Awards and prizes

Pilkington Prize for Teaching (2009)

Honorary Secretary (1998-2002), Vice President (2009-12), President (2012-16), Royal Historical Society

President, Historical Association (2020-23)

Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015) - interview here

Fellow of the British Academy (2015)

Research interests

British history since c. 1750, especially cultural, social and intellectual; the history of the humanities and social sciences in Britain and the U.S. since the late 19th century. Books include The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (1997); History and National Life (2002); The English National Character (2006); Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (2013); The Crisis of the Meritocracy:  Britain's Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (2020).  Currently writing about the experience of universal secondary education in postwar Britain (see sesc.hist.cam.ac.uk) and the language of social science in everyday life in the mid-20th century.

Teaching interests

Modern British history