Stephen J Brooke
Professor
Chair
Office: 2140 Vari Hall
Phone: 416-736-2100 Ext: 66966
Email: chairhis@yorku.ca, sjbrooke@yorku.ca
Primary website: http://www.yorku.ca/gradhist/facultypro/Brooke.html
Media Requests Welcome
Accepting New Graduate Students
I am an historian of twentieth-century Britain, with a speciality in politics, gender, sexuality and culture. I am the author of, most recently, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford, 2012), as well as articles on the photographer Roger Mayne, on Britain in the 1980s and on themes of love and romance in popular music and film in the twentieth century. In 2024, my new book, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City will be published by Oxford University Press. In 2020, I was awarded a SSHRC Insight grant to begin a project entitled 'Politics and Emotion in Britain, c.1970 to c. 1970'. The project will explore the centrality of emotion to questions such as racism, inequality and globalization, as well as to the experience of specific historical developments and events in the late twentieth century such as refugee crises, famine, and economic change over a tumultuous thirty-year period.
Degrees
D. Phil, University of OxfordMA, McGill University
BA, Dalhousie University
Professional Leadership
Co-editor, Twentieth-Century British History, 2004 to 2011 Co-editor, Left History, 2001 to 2008
Associate Editor, Dalhousie Review, 1997-9
Community Contributions
Member, Editorial Board, Twentieth-Century British History, 2000 to present
Member, Editorial Board, Journal of British Studies, 2006 to present
CHA Programme Committee, Toronto, 2006
Member, Editorial Board, Contemporary British History, 1994 to 1999
North American Conference on British Studies, Toronto conference, 2001, Local Arrangements Organizer
Manuscript reviewing for Oxford University Press
Member, History Adjudication Committee for Research Grants, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Committee of Canada, 1993-6
Member, Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Committee, 1990-4
Research Interests
- York University, Faculty of Arts Fellowship 2007-2008 - 2007-2008
- Residency, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study Centre, Bellagio, Italy 2005 - 2005
- Residency, Getty Summer Institute in Visual Culture, University of Rochester, New York 1998 - 1998
- Burgess Research Fellow, Dalhousie University 1997 - 1997
- James McGill Award, McGill University 1989 - 1989
- Province of Ontario Graduate Scholarship 1986 - 1986
- SSHRC Insight Grant - 2012
- SSHRC Insight Grant - 2020
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
‘Politics and Emotion in Britain, c. 1970 to c. 2000,’ is a five-year project that will examine the relationship of emotion to politics in late twentieth-century Britain, focusing on emotions such as hatred, fear, compassion, empathy and hope and their connections to race relations, social diversity, economic change, humanitarian efforts, and attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers.
Description:‘Politics and Emotion in Britain, c. 1970 to c. 2000,’ is a five-year project that will examine the relationship of emotion to politics in late twentieth-century Britain, focusing on emotions such as hatred, fear, compassion, empathy and hope and their connections to race relations, social diversity, economic change, humanitarian efforts, and attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers. The project will explore the centrality of emotion to questions such as racism, inequality and globalization, as well as to the experience of specific historical developments and events in the late twentieth century such as refugee crises, famine, and economic change over a tumultuous thirty-year period.
Start Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2020
End Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2025
Funders:
SSHRC Insight
London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City
Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 284 pp. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199562541.do?keyword=stephen+brooke&sortby=bestMatches
Reform and Reconstruction: Britain After the War 1945-51. [As editor] Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press/St. Martin's, 1995. 159 pages.
Labour's War: The Labour Party and the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 363 pages.
2014: ‘”A Certain Amount of Mush”: Love, Romance, Celluloid and Wax in the Mid-Twentieth Century’, in Alana Harris and Tim Jones, Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-70 (London: Macmillan, 2014), 15 pages.
‘The Sphere of Sexual Politics: The Abortion Law Reform Association, 1930s to 1960s’in Nick Crowson, Matthew Hilton and James McKay (editors), NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in Society and Politics Since 1945. London: Palgrave, 2009, 12 pages.
‘Class and Gender’ in Francesca Carnevali and Julie-Marie Strange (editors), 20th Century Britain. London: Longman, 2007, 42-57. 15 pages.
‘Janet Chance’, ‘Alice Jenkins’ and ‘Dorothy Thurtle’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online edition, 2005, unpaginated
“Abortion Law Reform, 1929-68” in Michael Kandiah and Gillian Staerck (editors), The Abortion Act 1967: ICBH Witness Seminar (London: Institute of Historical Research/Institute of Contemporary British History, 2002), 15-20; 22-5. 9 pages.
'Attlee', in Robert Eccleshall (editor), A Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers. London: Routledge, 1999, 305-15. 10 pages.
'Labour and the "Nation", 1945 to the Present', in Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor (editors), Party, State and Nation. Aldershot: Scolar, 1997, 153-75. 22 pages.
'The Conservative Party, Immigration and National Identity, 1948-68', in Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (editors), The Conservatives and British Society 1880-1990. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996, 147-70. 23 pages.
'The Labour Party and the Second World War', in W.S. Lucas, L. Johnman, and A. Gorst (editors), Contemporary British History 1931-61: Politics and the Limits of Policy (London: Pinter, 1991), 1-16. 15 pages.
Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in England 1918-50, English Historical Review 123 (February 2008), 253-5. 2 pages.
Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames and Matt Houlbrook, Queer London, Social History 32/1 (February 2007), 91-4. 4 pages
Paul Delany, Bill Brandt, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 400-3. 3 pages.
Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 889-91. 3 pages.
James Hinton, Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War and Sonya Rose, Which People’s War?, Journal of Modern History 77/3 (September 2005), 786-88. 3 pages.
Mike Leigh, Vera Drake, American Historical Review 110/1 (February 2005), 227-8. 2 pages.
‘Screening the Postwar World: British Film in the Fifties’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 562-9. 7 pages.
Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 871-3. 3 pages.
John Shepherd, George Lansbury, American Historical Review 108/5 (December 2003), 1528-9. 2 pages
‘Memory and Modernity’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003), 132-9. 7 pages.
‘New Labour’, Political Quarterly 72 (2001), 406-8. 3 pages.
'Identity in Modern British History', Journal of British Studies 39 (2000), 151-8. 7 pages.
'Sexuality, Film and Society', Twentieth Century British History 8 (1997), 272-7. 5 pages.
'Space, Emotions and the Everyday: The Emotional Ecology of 1980s London', Twentieth-Century British History, 28 (2017), 110-42 https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article-abstract/28/1/110/2587140/Space-Emotions-and-the-Everyday-The-Affective?redirectedFrom=fulltext
'Sexual Rights, Human Rights, the Material and the Post-Material in Britain 1970-2010', Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique 19/3 (2015), 114-29.
‘Revisiting Southam Street: Class, Generation, Gender and Race in the Photography of Roger Mayne’, Journal of British Studies, 53/2 (2014), 453-96. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9242018
‘Living in “New Times”: Historicizing 1980s Britain’, Historical Compass 12/1 (2014), 20-32. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12126/abstract
‘Slumming in Swinging London: Class, Gender and the Postwar City in Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963)’, Cultural and Social History 9 (2012), 429-449. 20 pages. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bloomsbury/cash/2012/00000009/00000003/art00007
‘Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes’, International Labour and Working Class History 69 (June 2006). 122-43. 21 pages.
‘War and the Nude: The Photography of Bill Brandt in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies 45/1 (January 2006), 118-38. 20 pages.
‘The Body and Socialism: Dora Russell in the 1920s’, Past and Present 189 (November 2005), 179-209. 30 pages.
‘"A New World For Women"? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s', American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 431-59. 28 pages.
‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History 34 (Summer 2001), 773-95. 22 pages.
'Evan Durbin: Reassessing a Labour "Revisionist"', Twentieth-Century British History, 7 (1996), 27-52. 25 pages.
'The Labour Party and the 1945 General Election', Contemporary British History, 9 (1995), 1-21. 20 pages.
'Atlantic Crossing? American Views of Capitalism and British Socialist Thought, 1932-1962', Twentieth-Century British History 2 (1991), 107-36. 29 pages.
'Problems of "Socialist Planning": Evan Durbin and the Labour Government of 1945', Historical Journal, 34 (1991), 687-702. 15 pages.
'Revisionists and Fundamentalists: The Labour Party and Economic Policy during the Second World War', Historical Journal 32 (1989), 157-75. 18 pages.
2009: ‘Children and Streets: Class, Childhood and the City in 1950s and 1960s Photography’, Brown University, North Eastern Conference on British Studies, October 2009
2009: ‘A Strange Country’: The Photography Books of Bill Brandt, 1936 to 1961’, National Gallery of Art, Washington, January 2009
2008: ‘Up the Junction with Nell Dunn: ‘Slumming’ and Sexuality in Sixties London’, Boston, North Eastern Conference on British Studies, November 2008
2008: ‘The Politics of Love Between the Wars’, Cincinnati, North American Conference on British Studies, October 2008
2007: ‘Landscape with Figures: national identity in the post-war photography of Bill Brandt’, Halifax, North Eastern Conference on British Studies, November 2007
2007: ‘The Sphere of Sexual Politics: The Abortion Law Reform Association, 1930s to 1960s’, Conference on NGOs, Birmingham, England, July 2007
2006: ‘Writing New Worlds: Love, Emotion, Sex and Politics in the Work of Naomi Mitchison and Dora Russell in the 1920s and 1930s, Amsterdam, European Social Science History Conference, March 2006
2006: ‘Writing New Worlds: Sex, Love, Emotion and Politics in Interwar British Socialist Feminism’, James A. Jackson Memorial Lecture, University of Manitoba, February 2006
2004: ‘Framing the Body in War and Peace: The Photography of George Rodger and Bill Brandt in the 1940s’, Philadelphia, North American Conference on British Studies, 2004
2004: ‘Bodies, Sexuality and the ‘Modernization’ of the British Working Classes, 1920s-1960s’, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University, 2004
2003: ‘The Boundaries of Desire: Gender, Sexuality and Working Class Identity in 1950s Britain’, Bloomington, Kinsey Institute Conference on Women’s Sexualities, 2003
2003: ‘The Body, Sex and Socialism: Dora Russell in the 1920s’, London, Anglo-American Conference, July 2003
2000: 'Labour and Abortion, 1936 to 1967', Institute of Contemporary British History, London, Gender and Twentieth Century Britain Conference, 10 July 2000
2000: ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Pasadena, North American Conference on British Studies, November 2000
1998: 'Gender, Sexuality and Working-Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s', New Accents in British History lecture series, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 26 September 1998.
1996: 'The Labour Party, Class and Gender in the 1950s', Centre for European Studies, Harvard University, 25 November 1996.
I am an historian of twentieth-century Britain, with a speciality in politics, gender, sexuality and culture. I am the author of, most recently, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford, 2012), as well as articles on the photographer Roger Mayne, on Britain in the 1980s and on themes of love and romance in popular music and film in the twentieth century. In 2024, my new book, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City will be published by Oxford University Press. In 2020, I was awarded a SSHRC Insight grant to begin a project entitled 'Politics and Emotion in Britain, c.1970 to c. 1970'. The project will explore the centrality of emotion to questions such as racism, inequality and globalization, as well as to the experience of specific historical developments and events in the late twentieth century such as refugee crises, famine, and economic change over a tumultuous thirty-year period.
Degrees
D. Phil, University of OxfordMA, McGill University
BA, Dalhousie University
Professional Leadership
Co-editor, Twentieth-Century British History, 2004 to 2011 Co-editor, Left History, 2001 to 2008
Associate Editor, Dalhousie Review, 1997-9
Community Contributions
Member, Editorial Board, Twentieth-Century British History, 2000 to present
Member, Editorial Board, Journal of British Studies, 2006 to present
CHA Programme Committee, Toronto, 2006
Member, Editorial Board, Contemporary British History, 1994 to 1999
North American Conference on British Studies, Toronto conference, 2001, Local Arrangements Organizer
Manuscript reviewing for Oxford University Press
Member, History Adjudication Committee for Research Grants, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Committee of Canada, 1993-6
Member, Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Committee, 1990-4
Research Interests
Awards
- York University, Faculty of Arts Fellowship 2007-2008 - 2007-2008
- Residency, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Study Centre, Bellagio, Italy 2005 - 2005
- Residency, Getty Summer Institute in Visual Culture, University of Rochester, New York 1998 - 1998
- Burgess Research Fellow, Dalhousie University 1997 - 1997
- James McGill Award, McGill University 1989 - 1989
- Province of Ontario Graduate Scholarship 1986 - 1986
- SSHRC Insight Grant - 2012
- SSHRC Insight Grant - 2020
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
‘Politics and Emotion in Britain, c. 1970 to c. 2000,’ is a five-year project that will examine the relationship of emotion to politics in late twentieth-century Britain, focusing on emotions such as hatred, fear, compassion, empathy and hope and their connections to race relations, social diversity, economic change, humanitarian efforts, and attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers.
Description:‘Politics and Emotion in Britain, c. 1970 to c. 2000,’ is a five-year project that will examine the relationship of emotion to politics in late twentieth-century Britain, focusing on emotions such as hatred, fear, compassion, empathy and hope and their connections to race relations, social diversity, economic change, humanitarian efforts, and attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers. The project will explore the centrality of emotion to questions such as racism, inequality and globalization, as well as to the experience of specific historical developments and events in the late twentieth century such as refugee crises, famine, and economic change over a tumultuous thirty-year period.
Project Type: FundedRole: Principal Investigator
Start Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2020
End Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2025
Funders:
SSHRC Insight
All Publications
2014: ‘”A Certain Amount of Mush”: Love, Romance, Celluloid and Wax in the Mid-Twentieth Century’, in Alana Harris and Tim Jones, Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-70 (London: Macmillan, 2014), 15 pages.
‘The Sphere of Sexual Politics: The Abortion Law Reform Association, 1930s to 1960s’in Nick Crowson, Matthew Hilton and James McKay (editors), NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in Society and Politics Since 1945. London: Palgrave, 2009, 12 pages.
‘Class and Gender’ in Francesca Carnevali and Julie-Marie Strange (editors), 20th Century Britain. London: Longman, 2007, 42-57. 15 pages.
‘Janet Chance’, ‘Alice Jenkins’ and ‘Dorothy Thurtle’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online edition, 2005, unpaginated
“Abortion Law Reform, 1929-68” in Michael Kandiah and Gillian Staerck (editors), The Abortion Act 1967: ICBH Witness Seminar (London: Institute of Historical Research/Institute of Contemporary British History, 2002), 15-20; 22-5. 9 pages.
'Attlee', in Robert Eccleshall (editor), A Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers. London: Routledge, 1999, 305-15. 10 pages.
'Labour and the "Nation", 1945 to the Present', in Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor (editors), Party, State and Nation. Aldershot: Scolar, 1997, 153-75. 22 pages.
'The Conservative Party, Immigration and National Identity, 1948-68', in Martin Francis and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (editors), The Conservatives and British Society 1880-1990. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996, 147-70. 23 pages.
'The Labour Party and the Second World War', in W.S. Lucas, L. Johnman, and A. Gorst (editors), Contemporary British History 1931-61: Politics and the Limits of Policy (London: Pinter, 1991), 1-16. 15 pages.
Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in England 1918-50, English Historical Review 123 (February 2008), 253-5. 2 pages.
Morris Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames and Matt Houlbrook, Queer London, Social History 32/1 (February 2007), 91-4. 4 pages
Paul Delany, Bill Brandt, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 400-3. 3 pages.
Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 889-91. 3 pages.
James Hinton, Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War and Sonya Rose, Which People’s War?, Journal of Modern History 77/3 (September 2005), 786-88. 3 pages.
Mike Leigh, Vera Drake, American Historical Review 110/1 (February 2005), 227-8. 2 pages.
‘Screening the Postwar World: British Film in the Fifties’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 562-9. 7 pages.
Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 871-3. 3 pages.
John Shepherd, George Lansbury, American Historical Review 108/5 (December 2003), 1528-9. 2 pages
‘Memory and Modernity’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003), 132-9. 7 pages.
‘New Labour’, Political Quarterly 72 (2001), 406-8. 3 pages.
'Identity in Modern British History', Journal of British Studies 39 (2000), 151-8. 7 pages.
'Sexuality, Film and Society', Twentieth Century British History 8 (1997), 272-7. 5 pages.
London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City
Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 284 pp. http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199562541.do?keyword=stephen+brooke&sortby=bestMatches
Reform and Reconstruction: Britain After the War 1945-51. [As editor] Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press/St. Martin's, 1995. 159 pages.
Labour's War: The Labour Party and the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. 363 pages.
'Space, Emotions and the Everyday: The Emotional Ecology of 1980s London', Twentieth-Century British History, 28 (2017), 110-42 https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article-abstract/28/1/110/2587140/Space-Emotions-and-the-Everyday-The-Affective?redirectedFrom=fulltext
'Sexual Rights, Human Rights, the Material and the Post-Material in Britain 1970-2010', Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique 19/3 (2015), 114-29.
‘Revisiting Southam Street: Class, Generation, Gender and Race in the Photography of Roger Mayne’, Journal of British Studies, 53/2 (2014), 453-96. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9242018
‘Living in “New Times”: Historicizing 1980s Britain’, Historical Compass 12/1 (2014), 20-32. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12126/abstract
‘Slumming in Swinging London: Class, Gender and the Postwar City in Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963)’, Cultural and Social History 9 (2012), 429-449. 20 pages. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bloomsbury/cash/2012/00000009/00000003/art00007
‘Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes’, International Labour and Working Class History 69 (June 2006). 122-43. 21 pages.
‘War and the Nude: The Photography of Bill Brandt in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies 45/1 (January 2006), 118-38. 20 pages.
‘The Body and Socialism: Dora Russell in the 1920s’, Past and Present 189 (November 2005), 179-209. 30 pages.
‘"A New World For Women"? Abortion Law Reform in Britain during the 1930s', American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 431-59. 28 pages.
‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Journal of Social History 34 (Summer 2001), 773-95. 22 pages.
'Evan Durbin: Reassessing a Labour "Revisionist"', Twentieth-Century British History, 7 (1996), 27-52. 25 pages.
'The Labour Party and the 1945 General Election', Contemporary British History, 9 (1995), 1-21. 20 pages.
'Atlantic Crossing? American Views of Capitalism and British Socialist Thought, 1932-1962', Twentieth-Century British History 2 (1991), 107-36. 29 pages.
'Problems of "Socialist Planning": Evan Durbin and the Labour Government of 1945', Historical Journal, 34 (1991), 687-702. 15 pages.
'Revisionists and Fundamentalists: The Labour Party and Economic Policy during the Second World War', Historical Journal 32 (1989), 157-75. 18 pages.
2009: ‘Children and Streets: Class, Childhood and the City in 1950s and 1960s Photography’, Brown University, North Eastern Conference on British Studies, October 2009
2009: ‘A Strange Country’: The Photography Books of Bill Brandt, 1936 to 1961’, National Gallery of Art, Washington, January 2009
2008: ‘Up the Junction with Nell Dunn: ‘Slumming’ and Sexuality in Sixties London’, Boston, North Eastern Conference on British Studies, November 2008
2008: ‘The Politics of Love Between the Wars’, Cincinnati, North American Conference on British Studies, October 2008
2007: ‘Landscape with Figures: national identity in the post-war photography of Bill Brandt’, Halifax, North Eastern Conference on British Studies, November 2007
2007: ‘The Sphere of Sexual Politics: The Abortion Law Reform Association, 1930s to 1960s’, Conference on NGOs, Birmingham, England, July 2007
2006: ‘Writing New Worlds: Love, Emotion, Sex and Politics in the Work of Naomi Mitchison and Dora Russell in the 1920s and 1930s, Amsterdam, European Social Science History Conference, March 2006
2006: ‘Writing New Worlds: Sex, Love, Emotion and Politics in Interwar British Socialist Feminism’, James A. Jackson Memorial Lecture, University of Manitoba, February 2006
2004: ‘Framing the Body in War and Peace: The Photography of George Rodger and Bill Brandt in the 1940s’, Philadelphia, North American Conference on British Studies, 2004
2004: ‘Bodies, Sexuality and the ‘Modernization’ of the British Working Classes, 1920s-1960s’, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers University, 2004
2003: ‘The Boundaries of Desire: Gender, Sexuality and Working Class Identity in 1950s Britain’, Bloomington, Kinsey Institute Conference on Women’s Sexualities, 2003
2003: ‘The Body, Sex and Socialism: Dora Russell in the 1920s’, London, Anglo-American Conference, July 2003
2000: 'Labour and Abortion, 1936 to 1967', Institute of Contemporary British History, London, Gender and Twentieth Century Britain Conference, 10 July 2000
2000: ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s’, Pasadena, North American Conference on British Studies, November 2000
1998: 'Gender, Sexuality and Working-Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s', New Accents in British History lecture series, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 26 September 1998.
1996: 'The Labour Party, Class and Gender in the 1950s', Centre for European Studies, Harvard University, 25 November 1996.
