Neale Lecture 2026: Professor Peter Mandler
This year's UCL History Neale Lecture will feature Professor Peter Mandler (University of Cambridge) on ‘Eight Reasons to Study History: The Rise (and Fall?) of History as an Undergraduate Degree’.
Neale Lecture 2026: Professor Peter Mandler
30 Apr 2026, 18:00 – 20:30
This lecture, held as part of the UCL History Bicentenary Programme, charts the emergence and growth of History as an undergraduate degree subject over the last 200 years, covering the whole of the UK but naturally taking UCL as a centrepiece. The focus will be on the students and their choices, not, as is customary in disciplinary histories, the academics who taught them or even the future academics among them. Who wanted to study history and why? And after 20th-century peaks, are we fated to a long decline?
Lecture: Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre (18:00-19:00)
Reception: IAS Common Ground (19:00-20:30)
The lecture will be recorded and made available on our YouTube channel.
Image: Students protesting against education cuts 1970s, IOE Archive.
Image: UCL students with their mascot Phineas in the 1930s, UCL Special Collections.
Professor Peter Mandler
Fellow Gonville and Caius College,
University of Cambridge
Peter Mandler FBA is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He has taught both in the US and the UK, and from 2001 to 2025 was based at the University of Cambridge. He has also served as President of the Royal Historical Society and of the Historical Association. He is co-editor, with Simon Gunn and Otto Saumarez Smith, of The Modern British City, 1945-2000 (Lund Humphries, 2025). He is currently working on a history of universal secondary education in the UK since 1945 (with Laura Carter and Chris Jeppesen) as well as a book based on his 2026 Ford Lectures at Oxford, which examines how the language of social science entered everyday life across the 20th century.