This research group brings together members of the History department working on all aspects of British and Irish History from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The group takes a broad view of the period and deliberately eschews a focus on any particular sub-discipline or type of history. If we accept that cultural, economic, intellectual, social and political spheres intersect closely with one another, then to understand them fully we need to consider their connections rather than their boundaries.

The group was created in 2018 and operates primarily as a forum for mutual support and the exchange of ideas between its members. However its outward-facing activities are likely to grow in the future.

For more information, please contact Richard Marsden on Richard.marsden@open.ac.uk.

Members

• Suzanne Forbes works on political culture in Ireland. In 2018 she published a book about print and party conflict in early eighteenth-century Ireland. She is currently carrying out research on elections in eighteenth-century Ireland.
• Amanda Goodrich’s research includes political and cultural history in the Georgian period with an emphasis on political ideas. In particular she has focused on the English response to the French Revolution and the battle between reformers and loyalists on this side of the English Channel. She has a book in press on politics and identity in the Atlantic World; a political, cultural and intellectual biography of Henry Redhead Yorke, a dual heritage West Indian who became embroiled in English extra-parliamentary politics in the Georgian period. She is now working on plantation relationships in the West Indies, based on contemporary correspondence.
• Janice Holmes works on the social history of religion in 19th and 20th century Britain and Ireland and on aspects of Irish local history. In 2000 she published a book on the evangelical phenomenon of religious revivals in 19thc Britain. Since then she has written on several aspects of the evangelical experience including female ministry, open-air preaching, the concept of piety and Methodism. She is currently working on a study of Irish Presbyterian clergymen and their families in 19thc Belfast and the ways they interacted with their congregations using material and visual culture as key primary sources. In recent years she has developed an interest in the emergence of 'folklife studies' as a scholarly discipline in early 20thc Ireland and is currently working on an article which explores the Scandinavian influences on the establishment of the Ulster Folk Museum (1958).
• Donna Loftus is a social and cultural historian of nineteenth-century Britain with a particular interest in the market, social relations and identity. Her research focuses on Victorian understandings of, and responses to, capitalism and industrialisation and uses a range of sources to explore attitudes to economic and social development during a period of rapid change. Donna is a committee member of the Social History Society.
• Richard Marsden is interested in representations of the past. In 2014 he published a book on the politicisation of Scottish history during the 1800s. More recently he has worked on Scottish antiquarianism, modern attitudes to Gerald of Wales, depictions of the old Scottish parliament under devolution, and the evolution of medievalism studies. He is currently investigating antiquarian representations of the Middle Ages across nineteenth-century Britain.
• Robin Mackie works on Scottish and British social and economic history in the 1850-1950 period. He writes on Scottish business history, in particular relating to family firms, and on the relations between science and education and industry. His most recent publication was an article about a Scottish engineering firm that exported rice-milling machinery to SE Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century, and he is currently working on a project related to succession and inheritance in family firms using wills.
• Stuart Mitchell has interests principally in mid-twentieth British history. His first book examined the economic policies of the Macmillan and Home governments between 1957 and 1964. More recently, he has been developing interests in English local history, both political and social.
• Anna Plassart works on the history of European ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on Scottish, English and French political philosophy. Her first book examined the Scottish reception of the French Revolution, and she is particular interested in the heritage of Scottish social and political thought in the nineteenth century. She is currently engaged in a new project centered on the emergence of new ideas of the 'nation' in the early nineteenth century.
• Vincent Trott works on modern British and American history, with a particular focus on the cultural history of the First World War, and on the history of publishing and reading in the twentieth century. His first book, Publishers, Readers and the Great War, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017, and he is currently working on a new research project exploring satirical magazines during the First World War.