Professor Matt Cook

Professor Matt Cook
Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality
Mansfield College
matthew.cook@mansfield.ox.ac.uk

I am a social and cultural historian specialising in LGBT and queer history. My books include London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003), A Gay History of Britain (lead author; 2007), Queer Domesticities (2014), Queer Beyond London (with Alison Oram; 2022) and Writing Queer History (forthcoming 2024). I have also co-edited five further books and  contributed to a range of leading history journals. I have been an editor of History Workshop Journal since 2002.

 

I appear regularly on radio, occasionally on TV, and have acted as a consultant on a number of films, documentaries and stage shows. I have also advised on a wide range of LGBTQ+ community history, archive, museum and heritage projects, including for the nightclub Duckie, The National Trust, the Museum of London and the Pitt Rivers Museum. I am currently visiting researcher and project adviser for the Norwegian Queerdom initiative based at the University of Bergen.

 

I joined Oxford’s Faculty of History and Mansfield College as the inaugural Jonathan Cooper Professor of the History of Sexuality in October 2023. Prior to that I spent 18 years at Birkbeck, University of London, latterly as Professor of Modern History and Head of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology.  Whilst at Birkbeck I directed the Raphael Samuel History Centre for eight years and convened the Gender and Sexuality Studies MA/MSc. I was educated at state secondary school in Staffordshire, at Sheffield University (BA English Literature) and at Queen Mary, University of London (MA 'Literature Culture and Modernity' and PhD in History). My first academic job was as Lecturer in Modern History at Keele University (2002-2005).

 

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in queer, urban, public, oral, community and local history. I am also fascinated by cross-period, transnational, comparative and cross-disciplinary work.

I have worked especially on: urban queer cultures (especially London): the AIDS crisis: queer domesticity: queer arts and culture: and LGBTQ+ public history and heritage.

Current DPhil Students outside of Oxford

At Birkbeck:

  • James Handy, ‘LGBTQ teachers and teaching in London and Birmingham in the late twentieth century’ (co-supervisor)
  • Idroma Montgommery, ‘Unruly Bodies/Disorderly Cities: Black female queerness in Interwar Cardiff and London’
  • Leila Sellars, ‘The Beaumont Society: Trans Cultures, Identities and Everyday Subjectivities, 1966-2004’
  • Jo Brydon, ‘Percy Grainger and Trans Identity in Edwardian England’
  • Yvette Williams Eliot, ‘My Circle Widened’: Caroline Ganley and Networks of Public Life in London, 1900-1940’
  • Matthew Littleford, ‘Stonewall, OutRage! and the battle civic space’

At Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

  • Joana Matias, ‘Reparative archive: independent print cultures and queer Portuguese historiography’ (1974-2000)

Teaching

I am interested in supervising topics ranging across modern LGBT and queer history, urban history, and counter culture.

I currently teach:

Undergraduate Papers: 

  • Bodies of Feeling
  • Masculinities and its Discontents

Graduate Papers: 

  • Approaches to Queer and Trans Histories
  • Youth culture, generational revolt and sexual politics in Great Britain
  • Europe and the USA since 1945