Introducing the new Director of the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Britain

CMCB seeks to build a vibrant and connected space for intellectual community and exchange that creates new synergies and productive working relationships across UCL and beyond. It enables students and scholars of modern and contemporary Britain to engage with each other’s work across traditional disciplinary boundaries, bringing the arts and sciences, theorists and practitioners, into productive conversation.

Prof Mark Freeman is looking forward to taking up the role of director from September 2022. As director, Mark is particularly interested in broadening the appeal of CMCB across the university and extending its work in new directions. There is an opportunity to draw on leading research across UCL, and to bring researchers together in a revitalised post-pandemic research culture that reaches across the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, he envisions CMCB as a centre of research excellence that supports early-career scholars and doctoral students to present and publish their research.

Mark is Professor of Social History and Education – and a historian of modern Britain – based in the IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. His research focus is on the history of education, youth movements and informal education. He has published widely on modern British social, educational and business history, and was co-investigator on a large AHRC-funded grant, 'The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain 1905-2016'.