Pohl is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History. His research interests are medieval European history and historiography with a focus on the Anglo-Norman world, palaeography (the study of old handwritings), codicology (the material study of books, specifically old books), book history and monastic cultures. He is the author of numerous journal articles and several books, including the monograph Dudo of St. Quentin’s Historia Normannorum: Tradition, Innovation and Memory (2015) and the edited volume A Companion to the Abbey of Le Bec in the Central Middle Ages (11th–13th Centuries) (2017). He is currently writing his new monograph Medieval Abbots and the Writing of History and editing The Cambridge Companion to the Age of William the Conqueror (both forthcoming).

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Featured Historian: Janek Gryta

Dr. Janek Gryta  is a Lecturer in Modern European History. His research focuses on the Holocaust and its impact on postwar Communist Poland, but also Europe more broadly. He writes about the history and memory of death camps, and about heritage sites, museums and memorials, and has more recently starting exploring the histories of health spas in Communist Europe. His book Jews and Poles in the Holocaust Exhibitions of Kraków, 1980-2013: Between Urban Past and National Memory has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

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Featured Historian: Will Pooley

Will Pooley is Lecturer in Modern European History. His research explores popular cultures, folklore, and witchcraft in modern France. He is particularly interested in creative historical practices, such as history through games, theatre, poetry, art, and creative writing. 

What’s your new book Body and Tradition in Nineteenth-century France about?

The book is about trying to understand what it felt like to be an ordinary agricultural worker or artisan in nineteenth-century France. What were the bodily experiences, and how did ordinary people use their own bodies?

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Featured Historian: Victoria Bates

Dr. Victoria Bates is Senior Lecturer in Modern History, with research interests in the modern social history of medicine and the medical humanities.

A picture of Dr. Victoria BatesHi Victoria, could you start by telling us about  your new research project?

I have just started a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship called ‘Sensing Spaces of Healthcare: Rethinking the NHS Hospital’. Continue reading

Featured Historian: Grace Huxford

Dr Grace Huxford is Senior Lecturer in Modern History. She is a social historian of modern Britain, specializing in the Cold War period and with particular interest in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Korean War. She is an oral historian and currently conducting an oral history of British military communities in Germany (1945-2000). She was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 3 about the project as part of a special programme on post-war Germany, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – you can listen to the interview here Continue reading