Joe Moran
Reader in Cultural History
Research Interests
My research lies somewhere between cultural studies and contemporary British cultural history, and focuses on the habits and spaces of everyday life as a way of making sense of cultural and political change in postwar Britain. One of my aims has been to reach as wide an audience as possible with my work, both across disciplines and outside academia. I have a longstanding teaching and research interest in encouraging innovative interdisciplinary dialogue, a subject developed in my book Interdisciplinarity (2002). I have also regularly written articles for the New Statesman, the Guardian and the Times Higher Education Supplement on the history and politics of daily life and other subjects, as well as being a monthly columnnist in BBC History Magazine. My most recent book, Queuing for Beginners, was Book of the Week on Radio 4 and I was shortlisted for the Times Higher Young Academic Author of the Year. I have also appeared regularly on various programmes on BBC Radio 3, 4 and 5.
Current Projects
I am currently completing a cultural history of British roads, mostly covering the post-war era. As in my other work on everyday life, the book uses the study of supposedly banal phenomena (motorway service stations, road signs, driving etiquette, speed limits) to uncover submerged historical changes and political questions that might be missing from more conventional histories.
Publications (Selected)
Books
Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime (London: Profile, 2007)
Reading the Everyday (London & New York: Routledge, 2005)
Interdisciplinarity (London & New York: Routledge, 2002)
Journal Articles
'Mass-Observation, Market Research and the Birth of the Focus Group, 1937-1997', Journal of British Studies, forthcoming, 2009
'Early Cultures of Gentrification in London, 1955-1980', Journal of Urban History 34.1 (November 2007), 101-21
'"Subtopias of Good Intentions": Everyday Landscapes in Postwar Britain', Cultural and Social History 4.3 (September 2007), 401-21
'Milk Bars, Starbucks and the Uses of Literacy', Cultural Studies, 20, 6 (November 2006): 552-73.
'Crossing the Road in Britain, 1931-1976', Historical Journal, 49, 2 (June 2006): 477-96.
'Queuing Up in Postwar Britain.' Twentieth-Century British History, 16, 3 (2005): 283-305.
'The Strange Birth of Middle England.' Political Quarterly, 76, 2 (April 2005): 232-40.
'Housing, Memory and Everyday Life in Contemporary Britain.' Cultural Studies, 18, 4 (July 2004): 607-27.
'November in Berlin: The End of the Everyday.' History Workshop Journal, 57 (Spring 2004): 214-33.
'History, Memory and the Everyday.' Rethinking History, 8, 1 (March 2004): 51-68.
'Benjamin and Boredom.' Critical Quarterly, 45, 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2003): 168-81.
'Tom Phillips and the Art of the Everyday.' Visual Culture in Britain, 3, 2 (2002): 17-32.
'Childhood, Class and Memory in the Seven Up Films.' Screen, 43, 4 (Winter 2002): 387-402.
'Childhood and Nostalgia in Contemporary Culture.' European Journal of Cultural Studies, 5, 2 (May 2002): 155-73.
'F.R. Leavis, English and the University.' English: The Journal of the English Association, 51, no. 199 (Spring 2002): 1-13.
'Aging and Identity in Dementia Narratives.' Cultural Values 5.2 (April 2001): 245-60.
'Childhood Sexuality and Education: The Case of Section 28.' Sexualities, 4, 1 (February 2001): 93-109.
Book Chapters
'Houses, Habit and Memory', in Gerry Smyth & Jo Croft (eds), Our House: The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 27-42
External Professional Activities
Member, Editorial Board of the International Journal of Cultural Studies
Postgraduate Teaching and Supervision
I have served on a number of PhD/MPhil supervisory teams and would be interested in supervising topics in the broad area of contemporary British cultural history.
Teaching: Undergraduate
I teach a range of modules across English and American Studies, on childhood, celebrity and contemporary fiction, as well as leading several of the Level One introductory modules.
