Office: FAB 3.55 (Faculty of Arts Building, third floor) Phone: 024 76572797, internal extension 72797 Email: stuart.middleton@warwick.ac.uk Office hours: Tuesdays 11-12 and 2-3. Please email me if you are unable to meet at these times.

Stuart Middleton is a historian of political and intellectual cultures in Britain, Western Europe and America since the late nineteenth century. His work is currently focused on two projects. The first, a monograph entitled The Paradox of Democracy, examines the search for ‘democratic values’ among progressive intellectuals in Britain and America who believed that democracy was imperilled or unattainable after 1918. The second is a study of political thought and argument during the twentieth century which ultimately aims to historicise the idea of the 'welfare state' (and its related concepts) in British and global history. The first instalment of this, a major re-evaluation of the politics of ‘affluence’ in Britain, appeared in the English Historical Review; and the second, on the concept of 'the Establishment', in the Journal of British Studies.

At Warwick he established, and now co-convenes and teaches, the BA programme in English and History.

Academic Profile

• 2018- : Assistant, then Associate Professor in History and Literature, University of Warwick
• 2014-2018: Research Fellow, Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge
• BA (Double First), MA, MPhil, PhD - University of Cambridge

Teaching

• EN126 History and Textuality (first-year core module for the BA in English & History)
• EN2J9 Writing History (second-year core module for the BA in English & History)
• EN3K9 English & History dissertation (third-year core module for the BA in English & History)
• HI2E1 Historiography (second-year core module for single-honours History)
• HI2D7 Politics and Literature from the Russian Revolution to the Cold War (undergraduate second-year option module; not running in 2023-24)

Publications

Books

The Paradox of Democracy: Progressive politics and the search for democratic values in Britain, 1918-1958 (under contract, Cambridge University Press)

Articles

'"Time is always guilty": Narratives of modernity in inter-war detective fiction', forthcoming, Modernism/modernity

'The crisis of democracy in inter-war Britain', Historical Journal 66:1 (2023), 186-209

'Defoe's Deist Masterpiece?', Essays in Criticism 72:4 (2022), 532-540

'The concept of "the Establishment" and the transformation of political argument in Britain since 1945', Journal of British Studies 60:2 (2021), 257-284

'Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" and the problem of democratic values in Britain, 1938-1961', Modern Intellectual History 17:4 (2020), 1133-1161

‘Humanism’s Prodigal Son’, Essays in Criticism 69:3 (2019), 380-388

'The concept of "experience" and the making of the English working class, 1924-1963', Modern Intellectual History 13:1 (2016), 179-208

'E.P. Thompson and the Cultural Politics of Literary Modernism', Contemporary British History 28:4 (2014), 422-437

'"Affluence" and the Left in Britain, c.1958-1974', English Historical Review CXXIX:536 (2014), 107-138

Reviews, essays, and occasional writings (selected)

'Interns', Times Literary Supplement 6214 (6 May 2022), 24

'Appeasers', Times Literary Supplement 6192 (3 Dec. 2021), 32-3

'Radicalism', Times Literary Supplement 6159 (16 Apr. 2021), 24-5

'I was the Left Opposition', London Review of Books 40:6 (22 Mar. 2018), 27-30

‘Weaponised Modernism’, Cambridge Humanities Review 14 (2017), 5-7

'Value of Imagination', Times Literary Supplement 5924 (14 Oct. 2016), 30

'Questionably Virtuous', London Review of Books 38:17 (8 Sep. 2016), 9-10

'How to Decorate the Downstairs Lavatory', Cambridge Humanities Review 12 (2016), 11-12

'The Facts', Cambridge Humanities Review 9 (2015), 7-10

'Diaperology', Cambridge Humanities Review 8 (2015), 25-7