Professor Jon Lawrence

I am now Professor Emeritus at Exeter. I work on modern British social, cultural and political history and have a special interest in the intersection of class and gender in both popular politics and the wider politics of everyday life. My latest book, Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England (2019) was paperbacked by the trade arm of Oxford University Press in 2023. Based largely on research conducted during a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, it uses the testimony of ordinary people collected since the 1940s to challenge conventional accounts of the death of community and relentless rise of selfish individualism.

My previous books include Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914 (CUP, 1998), Electing Our Masters: the Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (OUP, 2009) and the edited collection Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (with Miles Taylor [1997]) which played an important part in defining the so-called 'new political history'. I have previously taught at University College London, the University of Liverpool, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge and been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Monash and the Australian National University. I have supervised more than twenty PhDs to completion on a wide range of topics in modern British history. 
Read more at https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/staff/jlawrence/#COaa3E3gy8IDXhXg.99