The Centre for Modern and Contemporary History

Head of CMCH

• Prof James Crossland (History of terrorism, intelligence, laws of armed conflict)

Core members

• Dr Chris Vaughan (East African history, decolonisation)
• Dr Olivia Saunders (South American history)
• Prof Nick White (History of decolonisation in South-East Asia, business history)
• Dr Kate Ballantyne (American Civil Rights movement, youth activism)
• Dr Tom Beaumont (French history, labour history)
• Dr Mike Benbough-Jackson (Welsh history, regional identities)
• Dr Louise Coyne (Women's suffrage, Irish nationalism)
• Dr Malcolm Craig (Cold War history, culture in the nuclear age)
• Dr Dan Feather (South African history)
• Dr Laura Gillespie (American Civil War, Black politics)
• Prof Susan Grant (Soviet history, nursing and aged care)
• Dr Katherine Harbord (Middle East history, anti-Semitism)
• Dr Andre Keil (German history, state responses to emergencies)
• Dr Percy Leung (British history, German history, Music history)
• Dr Andrea Livesey (History of slavery)
• Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Histories of the home, gender, Victorian culture)
• Prof Gillian O'Brien (Irish history, dark tourism)

Affiliate members

• Dr Emily Cuming (Victorian literature and culture)
• Dr Ailsa Fidler (Education history)
• Dr Clare Horrocks (Victorian popular print culture and periodicals)
• Dr Nick Ridley (Terrorism and 19th century revolutionary movements)
• Dr Isabel Robinson (History of slavery)
• Dr Avril Rowley (Education history)

Externally-funded projects

“The “federal moment” in East Africa: regionalism and the nation-state, 1958-1963”
Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (£70,000)

Researcher: Chris Vaughan

"Anxiety, Prejudice, Paranoia: Shaping British Intelligence Culture, 1880s-1920s"
Leverhulme Trust (£113,000 / 2022 to 2025)

This project examines how colonial anxieties, prejudices and trauma shaped the culture of Britain’s intelligence community during its formative period from the 1880s to the 1920s. This will be done using a novel interdisciplinary method, which will involve combining the study of emotions and human experience (affective science) and collective biography (prosopography) to explore the emotional states and activities of 19 individuals who, after experiences in the colonies, returned to Britain to work for the Community. By uncovering the connections between colonial experiences and the development of the Community’s institutional culture, this project will contribute new knowledge to the field of imperial history, and pioneer a more human-centric approach to intelligence studies, in which the emotional states of intelligence officers will be given greater consideration when analysing how they assess and respond to threats. Through a range of outputs aimed at both academics and the public, this research will open avenues for a wide discussion of the troubling colonial origins of today’s intelligence Community.

Researchers: James Crossland and Lukasz Grzymski.

"Engaging with a Pariah State: British Cultural Diplomacy in Rhodesia, 1965 to 1980"
British Academy (£7,715 / 2023 to 2025)

Debates about the value of cultural boycotts re-emerge on a cyclical basis, often coming hand-in-hand with the implementation of economic sanctions. The key question is always whether it is better to isolate a pariah state, or maintain cultural contact with the general population in the hope of softening attitudes, promoting change, and gaining influence. One example, which has received little scholarly attention, is the efforts by Britain to utilise cultural diplomacy in its dealing with the ‘rebel colony’ of Rhodesia. While Britain and Rhodesia had a unique relationship, and this contact took place at a very different time, this case study can be used as a microcosm for the contemporary challenges states face when attempting to sustain linkages through cultural contact with the aim of maintaining long-term influence.

Researcher: Dan Feather.

"Sharing Lands: Reconciliation, Recognition and Reciprocity"
AHRC (£509,400 / 2024 to 2027)

The remarkable story of the $172 sent by members of the Choctaw tribe to Ireland via the General Irish Relief Committee of the City of New York during the Great Famine in 1847 is one that is often recalled by people worldwide. Despite that fact, both the details surrounding the connection between the Choctaw Nation, the people of Ireland and the gift's legacy have been greatly understudied. Rooted in the Choctaw concept of ima (giving), the project will consider the gift's expression of core indigenous values as well as models of sharing and collective wellbeing. It will also construct a deeper understanding of the ways in which Choctaw traditions have led to moments of empathy, recognition, and international alliance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. There are other relevancies to be considered too, given that the tribe's donation was dispatched soon after Choctaw Removal to Indian Territory in the mid-1830s. Also suffering from hunger, disease and land loss, swathes of the population in Ireland-had experienced numerous privations caused by colonial expansion. It is also a tragic fact that many Irish born migrants and Irish-America settlers-President Andrew Jackson amongst them-would go on to play a large part in expansionist U.S. policies during the 1830s and beyond. Set within the broader interpretative contexts established by this project, the enduring story of the Choctaw gift can speak, compellingly, to issues surrounding collective trauma and indigenous responses to colonisation. Moreover, the critical(re)assessment of this story, as well as the memorialisation, commemoration and celebration of it in the twenty-first century, underlines the potential for recovery and reconciliation, both within and between communities. Finally, set against a backdrop of famine and removal, in the first instance, as well as forms of sustenance and sharing, in the second, the donation might prompt audiences to consider questions relating to immigration, internationalism and belonging, patterns of inter-relationality and reciprocity during times of crisis and catastrophic change, and the ethics of production and consumption, especially around food sustainability.

Researchers: Gillian O'Brien and Prof LeAnne Howe (University of Georgia).

Partner organisations: Irish Heritage Trust, Department of Foreign Affairs, Irish American Heritage Museum, Nano Nagle Place and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. 

"From Slavery to Roe vs Wade: Using Theatre to Explore Black Diasporic Understandings of Reproductive Health and Justice"
British Academy (£7,810 / 2023 to 2024)

This collaborative between LJMU, Collective Encounters and the International Slavery Museum, works with women from local descendant communities to better understand how participatory theatre methodology can help curators understand difficult sources and artefacts. The objective is to co-produce research into slavery, midwifery and reproductive health.  In the trauma-informed sessions – led by local artists – the project researchers explore links between reproductive violence under slavery and in the present day.  The participants and artists will use creative methodologies to share in the archival material, building knowledge and developing critical skills. 

Researchers: Andrea Livesey and Isabel Robinson.

Partner organisations: Collective Encounters and the International Slavery Museum.

“Our Most Beautiful Mechanical Contrivances”: Exhibiting Empire in Nineteenth Century Liverpool
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (£16,100.43 /2024 to 2025)

‘Exhibiting Empire’ aims to digitise, document, and critically interpret a series of nineteenth century public exhibitions held by a predecessor college of LJMU - Liverpool Mechanics’ Institution - between 1840 and 1861. These exhibitions were intended to showcase the best of Liverpool’s artistic and manufacturing capabilities during the mid-nineteenth century. Although highly popular at the time, little of the exhibitions’ history or significance is known to audiences today. The project therefore aims to spotlight this important moment in LJMU’s creative and civic development at a time when Liverpool was colloquially known as ‘the second city of Empire’. At its core, the project aims to make previously inaccessible archival material publicly available in order to examine how art, industry, science, and global cultures were both displayed and understood within Liverpool, and how they shaped the early development of the institution.

The project is the first output produced as part of the wider, internally funded ‘LJMU, Enslavement and Empire’. This project is ongoing and aims to better understand the early history of LJMU, and how it benefitted from and participated in the economy of slavery, together with how those legacies continue to impact the university community today.

For more, visit the Exhibiting Empire microsite.

Researcher: Isabel Robinson

Partner organisation: Liverpool Record Office

Gender, Race and Sexuality

This cluster brings together the complex research and ideologies that constitute the histories of gender, race and sexuality.  By taking an intersectional approach to these histories, the Gender, Race and Sexuality cluster will provide a space for discussion, sharing of ideas, and constructive feedback for researchers working across disciplines.

Cluster leader: Andrea Livesey

Home and Domestic Cultures

This research cluster will provide an interdisciplinary and collaborative space to investigate home and domestic cultures from a historical and contemporary perspective. The nineteenth century famously saw the proclamation of ‘home, sweet home’, while the recent pandemic has centred home and domestic culture as never before. Home and homemaking continue to be central to our daily lives. Yet, home is not just as a physical space of dwelling, but a feeling and emotion that can extend into other home-like spaces such as gardens, parks, workspaces, community spaces, the nation, and institutions. Broadening understandings of home and domestic cultures, this interdisciplinary research cluster aims to explore more fully how people have made themselves at home both in the past and the present. By decentring a romanticised reading of domestic space, we recognise that not everyone finds their homes to be a place of security and tranquillity. We therefore aim to address how homes are made and unmade, embraced and rejected, located and displaced. This research cluster will run a regular reading group, meetings, and workshops. We are keen to provide a space for researchers across the HSS and APSS who have an interest in home and domestic cultures and to extend this network to the broader community with a view to building partnerships across the heritage, charity, and public sectors. A key component of our research group will be to support knowledge exchange work and to develop funding opportunities.

For more information, please visit Home and Domestic Cultures webpage.

Cluster Leaders: Lucinda Matthews-Jones and Emily Cuming

Andre Keil
Emergency Powers and the Home Fronts in Britain and Germany during the First World War
(Oxford University Press, 2025)

The First World War transformed modern politics. No example demonstrates this more powerfully than the enactment and use of emergency powers by all belligerents. Wartime governments passed extensive emergency legislation that allowed them to pursue their war efforts with little democratic scrutiny and legal restrictions. In Britain, the Defence of the Realm Act transferred law-making powers from Parliament to the government and suspended vital elements of the unwritten constitution. In Germany, the declaration of the state of siege meant that the military assumed executive powers on the home front. These powers were initially used to suppress dissent, establish censorship of the press, and combat espionage. Yet, by 1918, they had been extended to regulate almost any aspect of everyday life on the home front. Understanding the political and social dynamics on the home front is only possible when the crucial importance of these emergency powers is considered. The experience of life under a permanent state of exception during the war transformed the relationship between the state and its citizens. Yet it also marked the rise of the state of exception as a paradigm of rule.

Andrea Livesey
Voices of the Formerly Enslaved in Louisiana
(Louisiana State University Press, 2025)

In the 1930s, thousands of formerly enslaved Americans were interviewed across the United States as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project. While most of those interviews were subsequently published, Louisiana’s were not. Gathered here for the first time in complete and contextualized form are the full interviews with the formerly enslaved in Louisiana, the transcripts of which had been separated, fragmented, and distributed throughout archives in the state.

Reassembled and analyzed by historian Andrea Livesey, the interviews are critical for understanding how Black Louisianans experienced enslavement but also resisted and built distinctive cultures, communities, and families in spite of it. Equally important is the testimony of how they negotiated emancipation and built relationships after freedom.

Livesey discusses the impact of Lyle Saxon, a well-known writer who headed the Louisiana branch of the Writers’ Project, and Louisiana poet Marcus B. Christian, who led the segregated Black unit. Other unique aspects of the collection are interviews in Kouri Vini and Louisiana French and descriptions of Voodoo, Marie Laveau, and medicine practiced in Black communities of the era.

Livesey invites readers to pay critical attention to how the interviewers may have influenced the narrative preserved in the archive through interpersonal dynamics or editing as they transcribed the interview. Alongside the extended introduction to the volume, this analysis sheds light on the administrative structures and racialized dynamics that initially shaped the interviews.

Nick Ridley
The Belgian Revolt of 1830
(Taylor and Francis, 2025)

This book examines and analyses the factors essential for the success of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, in which the southern provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands successfully broke away in a nationalist revolt and became the independent Kingdom of Belgium.

The Belgian Revolution of 1830 was a major factor in breaking the post-1815 Vienna Settlement and the international system, an international system which was manipulated by Austria, Russia and Prussia for suppressing liberal and nationalist movements. Due to the fervour and unity of the Belgian revolutionaries and coordinated diplomacy by the five major European powers of Russia, Prussia, Austria, France and Britain, a new nation with its neutrality guaranteed by all the powers was established: Belgium. 

Kate Ballantyne
Radical Volunteers: Dissent, Desegregation and Student Power in Tennessee
(University of Georgia Press, 2024)

Radical Volunteers tells the largely unknown story of southern student activism in Tennessee between the Brown decision in 1954 and the national backlash against the Kent State University shootings in May 1970.

As one of the first statewide studies of student activism—and one of the few examinations of southern student activism—it broadens scholarly understanding of New Left and Black student radicalism from its traditionally defined hotbeds in the Northeast and the West Coast.

Dan Feather
British Cultural Diplomacy in South Africa, 1960-1994
(Palgrave, 2024)

This book analyses the British government’s use of cultural diplomacy in South Africa from 1960 to 1994. Previously, scholarship on UK-South African relations has focussed mainly on political, economic, or military links; this book makes an important and original intervention by emphasising how the British government sought to use cultural ties as part of its diplomacy in South Africa.

The book also highlights the controversy these links generated owing to broader international efforts to ostracise South Africa owing to the racist apartheid system in the country at the time.

By examining British policy towards educational exchanges, performing arts tours, radio and television broadcasts, and sporting contact, this book provides a dynamic case study from which to analyse Britain’s use of cultural diplomacy during a period of relative decline, while also adding a new layer to the well-established literature on the UK-South African special relationship.

James Crossland
Rogue Agent: From Secret Plots to Psychological Warfare, the Untold Story of Robert Bruce Lockhart
(Elliott and Thompson, 2024)

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart (1887–1970) was an impressive figure: a diplomat, intelligence agent, conspirator, journalist and propagandist who played a key role in both world wars. He was a man who charmed his way into the confidences of everyone from Leon Trotsky to Anthony Eden.

A man whom the influential press baron Lord Beaverbook claimed ‘could well have been prime minister’. And yet Lockhart died almost forgotten and near destitute, a Scottish footnote in the pages of history. Rogue Agent is the first biography of this gifted yet habitually flawed maverick.

It chronicles his many exploits, from his time as Britain’s ‘Agent’ in Moscow, and his role in a plot to bring down the communist regime, to leading the Political Warfare Executive, a secret body responsible for disinformation and propaganda in the Second World War.

Exploring Lockhart’s unorthodox thinking and contributions to the development of psychological warfare as well as his hedonistic lifestyle, late nights and many affairs that left him in a state of perpetual debt, Rogue Agent tells the thrilling story of this unconventional war hero.