State of the field essay

A comment on the place of national (British) history in the historical discipline for Modern British History.

Teaching

This spring I’m teaching my survey of Britain & the British Empire. I’ve taught this class many times, but each time it looks a little different, since the world around us is always changing. This spring I’m finding a class about Britain and its Empire talking a lot about Europe. We begin with Parliament welcoming a Dutch monarch in 1689, and end with Britain leaving the European Union in 2020. In between, Britain allies with Germany, Russia, and France, and fights wars against Germany, Russia, and France. This is a class about a European country - one that comes to know itself, in part, through an often tricky relationship with 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?

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.

Unpublished paper

“Welfare State Modernism and the Politics of Aesthetic Change,” a standalone version of Chapter 3 of Thatcher’s Progress.