History of Political Culture

Two AHRC grants have allowed Marcus Collins to advance an ‘audiovisual turn’ in historical research. As AHRC BBC Centenary Fellow, he worked with a dozen schools, three theatre companies, two museums, a library, a subject association, an examination board and the BBC itself to assess whether the BBC experienced a ‘cultural revolution’ in the 1960s. His subsequent public engagement project on ‘Re-viewing LGBTQ+ Lives’ investigates how television and radio represented and moulded the experiences of lesbian, gay and trans people during the twentieth century and how these programmes can be reinterpreted in the twenty-first century for use on the stage, in the classroom and in events like Pride.

Hilary Robinson was given the 2024 College Art Association (USA) Award for Distinguished Feminist Scholarship, in recognision of over 40 years of research. Her latest major project is Feminist Art Making Histories, an oral history and digital humanities project, funded by the AHRC and the Irish Research Council. The aim is to archive and make accessible histories of art that have been marginalised by a discipline that is still based upon C19th values; and to do this by interviewing artists who were active 1960s-1980s. This builds upon her feminist archival practices in much of her publishing, from Visibly Female (1987) and Feminism-Art-Theory 1968-2014 (2015) to the impact-facing The Art of Feminism (with Gosling & Tobin) with over 340 illustrations; forthcoming books are: Feminisms-Museums-Surveys: An Anthology (co-ed. Perry; WileyBlackwell), and Selected Writings (Duke University Press). 

Catherine Armstrong is leading the efforts to create a new archive of trans and non-binary stories and histories in the East Midlands. This project encourages the sharing of knowledge, skills and best practice from academics, practitioners and the trans and non-binary community around developing a meaningful and ethical archive of the social and political experiences of trans and non-binary people over the past few decades. The resulting archive will be used for academic research but more importantly will provide a resource for the trans and non-binary community to further develop a collective memory of their social activism and a sense of community coherence and belonging.

A substantial grant from the AHRC and DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) is enabling Thoralf Klein to collaborate with partners in Germany (Kirsten Bönker) and Tanzania (Andrea Kifyasi) to explore a hitherto understudied aspect of Cold War History: the competition between the Soviet and Chinese models of socialism in Africa. The project uses Tanzania as a case study to examine the connection between global and local factors and to analyse tangible interactions ‘on the ground’, highlighting the agency of African actors and their ability to navigate between the two socialist powers and use them to their own ends.

Sam Edwards is a recognised authority on transatlantic relations and, especially, on the history and politics of the US-UK ‘special relationship’. He has published a number of articles on this subject in major public-facing foreign policy fora such as History and Policy and War on the Rocks, and he has also written for various international media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Independent, and The Conversation. A former Fulbright Scholar, Dr Edwards has provided expert insights on US-UK relations for BBC News, BBC Radio, CNN, and US Government TV. He is a Trustee of two major transatlantic organisations – Sulgrave Manor (ancestral home of George Washington) and The American Library (Norwich) – and serves as Vice-Chair of the Transatlantic Studies Association.