Dr Ben Mechen

Ben Mechen is a social and cultural historian of modern Britain. Much of his work to date has focused on histories of gender, sex and sexuality in late twentieth century Britain, and especially the meanings given to gendered and sexual health, happiness and freedom across pop culture, politics, commerce and the human sciences. 

This research, which began during his PhD at UCL, has resulted in a series of articles, book chapters, edited collections and journal special issues, as well as a first monograph to be published by University of California Press. His 2024 co-edited collection Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain: A History for the Present is one of Manchester University Press’s ten most downloaded Open Access titles.

Overall, his research in this area reopens a critique of the period’s apparent sexual liberalism by considering what and who this idea left out, as well as the new expectations and norms ‘permissiveness’ paradoxically put in place.

Ben’s current work in gender history and the history of sexuality turns towards mid-to-late twentieth century psychoanalysis and its influence beyond the clinic, in domains as diverse as business psychology, political commentary, feminist and LGBT+ activism, and social work.

More recently, Ben has begun two projects in modern environmental history. 

The first, developed with Simeon Koole (Bristol), is an embodied and ecological history of the European timber trade of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project draws upon strands in posthuman and “new materialist” thought to consider the interconnected vulnerabilities of London’s dockside labourers, the Thames floodplain, and Sweden’s forests in the ages of capital and empire. The resulting article will be published by Past & Present.

The second, to be the basis of a second monograph, is called Salvage Ecologies in Late 20th Century Britain. It offers a history of ecological thought and praxis in Britain that reaches beyond a history of organised environmentalism, ecological “pioneers,” environmental policy or “Earth System” science – the strands of analysis dominant in the historiography. 

Instead, the project draws together important but largely unhistoricised experiments in everyday ecology between the 1970s and 1990s, from re-naturing sites of dereliction to ‘reclaiming the streets’ from cars to making art out of waste. Many were rooted in queer, feminist, Black or anarchist thinking about the environment. And joining them together, the project argues, was an attempt to salvage from the ruins of late modernity new ways of living on, and with, the Earth, in a departure from seeking mastery over it. 

Ben rejoined UCL History in 2023 after holding a variety of research and teaching roles at the University of Bristol, King’s College London, Royal Holloway and the University of Birmingham. Before this, he completed his PhD, MA and BA at UCL History.

Selected publications

• ‘Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860-1928’, Past & Present, in press. Authored with Simeon Koole
• ‘Between the Clinic and the Conference: ‘Wild’ and Institutional Psychoanalysis in the Early UK Transgender Movement, 1969-79’. Article invited for a special issue of Psychoanalysis and History
• Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain: A History for the Present (Manchester University Press, 2024), edited with Matt Houlbrook and Katie Jones
• ‘Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex and the Tensions of Liberal Sexpertise’, in ‘Everyday Health’, Embodiment, and Selfhood since 1950, edited by Tracey Loughran, Hannah Froom, Kate Mahoney and Daisy Payling (forthcoming Manchester University Press, 2024)
• ‘“Instamatic Living Rooms of Sin”: Pornography, Participation and the Erotics of Ordinariness in the 1970s’, Contemporary British History, 36:2 (2022), 174-206
• ‘History from the Top Shelf: The Cultural Politics of Sex in Post-War Britain’, Contemporary British History, 36:2 (2022), 165-173, with Matt Worley and Laura Cofield
• ‘“Closer Together”: Durex Condoms and Contraceptive Consumerism in 1970s Britain’, in Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Jennifer Evans and Ciara Meehan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
   

Teaching

• ​HIST0089 National Identity in Britain since 1940 (Second Year Research Seminar)
• HIST0071 Gender & Sexuality in Transnational Perspective, 1850-1980 (Advanced Seminar)
• HIST0086 Challenging the Gender Binary in Modern Britain (MA Option)
• HIST0376 Gender & Sexuality in Modern Britain, 1850-Present, Part B: Sexuality and Sexual Behaviour (MA Option)
• HIST0867 Critical Public History (MA Core Module)
• HIST0868/HIST0869 Examining Public History/Creating Public History (MA Core Modules)

Further information about Ben is available on his UCL Profile.

Contact information

Email: b.mechen@ucl.ac.uk

Office: 412, 25 Gordon Square

Student support & feedback hours: Tuesday 4-5pm, by appointment

Student support & feedback hours are an opportunity for students to chat with their module tutors about their ideas, any support they might need with the module, and to go through feedback from their assessments.