Department of History

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Dean Blackburn

Lecturer in Modern British History, Faculty of Arts

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Expertise Summary

My research explores political ideologies and their histories. I am particularly interested in the way that ideologies bestow meaning upon the concepts that we use to understand and describe the world around us.

Teaching Summary

HIST2037 History and Politics

HIST3075 The Rise and Fall of Thatcherism

HIST4058 Past Futures: Reimagining the Twentieth Century.

HIST4019 Exploring English Identities

'Learning from the Past: A Guide for the Curious Researcher' (Online Open Course)

Research Summary

Time and Chance: The Politics of Temporality in Modern Britain, 1945-2008

I am working on a book project about the politics of time. Drawing upon examples from the post-war period, the book will trace changes in the way that policy makers and intellectuals thought about temporal concepts like progress, decline and crisis.

This project is funded by a British Academy Small Grant.

Selected Publications

You can hear me talk about my research supervision here.

I welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral students who are interested in the following:

  1. The history of political ideas in Britain
  2. Party politics in modern Britain
  3. Theoretical approaches to the study of ideologies
  4. Class identities in modern Britain

Current Students

Luke Thrumble, 'Finding Britain's place in the New World Order: foreign policy in the Thatcher and Major governments at the end of the Cold War'

Evey Boffey, 'Feminism and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Britain'

Joshua Selley, 'The Black Atlantic? David Walker, Ottobah Cugoano and the Intellectual Politics of Abolition'

Past Students

David Civil, 'Meritocratic Discourse in Post-war Britain' (Awarded in 2020)

Matthew Kidd, 'Popular Politics in Urban England, 1867-1918' (Awarded in 2016)

Joseph Himsworth, 'The Political Thought of Keith Joseph' (Awarded in 2022)

William Noble, 'Our poor, tired little island just can't cope': race, immigration and 'decline' in the post-war English Midlands, c.1958-1981'

Alex Riggs, 'Democratic Party Presidential Primary Campaigns and the Left, 1980-1988'.

Rebecca Hickman, 'Gender-nonconformity and the quest for 'recognition' in the United Kingdom, from the 1970s to the present day'.

Past Research

Past Research

In 2020, I published a monograph that explored the political publishing of Penguin Books. Using the publisher's books as a way of tracing political ideas, it claims that the three decades after the Second World War might be best understood as a 'meritocratic moment' in Britain's political development.

New Books Network Podcast

Department of History

University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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