Chris Campbell
My doctoral research is supervised by Professor Helen McCarthy and examines the British Council, Britain’s official cultural diplomacy agency since 1934. Taking a long view of its work across the twentieth century, my research applies gender, class and race as analytical categories, aiming to consider both how the internal employment policies of the Council and the work of individual staff affected the cultural image of Britain which it promoted abroad.
I took my BA and MA in History at University College London. Before starting my PhD, I spent four years working in PR in both the public and private sectors. I am a member of the New York-Cambridge Training Collaboration, a co-convenor of the Cambridge Modern British History Workshop and an editor with Doing History in Public. I also run the social media channels for the journal Contemporary European History and co-edit its New Voices blog.
Cultural diplomacy and soft power; the cultural Cold War; cultural imperialism; late-stage British Empire and decolonisation; British international relations; histories of the workplace; institutional histories
Outline Paper 7 - Modern Britain and Ireland since 1750
Historical Thinking III - Race
Early Career Researcher Forum, AHRC Cultural Diplomacy Network Conference (Manchester, December 2024)
'"The Ambassadors of Tradition": The British Council, Anglo-Commonwealth Relations, and the 1948 Theatrical Tour of Australia and New Zealand', Cambridge Modern British History Workshop, (Cambridge, February 2024)
Contact
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St John's College, Cambridge, CB2 1TP