Faculty Member, Communication and Creative Arts
About
My current research project, Working for Hollywood, looks at the experience of work and shifting social relations in the U.S. movie industry from the early twentieth century to the present. I teach a course by the same name to third-year students in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences – the only one of its kind in British higher education -- and the interweaving of my research and teaching is a major stimulus to both. I also have an interest in film in its social and political context and the place of history films in understanding the past.
I would be very interested in communicating with other researchers in the field.
I am a historian of the modern United States. The political economy of industrial capitalism, particularly the social organisation of work, has always fascinated me. I wrote my PhD on the labour aristocracy of skilled workers in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Subsequently, I turned to documenting the lives of a small group of highly influential Philadelphia workshop owners who made the city the single largest centre of machine building in the United States during the nineteenth century. My interest in the contested nature of power in the workplace continues with my current research on Los Angeles and the motion picture industry
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