Susan Carruthers 'Making do' & Jeremy Goh's new article
By Eloisa Ocando Thomas. Published on 09 May 2025.
About Prof Susan Carruthers
Susan Carruthers is an international historian of twentieth-century, with particular interests in the foreign relations of the US and the UK. Her work focuses on war and the ways in which individuals and societies have made sense of conflict and its aftermath.
About Jeremy Goh
Jeremy is a current GHCC student. His interests lie in business and financial history, Chinese overseas, capitalism, and transnationalism, and, more generally, Southeast Asia’s past and present.
New publications by GHCC members! Congratulations to Professor Susan Carruthers, whose book 'Making do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World' has just been published! PGR student Jeremy Goh has also been recently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
'Making do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World'
'Making do' by Professor Susan Carruthers uses material culture to explore post-war Britain. Carruthers unpicks a familiar wartime motto, 'Make Do and Mend', to reveal how central fabric was to this period. Clothes and footwear supplied a currency with which some were rewarded, while others went without. Making Do moves from Britain's demob centres to liberated Belsen – from razed German cities to refugee camps and troopships – to uncover intimate ties between Britons and others bound together in new patterns of mutual need. Filled with original research and personal stories, Making Do illuminates how lives were refashioned after the most devastating war in human history.
Digitised Sources, Materiality and ‘Interim Archives’: Archive Encounters in Asia and the United Kingdom
PGR GHCC student Jeremy Goh has also recently published a piece in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. This comment, based on personal experience, explores the process of doing research at institutional archives as an early career historian. Jeremy discusses how his research has been shaped by encounters with physical and digital sources across Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong SAR and the United Kingdom.
Congrats to both!
Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World (Cambridge University Press, 2025), 400pp