Neale Masterclass 2026: Professor Peter Mandler

UCL History warmly invites our postgraduate student community to a masterclass offered by our speaker for the 2026 Neale Lecture, Professor Peter Mandler to discuss how historians draw on, and visualise, quantitative data in their historical research. 

Professor Mandler will draw from his own work on the history of education to discuss and visualise how quantitative data is rendered, often misleadingly, for the purposes of historical research. 

This masterclass is a unique opportunity for postgraduate students working across a wide range of regions and time periods to come together to discuss the opportunities and challenges of working with quantitative data in historical research. 

Please note that no ‘quantitative’ skills are required or expected. Instead, the masterclass will illustrate how some very simple quantitative measures can in fact be rendered more accessible by graphical and visual representations. 

Before the masterclass, we will circulate copies of a compilation of graphics from Professor Mandler’s own research: Peter Mandler. The Crisis of the Meritocracy : Britain’s Transition to Mass Education Since the Second World War. First Edition. OUP Oxford, 2020. Appendix, pp 217-227

Workshop: G09, 26 Gordon Square (11:00-12:30)

Lunch: G10, 26 Gordon Square (12:30-13:30)

Open to UCL postgraduate students only.

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.