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Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities

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Dr Catherine Flinn is Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, where she completed a PhD in modern British history in 2012. Her background prior to the doctorate was in architecture, planning and the historic built environment. Her current research focuses on postwar reconstruction, in particular the political, economic and cultural impacts on rebuilding and redevelopment.

Her contribution to the Research Exchange coincides with the launch of her book, ‘Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities’ which is published by Bloomsbury and will be launched at Churchill College, Cambridge, on 1 May 2019.

Reading for Masculinity in Iranian Primary Sources

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Dr Sivan Balslev is Lecturer in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in the social, cultural, and gender history of modern Iran and has published two Hebrew translations of poet Forough Farrokhzad’s books, ‘Another Birth’ and ‘Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season’. 

In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she gives a taste of the range of sources she used to seek out largely unspoken attitudes and practices that made up the history of Iranian masculinity for her doctoral research and her new book ‘Iranian Masculinities: Gender and Sexuality in Late Qajar and Early Pahlavi Iran’ (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

War and Childhood

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Dr Mischa Honeck and Dr James Marten are co-editors of ‘War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars’, an new edited volume published by Cambridge University Press. In their contribution to the Research Exchange, they reflect on the young lives and uncomfortable realities featured in this collection, which complicates the standard equation of childhood and victimhood in times of war.

Dr Mischa Honeck teaches US and transatlantic history at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.  He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and is the author of Our Frontier Is the World: The Boy Scouts in the Age of American Ascendancy (Cornell University Press, 2018).

Dr James Marten is Chair of History at Marquette University, Wisconsin, and a leading authority in both the history of the US Civil War and the history of childhood, whose books include ‘The Children’s Civil War’ (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Empires of the Mind

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Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at Worcester College, University of Oxford. He is the author of numerous books on everyday life and resistance, collective memory and political culture in French history, including ‘Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940-45’ (Macmillan, 2002),  ‘Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914’ (Allen Lane, 2008) and ‘Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance’ (Harvard University Press, 2015).

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he reflects on how his new book, ‘Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019)’, came to be compaison between the legacies and politics of the colonial past in France and Britain.

Black Sailors and Legal History from the Bottom Up

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Dr Michael A. Schoeppner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine, Farmington. His research explores how the lived experience of race intersected with and informed legal culture and constitutional change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he reflects on the writing of his new book, ‘Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America’ (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which was awarded the 2017 Hines Prize by the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program at the College of Charleston.

Punk Rock, Provincial Pride and the History of Local Journalism

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Dr Andrew Hobbs is a senior lecturer in international journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, interested in provincial print culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. He is currently working on a scholarly edition of the only known diaries of a provincial 19th-century journalist, Anthony Hewitson (1836-1912). Follow @HewitsonDiaries for daily extracts from the diaries.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he explains the emotions and experiences behind his new open-access book, ‘A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900’ (Open Book, 2018).

Opera before “Elitism”

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Dr Alexandra Wilson is Reader in Music at Oxford Brookes University, where she researches the social and cultural history of opera. She is the author of ‘The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity’ (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and ‘Opera: A Beginner’s Guide’ (OneWorld Publications, 2010).

In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she discusses her research on Opera’s surprising place in the 1920s ‘battle of the brows’ for her new book ‘Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain’ (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Charity Entrepreneurs

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Dr Sarah Roddy is Lecturer in Modern Irish History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of ‘Population, providence and empire: the churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland’ (Manchester University Press, 2014).

In her contribution for the Research Exchange, she explains how innovative and competitive the fundraisers were that she researched for her new book with Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe, ‘The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870–1912’ (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Rethinking Learie Constantine

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Jeffrey Hill is an emeritus professor of historical and cultural studies at De Montfort University. He has written on various aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century popular culture, with a special emphasis in recent years on the study of sport and its ideological influences.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he discusses the need to tell the story of cricketing hero Learie Constantine with a new focus on race, Empire and the Commonwealth. ‘Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire’ was published by Bloomsbury in December 2018.

Immigrant Life in Medieval England

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Dr Bart Lambert is Assistant Professor in Late Medieval Urban History and a member of the HOST research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His work focuses on migration flows and international trade in Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he reflects on the life of Gervase de Vulre, one of those whose story was uncovered during his collaboration with Mark Ormrod and Jonathan Mackman, which led to the publication of their co-authored monograph ‘Immigrant England, 1300-1550’ with Manchester University Press in December 2018.