Staff profiles
Dr John Baxendale
MA DPhil, Principal lecturer in social and cultural history
Phone 0114 225 3514
E-mail j.d.baxendale@shu.ac.uk
Research interests/current work
My research interest is in cultural distinctions and cultural identities in twentieth-century Britain. I have published work on early twentieth-century popular music, and the cultural history of royal tourism, among other related topics, and more recently I have focused on the 'middlebrow' in interwar Britain, and in particular the life and times of the writer and broadcaster J B Priestley. I have supervised/currently supervise PhD students researching into (among other topics) the early history of Rugby League, Sheffield peace movements of the 1930s, the politics of postwar reconstruction in South Yorkshire, and the BBC and the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Research collaborations
Advisory Board member of the HRC-funded Transatlantic Interdisciplinary Middlebrow Research network.
Research outputs since 2001
- ''I had seen a lot of Englands.' J B Priestley, Englishness and the People', History Workshop Journal 51, Spring 2001, pp 87-111
- 'Re-narrating the Thirties: English Journey Revisited', Working Papers on the Web, September 2004
- 'The Construction of the Past and the Origins of Royal Tourism in Ninetenth Century Britain', Cultural and Social History vol 4 no 2 (2007)
- Priestley's England J B Priestley and English Culture (Manchester University Press, 2007)
- 'We are members of one body.' Priestley's vision of England and the road to 1945.': essay in new edition of J B Priestley, English Journey (2009)
- 'Popular literature and the critique of mass culture': chapter in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1820-1940, ed. Patrick Parrinder and Andrej Gasiorek (forthcoming, 2010)
- 'Priestley and the Highbrows', in Mary Grover and Jayne Waterman (eds) The Middlebrow Text (forthcoming, 2011)
