Dr Jack Saunders

Jack Saunders is a Lecturer (Teaching) in Modern British History. He is a labour historian, with a particular focus on power and agency in the post-war British workplace. He has worked on shopfloor trade union activism in the notoriously fractious British motor industry and on women's organising in the National Health Service. His research also looks at de-industrialisation and the rise of emotional labour, as well as popular political culture in the second half of the 20th Century. 

Jack did his PhD at UCL from 2011 to 2015, before working on the Wellcome Trust funded Cultural History of the NHS project at the University of Warwick from 2016 to 2019. From 2019 he taught the history of citizenship and migration in 20th Century Britain at King's College London. 

Major Publications

• ‘The making of “NHS staff” as a worker identity, 1948-85’ in Jenny Crane and Jane Hand (eds.), Posters, Protests and Prescriptions: Cultural Histories of the National Health Service (Manchester University Press, 2022)
• ‘The “Usable Pasts” of de-industrialisation: Three new histories of twentieth-century labour’, Oral History Journal, 50/2 (2022), 118-124
• Assembling Cultures: Workplace Activism, Labour Militancy and Cultural Change in Britain's Car Factories, 1945-82 (Manchester University Press, 2019)
• ‘Emotions, social practices and the changing composition of class, race and gender in the National Health Service, 1970-79’, History Workshop Journal, 88 (Autumn 2019), 204-228
• 'The merits of Brother Worth: The International Socialists and life in a Coventry car factory, 1968-75’ in Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), Waiting for Revolution: The British Far Left from 1956, vol II (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2017)
• ‘The untraditional worker: Class re-formation in Britain, 1945-65’ in Twentieth Century British History, 26/2 (June 2015), 225-248

Teaching

• British History, 1850-1997 (1st and 2nd Year Survey Module)
• Crisis and Opportunity: Britain in the 1970s (2nd Year Research Seminar)
• Social Change, New Social Movements, and Politics in Britain After 1945 (Thematic - 2nd Year)