Dr Thomas Cryer
Departmental Lecturer in Twentieth-Century U.S. History
St Annel's College
I am a historian of the twentieth-century United States specialising in the intersecting histories of education, ideas, memory, and race. Taken as a whole, my research interrogates how historical narratives have been strategically appropriated, distorted, and mobilised to serve contemporary political agendas. Before arriving in Oxford, I completed a BA (Hons) in History and an MPhil in American History at Cambridge and a PhD in American History at University College London’s Institute of the Americas.
Research Interests
My research investigates how activist-intellectuals reshaped twentieth-century American universities, reconfiguring academic disciplines (including history) to demand social change, both within and beyond campus spaces. I'm particularly interested in how African American intellectuals negotiated both overt and covert forms of racialisation to reassert Black humanity and intellectual presence, often while working in institutions and disciplines that rarely recognised their capacities for thought and critique.
My AHRC-funded PhD project at UCL offered an intellectual biography of the seminal historian and activist John Hope Franklin (1915–2009). Perhaps the pre-eminent historian working in the late-twentieth-century United States, Franklin penned the best-selling Black history survey From Slavery to Freedom (1947) and engaged in tireless historical activism, supporting the NAACP on the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board (1954) and spearheading President Clinton’s One America Initiative. By tracing Franklin’s historical activism, this project sought to capture the profound duality of history’s role in American public life: both as a mechanism of silencing and dehumanisation and a vehicle through which African Americans have continually confronted their nation’s betrayals and historical deficiencies. This commitment to grappling with the public consequences of historical understandings has also inspired my research on the U.S. 1976 Bicentennial and a range of other sites of Cold War-era memory politics.
My research has been published in journals including Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of American Studies, where my first article won both the 2025 Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States Early Career Article Prize and the 2025 Arthur Miller Institute Article Prize.
