Professor Peter Mandler

Professor of Modern Cultural History

Gonville and Caius College Cambridge CB2 1TA Tel: (+44) (0)1223 768779 pm297@cam.ac.uk

Research and Teaching Interests

British history since c. 1800, especially cultural, intellectual and social history; the history of the social sciences in Britain and America; concepts and methods in cultural history.

For undergraduates, I supervise principally for the two modern British economic, social and cultural history papers (10 and 11) in Part I; teach with colleagues at Caius College a 'Themes and Sources' option on 'The History of Collecting'; and teach a special subject on 'Margaret Mead and the Public Face of Social Science, c. 1928 - c. 1978' (available 2010-11 but not 2009-10) in Part II.

For postgraduates, see below for areas of research supervision. I also run a Ph.D. reading seminar with Dr Jon Lawrence, 'Critical Readings in Modern British History' (available 2010-11 but not 2009-10). I am on leave in 2009-10 but am currently accepting new M.Phil. and Ph.D. students for 2010-11.   I encourage prospective students to get in touch by e-mail.

My own current research preoccupations lie principally in two areas.

First, in 2006-11 I am directing (with colleagues in Classics, HPS and English) the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group research programme 'Abandoning the Past', on Victorian attitudes to past, present and future, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The CVSG comprises a group of five research directors, six postdoctoral fellows, three PhD students, and a network of over 100 Cambridge postdoctoral scholars working across the disciplines on nineteenth-century subjects. For the work and public activities of the group, see its website at http://www.victorians.group.cam.ac.uk.

Second, with funding from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council I am working on a book about the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her move from the study of 'simple, homogeneous' cultures such as those among whom she did fieldwork in the South Pacific to 'complex, modern' cultures such as Britain and America. This forms part of a larger interest in the history of the social sciences and of their wider impact on culture and politics.

I am also thinking about the emergence of ‘cultural relativism’ in Britain and America in the first half of the 20^th century, the connections between education, the labour market and social mobility in 20^th-century Britain, and  the intellectual history of the concept of ‘national identity’.

Areas of Research Supervision

I am open to proposals from potential research students at M.Phil. or Ph.D. level on most topics in modern British cultural, intellectual and social history, and in the history of the social sciences.  Current Ph.D. students are working on Anglo-French travel and cosmopolitanism in the mid-19th century, Victorian social thought and the problem of the ‘entrepreneur’, women writers as 'public moralists' through Virginia Woolf, the idea of 'innocence' in pre-Victorian morals and manners, the education of imperial civil servants, the invention of Portsmouth as a site of heritage, W.H. Auden and ideas of Anglo-American community, the reception of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Britain and America, and private art galleries in early 19^th century London.

Chief Publications

• The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (2006)
• (ed.) Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (2006)
• History and National Life (2002)
• The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997)
• (ed., with Susan Pedersen) After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain (1994)
• (ed.) The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the 19th-Century Metropolis (1990)
• Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform (1990)

Other recent or forthcoming publications

• ‘Being His Own Rabbit:  Geoffrey Gorer and English Culture’, in C. V. J. Griffiths, James J. Nott, and William Whyte (eds.), Cultures, Classes, and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010)
• ‘Revisiting the Olden Time:  Popular Tudorism in the Time of Victoria’, in Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull (eds.), Tudorism:  Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century (British Academy, forthcoming 2010)
• 'One World, Many Cultures: Margaret Mead and the Limits to Cold War Anthropology', History Workshop Journal 68 (2009), 149-72
• ‘Margaret Mead Amongst the Natives of Great Britain’, Past & Present 204 (2009), 195-233
• 'The Responsibility of the Historian', in H. Jones, K. Ostberg and N. Randeraad (eds.), History on Trial: The Public Use of Contemporary History in Europe since 1989 (Manchester University Press, 2007). Spanish translation: 'La responsabilidad del historiador', Alcores: Revista de Historia Contemporanea 1 (2006), 47-61.
• 'What is National Identity? Definitions and Applications in Modern British Historiography', Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006), 271-97
• 'Art in a Cool Climate: The Cultural Policy of the British State in European Context, c. 1780-c. 1850', in T.C.W. Blanning & H. Schulze (eds.), Unity and Diversity in European Culture c. 1800 (Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 134, 2006), 101-20
• 'Nation and Power in the Liberal State: Britain c. 1800 - c. 1914', in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 354-69
• 'Problems in Cultural History: A Reply', Cultural and Social History 1 (2004), 327-33
• 'The Problem with Cultural History', Cultural and Social History 1 (2004), 5-28

Other professional activities

Advisory Boards, British Newspapers 1620-1900, JISC/British Library;  The Historical Journal;  Journal of British Studies;  Modern Intellectual History;  Journal of Victorian Culture;  Virtus:  Yearbook for the Study of the Nobility in Europe

For further information, see my c.v.