Hester Barron
Hester Barron is a Lecturer in History. Her monograph, The 1926 Miners' Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield, was published in 2010. It considered the social and political effects of the long 1926 strike, investigating attitudes to collective behaviour and the way in which miners and their families conceptualised issues of class and community. More recently, the focus of Hester's research has shifted to histories of childhood and parenting in the first half of the twentieth century. She is interested in two main research areas: exploring issues of community, identity and belonging amongst London schoolchildren in the interwar years; and the experience of motherhood during the Second World War. She is also involved in the research project Raising the Nation: Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, 1870-1950, with Claudia Siebrecht.
Ben Burbridge
Ben Burbridge is Lecturer in Art History at University of Sussex. His research focuses on the intersection of photography, art and politics, particularly in the contemporary period. Curated exhibitions include No Passaran! Robert Capa and the Spanish Civil War (Charleston Farmhouse Gallery, Firle, 2007) and the 2012 Brighton Photo Biennial, Agents of Change: Photography and the Politics of Space (various venues). He is currently working with Media Space, London, on an exhibition and edited publication examining artists’ responses to modes of vision made available by early scientific photography.
Robert Cook
Robert Cook is professor of American History. He is a specialist in the history of the American Civil War and the constructed memory of that sanguinary conflict. His books include Civil War America: Making a Nation 1848-1877 (Longman, 2004), Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Louisiana State University Press, 2007), Civil War Senator: William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic (Louisiana State University Press, 2011) and (with William Barney and Elizabeth Varon) Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He is currently working on a history of Civil War memory from Appomattox to the Sesquicentennial.
Sian Edwards
Sian Edwards is an Associate Tutor in the history department and has taught and lectured on undergraduate courses since 2010, including the second year course Britain in the Twentieth Century. Her recently completed doctoral research focused on the role of the countryside in the citizen training provided by youth movements in the mid-twentieth century. In this she explored the impact of the Second World War on youth organisations and shifting meanings of citizenship as a result. In February 2013 Sian was the principal researcher in the three month AHRC funded cultural engagement research project ‘In the Fields and in the Streets: Sarre at War 1939-45’. This community engagement project worked with Kent County Council to uncover local stories of the war and create ways in which the local community could engage with them.
Martin Evans
Martin Evans is Professor of Modern European History. His work examines the impact of war on society, but in particular the complex impact of colonial wars in the twentieth century. It also explores the memory of conflict and conflict resolution. His books include Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War 1954-62 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), (with Emmanuel Godin) France 1815-2003 (London: Edward Arnold, 2004) and (with John Phillips) Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (London: Yale University Press, 2007). He has also co-edited (with Ken Lunn) War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 1997) and (with Martin Alexander and J.F.V. Keiger) The Algerian War and the French Army: Experiences, Images, Testimonies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002). His latest book is Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) which analyses that conflict as a clash between Algerian nationalism and third way reformism encapsulated by the French Socialist Party. This book is based upon research he conducted as a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow at the British Academy in 2007-08. He is currently completing a three year British Academy project with colleagues at the University of Portsmouth, the University of Dakar in Senegal and the University of Algiers in Algeria that looks at the Algerian War conflict through oral testimony.
Chris Kempshall
Chris Kempshall is a Visiting Research Fellow at the CHWS. His recently completed doctoral research examined the relationships and interactions between British and French soldiers on the Western Front during the First World War. Chris has been an Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex for several years and has taught and lectured on the First World War. In February 2012 he was selected to participate in an AHRC collaborative workshop to inform and influence BBC thinking around their centenary coverage. He is also a contributor to the open educational resources project WW1 Continuations and Beginnings organised in conjunction with the University of Oxford and JISC.
Sarah L. King
Sarah King is a molecular neuroscientist in the Biological and Clinical Neuroscience group in the School of Psychology. Her work takes a molecular approach to study how changes in brain structure and function impact on behaviour. A Sussex–funded project with Lucy Robinson (History) explored combat-PTSD in Falklands War veterans in the context of history, psychiatry and neuroscience. Sarah is currently working on a project exploring how stress interacts with genetics to make some people susceptible to drug addiction.
Claire Langhamer
Claire Langhamer is Senior Lecturer in History and works on twentieth century Britain. Her publications include Women’s Leisure in England, 1920-1960 (MUP, 2000) and The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (OUP, 2013). Current projects include bigamy in wartime and the emotional aftermath of the Second World War. She is also involved in a project with Claudia Siebrecht and Lucy Noakes (Brighton) called War: an Emotional History.
Karen Leenders
Karen Leenders is a second year PhD student focussing on the Indian Army on the Western Front 1914-1915 and subsequent commemoration.Karen began her studies at Sussex in 1995 with a BA Philosophy and a MA in Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Karen has MAs in Contemporary History from Sussex and in Imperialism and Culture from Sheffield Hallam University. Karen works full time managing a hostel for homeless people and is a director of East Sussex Credit Union.
Jacob Norris
Jacob Norris is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex. He was previously Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, after completing his PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 2010. Jacob has a particular interest in Palestinian history around the time of World War I and its immediate aftermath. His monograph, Land of Progress: Palestine in the Age of Colonial Development, 1905-1948 was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. The book spans both the late Ottoman and British periods of rule in Palestine, charting the widespread enthusiasm for colonial development in that period and its ultimately negative consequences for the Arab Palestinian population. Jacob’s latest research looks at the social history of Bethlehem through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries – a town that has long been intimately connected to global movements of people, goods and ideas in ways that defy its stereotypical western Christian image.Lucy Robinson
Lucy Robinson is a Lecturer in Modern British History. Her first monograph Gay Men and the Left in PostWar Britain: how the personal became political (MUP, 2007) included analysis of the relationship between gay politics, anti-war activism and the wider Left. Since then Lucy has been working largely on the 1980s. As well as teaching a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses that engage with civilian and combatant experience of warfare, and of anti-war activism, she has completed a project on the Falklands War, particularly looking at the relationship between soldiers’ memoirs and historical ideas of trauma. Lucy then developed this into a more broad analysis of the 1980s, particularly looking at the relationship between popular culture and politics or resistance. As well as academic publications this research fed into a JISC funded digital project Observing the 1980s which brought together documents from the Mass Observation Project, British Library oral history collection, and ephemera from Sussex University’s documents collection into a unique online research and teaching resource. It includes interviews, writing and ephemera relating to the Falklands, Northern Ireland and the anti-nuclear movements in the 1980s. Alongside this Lucy has been involved in the launch and development of a major new Network for Subculture, Popular Music and Social Change.
Dorothy Sheridan
Dorothy Sheridan MBE is a Trustee of the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) at the University of Sussex and was formerly Head of Special Collections at Sussex. As Archivist and Director of the MOA (1974-2010), she co-founded the contemporary phase of Mass Observation and was researcher and consultant on the recently launched digital resource, “Observing the Eighties” with Lucy Robinson. She continues to work in areas relating to the politics and ethics of archiving and life writing (including the use of women’s diaries and life stories in history) and is currently planning further work on MO material from 1981 onwards. She is a Trustee of the National Life Stories at the British Library and Patron of the longstanding local community publisher, QueenSpark Books. She is a Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton, attached to the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories. Her books include Speak for Yourself (1984), Among You Taking Notes (1985), Mass Observation at the Movies (1987), Wartime Women (1990) and Writing Ourselves (2000). She was made a 50th Anniversary Fellow of the University of Sussex in 2011 and has an honorary doctorate from the Open University.
Claudia Siebrecht
Claudia Siebrecht is a Lecturer in Modern European History. She specialises in the cultural history of the First World War, has a particular interest in visual responses to war and her first monograph, The Aesthetics of Loss: German Women's Art of the First World War will be published in September 2013. Dr Siebrecht is also working on colonial violence and concentration camp imprisonment in the early 20th century. She is involved in the research projects Raising the Nation: Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, 1870-1950, with Hester Barron and War: an Emotional History, with Claire Langhamer and Lucy Noakes (Brighton).Paul Weir
Paul Weir is an AHRC-funded PhD student at the University of Sussex. His research focuses on British attitudes to the bombing of Germany during the Second World War. Paul is an Associate Tutor at the university and has taught on courses including Europe in the Twentieth Century and Britain in the Nineteenth Century. He also works as a freelance educator for the Holocaust Educational Trust.
Gerhard Wolf