Memory, identity and community
This research theme focuses on processes of identity-making including how people and groups cohere, remember, resist and adapt to change.
This research theme focuses on processes of identity-making including how people and groups cohere, remember, resist and adapt to change.
This interest embraces how events and individuals are memorialised, written about and re-presented as well as how protest and reconciliation contribute to cultural division and accommodation. Whether concerned with race, gender, status, sexuality, personhood, families, religious, political and local identities or communities of practice, many of us are investigating and integrating the histories and experiences of specific communities into wider historical narratives. This includes work on women’s communities and networks, sexualities and subjectivities, religious identities and groups, local contexts and regional identities, racial formation and identity-making, social movements and activism.
Researchers
Staff especially engaged with this research theme
Dr David Gange: cultural historian interested in the histories of coastlines, oceans, and the communities that rely on them.
Professor Matt Houlbrook; works on the cultural history of modern Britain, with particular interests in histories of gender, sexuality and selfhood.
Dr Chris Moores: historian of political and social activism with a particular focus on civil liberties and human rights and extra-parliamentary conservative activism in the second half of the twentieth century.
Dr John Munro: historian of the US in 20th century interested in knowledge production of social movements, the intersectional aspects of US empire, as well as race and US imperial culture.
Dr Katharine Sykes: historian of the early and central middle ages, with particular interests in gender and sexuality, religious communities, and families.
Dr Zoë Thomas: historian of the 19th and 20th centuries with particular specialisms in the history of work, artistic culture, and women’s lives.
Dr Jonathan Willis: historian of the English reformation specialising in the religious and cultural history of England over the course of the long sixteenth century.