Dean Blackburn

Contact

• workRoom A2a Lenton Grove
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work+44 (0)115 7484105
• Dean.Blackburn@nottingham.ac.uk

Expertise Summary

My research engages with political ideologies and their pasts. I am particularly interested in the conceptual structures of ideologies and the way in which they respond to historical change.

Office Hours

I am on research leave in autumn 2021, but as School Director of Postgraduate Teaching, I am available for appointments. Please email me to arrange a meeting.

Postgraduate Supervision

I welcome enquiries from doctoral students who are interested in the following:

• The history of political ideas in Britain
• Party politics in modern Britain
• Theoretical approaches to the study of ideologies
• Class identities in modern Britain

Teaching Summary

Undergraduate Teaching

Alongside Professor Steven Fielding, I convene HIST2037, a module for students enrolled on the History and Politics joint honours programme. This module, which is designed to help students navigate the boundary between their two disciplines, explores different concepts and approaches that scholars employ to understand political change.

I also convene The Rise and Fall of Thatcherism, a special subject explores the political, social and cultural changes that took place in 1980s Britain.

As well as the above, I also teach on the following team-taught undergraduate modules:

• Learning History
• Contemporary World
• Road To Modernity, 1789 - 1945

Postgraduate Teaching

I convene Past Futures: Reimagining the Twentieth Century. Taking the concept of modernity as its starting-point, this course interrogates the social and political changes that re-shaped Britain in the twentieth-century.

I contribute to Exploring English Identities.

Research Summary

Past Research

I have recently published a monograph that explored the political publishing of Penguin Books. Using the publisher's book as a way of thinking about shifts in political thought, it claims that the three decades after the Second World War might be best understood as a 'meritocratic moment' in Britain's political development.

Research Supervision

David Civil, 'Meritocratic Discourse in Post-war Britain' (Awarded in 2020)

Matthew Kidd, 'Popular Politics in Urban England, 1867-1918' (Awarded in 2016)

Joseph Himsworth, 'The Political Thought of Keith Joseph'

William Noble, 'Our poor, tired little island just can't cope': race, immigration and 'decline' in the post-war English Midlands, c.1958-1981'

Alex Riggs, 'Democratic Party Presidential Primary Campaigns and the Left, 1980-1988'.

Rebecca Hickman, 'Gender-nonconformity and the quest for 'recognition' in the United Kingdom, from the 1970s to the present day'.

Selected Publications

• BLACKBURN, DEAN, 2021. In The Shadows: Conservative Epistemology and Ideological Value Political Studies Review.
• BLACKBURN, DEAN, 2020. Penguin Books and Political Change: Britain's Meritocratic Moment, 1937-1988 Manchester University Press. (In Press.)
• BLACKBURN, D., 2017. Reassessing Britain's 'Post-war Consensus': The Politics of Reason, 1945-79 British Politics.
• BLACKBURN, D., 2017. Still the Stranger at the Feast? Ideology and the Study of Twentieth-Century British Politics Journal of Political Ideologies. 22(2), 116-130

• View all publications

Future Research

Time and Chance: The Politics of Temporality in Modern Britain, 1945-2008

I am working on a book project about the politics of time. Drawing upon examples from the post-war period, the book will trace changes in the way that policy makers and intellectuals have thought about temporal concepts.

• BLACKBURN, DEAN, 2021. In The Shadows: Conservative Epistemology and Ideological Value Political Studies Review.
• BLACKBURN, D., 2021. Response to 'What Conservatives Value' Political Studies Review.
• BLACKBURN, DEAN, 2020. Penguin Books and Political Change: Britain's Meritocratic Moment, 1937-1988 Manchester University Press. (In Press.)
• BLACKBURN, DEAN, 2018. Review of Willibald Steinmetz / Michael Freeden / Javier Fernández-Sebastián (eds.): Conceptual History in the European Space (2017)
• BLACKBURN, D., 2017. Reassessing Britain's 'Post-war Consensus': The Politics of Reason, 1945-79 British Politics.
• BLACKBURN, D., 2017. Still the Stranger at the Feast? Ideology and the Study of Twentieth-Century British Politics Journal of Political Ideologies. 22(2), 116-130
• BLACKBURN, D., 2017. Review of Geoff Horn . Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
• BLACKBURN, D., 2017. The Penguin Popular Front The Penguin Collector. 88,
• BLACKBURN, D, 2016. If the Conservatives are now committed to a philosophy of inequality, they are no longer conservatives Available at: <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/inequality-in-conservative-ideology/>
• BLACKBURN, D., 2015. ‘For We Shall Prejudice Nothing’: Middle Way Conservatism and the Defence of Inequality, 1945–1979 Political Studies. 64(1), 156-172
• BLACKBURN, D., 2013. Penguin Books and the 'marketplace for ideas'. In: BLACK, L., PEMBERTON, H. and THANE, P., eds., Reassessing 1970s Britain Manchester University Press. 224-251
• BLACKBURN, DEAN, 2012. Young, Edward Preston (1913–2003) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press. Available at: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/89470?docPos=3>
• BLACKBURN, D., 2011. Facing the Future? David Owen and Social Democracy in the 1980s and Beyond Parliamentary Affairs. 64(4), 612-633