The University of Sheffield
Department of History

Dr Clare Griffiths

Senior Lecturer in History [19th & 20th c. British, political and cultural history; agriculture and rural history; history of the British Left]

[On research leave, semester 1 2011-12]

Clare-Griffiths.jpg

Email: clare.griffiths@sheffield.ac.uk
Room: Jessop West: 2.14 | Telephone: (0114) 22 22573
Office Hours, Spring 2011-12: Wednesdays 12:00-13:00, Thursdays 9:00-10:00

 

Biography

Clare Griffiths joined the Department in 1999. She read Modern History at Merton College, Oxford, staying on there to study for her DPhil. Before moving to Sheffield, she taught at the University of Reading, as Lecturer in the Department of History, and in Oxford, as Thompson Junior Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford (1995-9).

Her work has been supported by grants from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and she has held visiting fellowships at St John's College, Oxford, and at the Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading. She has written for a number of magazines and newspapers, including History Today, BBC History Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman.

 

Membership of Professional Bodies

 

Research

Current Research
Clare Griffiths is currently completing a book about the Fabian socialists G.D.H. and Margaret Cole: Socialism and the English middle class. The public and private worlds of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole. This will provide the first dual biographical study of this influential couple, as well as exploring the social and cultural world in which they moved. The project has received funding from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

In 2008, she was awarded the Sir John Higgs fellowship for a new research project, based at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading. 'Heroes of the Reconstruction? Images of farmers and farming in war and peace' draws on visual material in the Museum's collections to explore the role and representation of the farming community in Britain during the Second World War and in the immediate post-war period. One of the outcomes of this project is an exhibition at the museum, scheduled to open in September 2010.

Research Interests
Clare's research is concerned with the political and cultural history of Britain in the twentieth century, and she has particular interests in the history of the Labour Party and in rural history in the modern period. These two themes came together in her study of the British Left and rural Britain, published in the Oxford Historical Monographs series, as Labour and the Countryside: the politics of rural Britain 1918-1939 (2007). She has written on various aspects of the political culture of the British left, including Labour party organization and attitudes towards the movement's past. The history of agriculture and the countryside remains an active area in her research and she is a member of the committee for the Interwar Rural History Research Group. She was co-organiser of a recent conference at the Museum of English Rural Life on the place of the countryside in modern British culture: 'Representing Rurality: culture and the countryside in the twentieth century'.

Other work in progress includes research on art and landscape in Britain during the Second World War; the rural vote in the twentieth century; model villages; and detective fiction.

Research Supervision and Teaching
Clare Griffiths teaches modules on modern British history and has also taught courses on historiography, including developing the second-year module 'Historians and History'. She is the co-ordinator for the level 1 modern British history survey course HST119 – 'The Transformation of Britain' and is currently teaching a level 2 document option 'Remembering the Fallen: British commemorations of the First World War' and the level 2 option 'Disunited Kingdom: cultures and communities in 20th century Britain'. Her teaching at postgraduate level includes a 15-credit module on 'Discovering Rural England: 1870-1920' and a new module on 'The Historical Novel'.

She is happy to discuss research projects in the general area of British history c.1880s-c.1950s and, in particular, on the history of the Labour party; political organisation and policy; rural, agricultural and landscape history; twentieth-century literature and publishing; and visual culture.

PhDs completed under her supervision include: a study of the Independent Labour politician Fenner Brockway; an oral history of the East Yorkshire Regiment during the Second World War; and representations of Greece and 'Greekness' in the Second World War.

Current PhD Students
Kate Ibbeson, working on women's involvement in civil defence in Britain during the Second World War.
Duncan Marks, working on memories of the Victorian period and the idea of the generation in Britain, 1918-1939
Vivian Yang, working on female Emancipation in a Colonial Context: Chinese Women in Singapore (1900-1942)

 

Administrative Roles and Responsibilities

Director of Postgraduate Research in the Department.

 

Selected Publications

Books

Labour and the Countryside: the politics of rural Britain, 1918-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ISBN 978-0199287437


Articles and Essays