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History

Network: Writing Labour History in Brexit Britain

Convenors: Laura Schwartz, Reader in Modern British History, University of Warwick and Diarmaid Kelliher, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Glasgow.

This network was formed out of a symposium held at the University of Warwick in July 2021, entitled '‘Ordinary’ Working-Class People? Brexit Britain and the New Labour History'. It brings together scholars whose work challenges contemporary invocations of ‘the British working class’ as white, male and socially conservative. Our research explores the history of a multi-racial working class, women workers, migrant workers and queer and cosmopolitan working-class cultures. We aim to engage with audiences beyond academia, and to produce research that is relevant within contemporary Britain.

Ongoing activities include:

If you think your research connects to our interests and would like to get involved, please email. l.schwartz@warwick.ac.uk

Members

Somak Biswas is Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge; and will take up an Associate Professorship in Modern British History at the University of Warwick in 2026.. He works on the intersections of transnational immigration, race and gender in British and South Asian history.

Caroline Bressey is Professor of Historical and Cultural Geography, in the Department of Geography at UCL. Her research focuses upon the black presence in Victorian Britain, especially London, alongside Victorian anti-racism communities and the links between contemporary identities and the diverse histories of London as represented in heritage sites in Britain. She has co-curated exhibitions with the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of London Docklands and Tate Britain where she and her colleague Dr Gemma Romain co-curated ‘Spaces of Black Modernism’ an exploration of Black artist models in Interwar London. Her first monograph, Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) examined the anti-racist reading community established by the Somerset Quaker Catherine Impey in 1888. Her current research project is exploring the multi-ethnic working-class communities of Victorian England.

David Featherstone is Professor in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Resistance, Space and Political Identiites: the Making of Counter-Global Networks (Wiley, 2008) and Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (Zed Books, 2012). He is currently working on a book with the draft title Politicising Race and Labour: Seafarers' Struggles for Equality and the Anti-Colonial Left, 1919-1953 and, together with Ben Gowland and Lazaros Karaliotas, a Leverhulme funded project on 'Trade Unions and Spaces of Democratization in Britain, the Caribbean and Greece'.

Ciara Garcha is a PhD student in World History at Trinity College, the University of Cambridge. She previously completed her Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Oxford. Ciara’s work looks at Indian migration in the early twentieth century and at the intersection of labour politics politics and anticolonialism amongst the diaspora. More broadly she is interested in migration and diaspora histories in the British Empire and postcolonial Britain.

Ewan Gibbs is lecturer in global inequalities at the University of Glasgow. He is a historian of energy, industry, work and protest with established expertise in oral history methods and archival research. His interests include heritage and memorialisation and uses of history in emotive and politically charged contexts such as the current debate over how to build a fairer and greener economy.

Ryan Hanley is a Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Exeter. He is interested in black British history, popular politics, radicalism, and working-class cultures of Empire in Britain from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. His first monograph, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, 1770-1830, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019 and was awarded the Royal Historical Society Whitfield Prize. His current research focuses on the sometimes turbulent relationship between working-class politics and the antislavery movement in the period 1787-1838, examining how the emergence of both raced and classed identities in this period were intimately linked.

Benjamin Jones teaches Modern British History at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research focuses on classed experiences and identities from the mid-twentieth century to the present with a particular emphasis on life histories, social research and social memory. He is the author of The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth Century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (Manchester, 2012) and his latest research on football casuals, fanzines and the emotional politics of rave and acid house was published in Modern British History and Contemporary British History in 2023 and 2024. He co-edited The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation, 1930s to Present with Lucy D. Curzon (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is a member of the Subcultures Network, co-editor of MUP’s Subcultures and Social Change Series and co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Mass Observation Critical Series. He is currently drawing on Mass Observation material for a book manuscript entitled “Middle England” and its “Enemies Within”: Class, Race and Feeling in Thatcher’s Britain.

Rhian E. Jones is a researcher and writer on history, politics and popular culture, and a co-editor of Red Pepper magazine. She is the author of Clampdown: Pop-Cultural Wars on Class and Gender (zer0, 2013); Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest (University of Wales Press, 2015); Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible (Repeater, 2017), the anthology of women's music writing Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them (Repeater, 2017), Paint Your Town Red: How Preston Took Back Control and Your Town Can Too (Repeater, 2021) and Rebecca's Country: A Welsh story of riot and resistance (Calon, 2024).

Diarmaid Kelliher is a British Academy postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Glasgow, in the school of Geographical and Earth Sciences. His current research focuses on the picket line in late twentieth century Britain. He has recently published a book for Routledge: Making Cultures of Solidarity: London and the 1984-5 Miners' Strike.

Julia Laite is Professor of Modern History at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. She researches and teaches on the history of women, crime, sexuality and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth century British world. She is the Birkbeck Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre and an editor at History Workshop Journal, and maintains a strong interest in public history and historiography. Julia is the principle investigator on the AHRC-funded Trafficking Past project and is the author of Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London (2012) and (with Samantha Caslin) Wolfenden’s Women: A Critical Sourcebook(2020). Her latest book, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice, was published with Profile Books in April, 2021.

Ariane Mak is a Lecturer in Modern British History at Université Paris Cité. Her first monograph focuses on coal mining strikes in Britain during the Second World War (En guerre et en grève. Enquêtes dans les cités minières britanniques, 1939-1945, Éditions de l’EHESS, 2025). It explores how the conflict between patriotism and social justice manifested itself in the everyday life of mining communities, taking into account miners, miners' wives and children, Bevin Boys, small shopkeepers and the nearest neighbours. By combining Mass-Observation mining surveys and oral history interviews, the book explores the articulation between wartime wage demands, gender dynamics and occupational pride. It also delves into the political dimensions of jokes, rumours and gossip. Ariane Mak is a member of the editorial boards of Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales and 20&21. Revue d’histoire.

Jonathan Moss is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sussex. He is a historian of modern Britain. His first book focused on the relationship between feminism, workplace activism, and trade unionism during the years 1968-1985. He is also co-author of The Good Politician: Folk Theories, Political Interaction, and the Rise of Anti-Politics which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The book takes a longer view of contemporary concerns about political dissaffection by focusing on the voices of 'ordinary' citizens found in the Mass Observation Archive from the 1940s to the present. He is currently writing a book with Emily Robinson and Jake Watts about popular understandings of the role of emotion and feelings in political debates about Brexit.

Matt Myers is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Oxford and the author of The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989 (Oxford, 2025).

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is Associate Professor of Twentieth Century British History at UCL and author of Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000 (2018). She is currently working with Natalie Thomlinson on a monograph about women's experiences during the 1984 - 5 miners' strike.

Natalie Thomlinson is Associate Professor of Modern British Cultural History at the University of Reading, and is author of Race and Ethnicity in The Women’s Movement in England, 1968 - 1993 (2016). She is currently working with Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite on a monograph about women's experiences during the 1984-5 miners' strike.

Aditya Sarkar is Associate Professor of South Asian History, University of Warwick. He is a historian of labour and political movements in late-colonial and postcolonial India. He was initially trained as a historian at the University of Delhi and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and completed his doctorate from SOAS in 2009. He has been teaching history at Warwick University since 2013, prior to which he was a research fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Goettingen in Germany. His first book, Trouble At the Mill, deals with the connections between factory law and industrial conflict in late-nineteenth century Bombay. He has also published articles on the effects of the global bubonic plague pandemic on labour relations in Bombay around the turn of the twentieth century. He is currently working on two very different projects. The first is a long history of the struggles and conflicts which attended the elaboration of structures of wage-payment in organized Indian industry between the 1890s and 1970s, with a specific focus on the genealogy of the payment-form known as the 'annual bonus'. The second is a collection of essays combining political theory and history, which seeks to analyse the nature and dynamics of contemporary right-wing authoritarianism in India.

Jack Saunders is a Lecturer in Modern British History at University College London. His first monograph, Assembling Cultures, a history of workplace activism in the notoriously fractious British motor industry, was published by Manchester University Press last year. He has published widely on the history of work and workers in post-war Britain, most recently on race, gender and class formation in the National Health Service.

Laura Schwartz is a Reader in Modern British History at the University of Warwick. She works on the history of feminism, class and radical movements. Her most recent monograph is Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

George Stevenson is a researcher for Unite the union. Prior to this, he completed a PhD in modern British history at Durham University in which he examined the relationship between British second-wave feminism and class politics. An adapted version of this research, The Women's Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. He has also published in the Labour History Review and Women’s History Review, as well as on History Workshop Online. He is currently researching "popular" constructions of social class at the end of Thatcherism based on the Mass Observation Project archive.

Valerie Wright is lecturer in modern Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh, and a historian of modern Scotland with particular expertise in gender, social and political history. She is the co-author of Glasgow: High-Rise Homes, Estates and Communities in the Post-War Period (Routledge: London, 2020) and Deindustrialisation and the Moral Economy in Scotland since 1955 (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2021).