Harry Parker

My doctoral research focuses on the history of the social sciences in Britain. I study the relationship between, on the one hand, the development of disciplines like sociology, anthropology, and human geography in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and on the other, Britain's democratisation during the same period. I ask how the social sciences provided new tools with which ordinary citizens could come to see themselves as belonging to a 'culture'. The thesis proceeds through a series of case studies of large scale social surveying projects that sought to recruit British men and women to become social-scientific observers of their own surroundings. These include the Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom (1892-1897), the contemporaneous photographic survey movement, the interwar regional survey movement of Patrick Geddes, and the early history of 'community studies'. An article based on this research won the History of Human Sciences journal's Early Career Prize.

Before embarking on the PhD, I completed both my BA and MPhil at Cambridge. In 2017 I won Gonville & Caius College's Schuldham Plate, awarded to the highest-ranking graduand across any subject that year, and in 2020 I was awarded the Members' History Prize for the best MPhil dissertation in the History Faculty. I am funded by the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, in addition to which I hold an honorary Vice-Chancellor's Award.