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Andrew Seaton is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History. He is a historian of modern Britain with interests in political history, social history, and the history of medicine and the environment.
Before joining UCL in October 2023, Andrew was the Plumer Junior Research Fellow in History at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He trained in both the UK and the USA, gaining a doctorate in History from New York University (NYU) in 2021.
Andrew's first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press 2023) is an expansive history of a world-famous universal health care system. Through the perspectives of patients, medical practitioners, trade unions, overseas health experts, and assorted cultural figures, the book explains how the service became an integral part of British identity and why it survived the rise of neoliberalism. In doing so, the book calls attention to the endurance of social democracy in a nation where this form of politics is commonly depicted as vanquished by the late-twentieth century. Our NHS was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and won the American Historical Association's Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in British history.
As part of his Leverhulme Fellowship, Andrew is writing a new book in environmental history, provisionally titled The Ends of Coal. This work is a wide-ranging history of Britain's relationship to coal since 1800, exploring its legacies on the landscape, human health and population, political economy and social change, environmentalism, as well as empire and decolonisation.
Selected publications
Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press, 2023).
'The Gospel of Wealth and the National Health: The Rockefeller Foundation and Social Medicine in Britain's NHS, 1945-60', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94, no. 1 (2020): 224-241
'Environmental History and New Directions in Modern British Historiography', Twentieth Century British History 30, no. 3 (2019): 447-456.
'Against the Sacred Cow': NHS Opposition and the Fellowship for Freedom in Medicine', Twentieth Century British History 26, no. 2 (2015): 424-449.
Media appearances/public engagement
Andrew has appeared on BBC Radio 4's 'Start the Week', BBC Radio 5 Live, the HistoryExtra podcast, and The Majority Report. He has either written for or had his research discussed in The Financial Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, the London Review of Books Blog, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, among others.
As a first-generation university student from a lower-income family, Andrew volunteers with programming to encourage students from similar backgrounds to enter higher education.
You can read more about his work at andrew-seaton.com.
Please note that as a postdoctoral fellow, Andrew is currently unable to supervise prospective doctoral students.
