Dr. Adrian Bingham, B.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.)
Senior Lecturer in History [20th c. British social & cultural history; popular press; gender; sexuality]
Email: adrian.bingham@sheffield.ac.uk
Room: Jessop West: 2.03 | Telephone: (0114) 22 22582
Office Hours, Spring 2011-12: Tuesdays 11:00-12:00, Thursdays 10:00-11:00
| Biography |
Dr. Adrian Bingham joined the History Department at Sheffield in September 2006. He read history at Merton College, Oxford, and stayed there to study for his D.Phil. In 2002 he took up a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary British History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He remained at the CCBH to hold a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
| Membership of Professional Bodies |
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
| Research |
Current Research
Dr. Bingham is working on various projects involving historical approaches to journalism. With Professor Martin Conboy he is currently writing Tabloid Century, a thematic history of the twentieth century press to be published by Peter Lang; he is also working on a collaborative project analysing sex education material in print culture since the 17th century. In 2009 he founded, with Professor Conboy, the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History.
Dr. Bingham is in the early stages of a project exploring popular attitudes to politics in modern Britain, focusing in particular on understanding which political issues were perceived to connect with 'everyday life'. He is a co-director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Culture
Research Interests
Dr Bingham's main research interests are in the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Britain. He has worked extensively on the national popular press in the decades after 1918, examining the ways in which newspapers both reflected and shaped attitudes to gender, sexuality and class. His first monograph explored press debates about femininity and masculinity in the inter-war period. His second book, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918-1978, explored the role of the press as a source of information and imagery about sex, morality and personal relationships. He is also interested in the history of press regulation, and conducted a project examining the Calcutt Report of 1990 and the establishment of the Press Complaints Commission.
Beyond his work on the press, he is interested in popular attitudes to politics; cultural hierarchies, particularly the category of the 'middlebrow'; the circulation of knowledge about sex; and the social and cultural changes in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.
Research Supervision
Dr. Bingham is keen to supervise postgraduate students working on the social and cultural history of modern Britain, particularly those with interests in the media, popular culture, gender, sexuality and class.
Current PhD Students:
- Sarah Rawlins (2007- ) Gardening and Identity in Interwar Suburban Britain
- Laura King (2008- ) Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1918-60
- Patrick Glen (2009- ) Morality in the British Music Press, 1964-84
- Helen Smith (2009- ) Working-class homosexual men in northern England 1895-1957
- Lucy Brown (2010- ) 'Permissiveness with affection? Sex, Marriage and Relationships between Men and Women in Britain, 1950s-1970s'
- Tom Dowling (2010- ) "From Consuming Passions to Passionate Consuming: How the Ideals of the "Baby Boom" Generation were Assimilated and Subverted by the British Mass-Media 1964 - 1979."
| Administrative Roles and Responsibilities |
- Head of Undergraduate Affairs Committee (2010- )
- Allocations (2006-9)
| Selected Publications |
Books
- Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
- Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Articles and Chapters
- '"Putting literature out of reach"? Reading popular newspapers in mid-twentieth century Britain' in Katie Halsey and W.R. Owens, (eds.), The History of Reading, Vol.2: Evidence from the British Isles, c.1750-1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2011)
- 'Representing the people? The Daily Mirror, class, and political culture in inter-war Britain' in Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (eds.), Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-building in Britain between the Wars (London: Institute of Historical Research, forthcoming, 2011)
- 'Cultural hierarchies and the inter-war British press' in Erica Brown and Mary Grover (eds.), Middlebrow Matters: Cultural Hierarchy and Literary Value (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2011)
- 'The "K-Bomb": social surveys, the popular press and British sexual culture in the 1940s and 1950s', Journal of British Studies, 50/1 (2011), pp. 156-179.
- 'The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians', Twentieth Century British History, 21/2 (2010), pp. 225-31.
- (with Dr Martin Conboy) 'The Daily Mirror and the Creation of a Commercial Popular Language: A People's War, a People's Paper?', Journalism Studies, Vol. 10, No. 5, 2009, pp. 639-54.
- '"A stream of pollution through every part of the country?" Morality, regulation and the modern popular press' in Michael Bailey (ed.) Narrating Media History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008).
- '"Drinking in the last chance saloon": The British press and the crisis of self-regulation, 1989-1995', Media History, 13/1, April 2007, pp. 79-92.
- 'The British popular press and venereal disease during the Second World War', Historical Journal, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2005, pp. 1055-76.
- '"An era of domesticity"? Histories of women and gender in inter-war Britain', Cultural and Social History, Vol. 1, No.2, 2004, pp. 225-233.
- '"Stop the Flapper Vote Folly": Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail and the equalisation of the franchise 1927-28', Twentieth Century British History, Vol.13, No.1, 2002, pp.17-37.