recent
Thatcher’s Progress is now available in paperback . . .
. . . and, using this flyer, 20% off.
Teaching
This spring I’m teaching my survey of Britain & the British Empire. Though I have taught this class many times, it looks different each time, since the world around us is always changing. This time I find a class about Britain and Empire continually circling back to Europe. We begin with Parliament welcoming a Dutch monarch in 1688, and end with the British state leaving the EU in 2020. In between, Britain allies itself with Germany, Russia, and France, and also fights wars against Germany, Russia, and France. This is, ultimately, a class about a European country, one that comes to know itself through its often antagonistic relationship to Europe.
In Fall 2024, I taught a graduate seminar with my colleague Karl Appuhn. Now and Then compared early modern and modern treatments of common themes in European history. Are animals historical? Is sight? Is there a relationship between gossip in sixteenth-century Switzerland and twentieth-century England? What can the historian gain gained by asking these and other questions across conventional periodizations?
Writing
“British History and the Fate of National Historiographies,” Modern British History 35:1 (2024): 18-21.
On David Holland, “Toffee Men, Travelling Drapers and Black-Market Perfumers—South Asian Networks of Petty Trade in Early Twentieth Century Britain,” for Modern British History 35:1 (2024): 109-111.
Award
NYU has awarded a Teaching Innovation Award to this low-tech approach to assessing learning in large humanities classes.
Public writing
“The Queen is dead. England is not.” On the state-of-the-nation upon the Queen’s death for the Washington Post. This piece got picked up in a number of places, from the Bangladesh Post to Stars and Stripes.
“Yet despite the tried-and-true Tory tactic of sacrificing wounded leaders to reset their public standing, this time could be different.” On Boris Johnson’s resignation for the Washington Post.
Reviews
Peter Stansky, Twenty Year On: Views and Reviews of Modern Britain, for Cercles.
Richard J. Williams, Why Cities Look the Way They Do, for Urban History.
Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism, for Cercles.
Unpublished paper
“Welfare State Modernism and the Politics of Aesthetic Change,” a standalone version of Chapter 3 of Thatcher’s Progress.