Jörg Arnold
Assistant Professor in Contemporary History, Faculty of Arts
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Biography
I was educated at the Universities of Göttingen, Edinburgh, Southampton and Heidelberg, where I studied for a joint honours degree in English Literature and History. I received my PhD in Modern European History from the University of Southampton in 2007, from where I went on to teach at the Universities of Edinburgh and Freiburg im Breisgau. I joined the department of History at Nottingham in October 2013.
Expertise Summary
I have three main research interests: The first is concerned with memory and war in twentieth-century Europe; the second with the political and cultural fallout of de-industrialization in the UK and beyond; and the third with the history of historical scholarship.
I would be happy to supervise any student interested in the ways that societies, communities and individuals have sought to come to terms with the memory of cataclysmic events, be they wars, revolutions or mass crimes.
I also welcome students interested in the political, social and cultural fallout of 'de-industrialization' in late twentieth-century Britain and Europe.
Finally, I welcome proposals in the history of historical thought and the history of ideas.
Teaching Summary
Do historical epochs have a colour? The father of one of our prospective students certainly thought so. When asked what came to mind when he thought of the 1970s, he said 'the colour of rust'. The… read more
Research Summary
My first book, based on my PhD and published with CUP in 2011, is a comparative study of the cultural aftermaths of Allied bombing in the Second World War. It explores the ways in which urban… read more
Do historical epochs have a colour? The father of one of our prospective students certainly thought so. When asked what came to mind when he thought of the 1970s, he said 'the colour of rust'. The image of 'rust' captures very well the 'dark view' of the period, a tale of the post-war dreams of economic prosperity and of permissive liberalisation turned sour. And indeed, by the 1970s ghosts returned that many thought had been laid to rest for good: economic stagnation and mass unemployment; social polarisation and dislocation; the rise of political extremism and an authoritarian Right. In my teaching, we shall engage with this dominant conceptualisation of the 1970s and 1980s as 'crisis decades', but we shall also test the plausibility of a 'bright' view - a tale of crisis overcome through a reassertion of the state, the liberation of the market, and of conspicuous consumption.
These themes are explored in two modules, the second-year option HIST 2032: "De-industrialisation: A Social and Cultural History, c. 1970-1990" (20 credits) and the third-year Special Subject, HIST 3055: "After the Golden Age: The West, c. 1970 to 2000" (40 credits).
The second-year module on de-industrialization compares the development of old industrial regions in the north of England, the German Ruhr basin and the Industrial Midwest in the United States. It explores, from a social and cultural perspective, the momentous economic changes that swept through traditional industrial regions across the West in the 1970s and 1980s and which turned proud heartlands into rustbelts in less than one generation.
The third-year Special Subject takes a more comprehensive view of the West in the period of c. 1970 to 2000, encompassing, among other things, the rise of the New Right, the 'silent revolution' in values, the coming of a post-industrial society, changing conceptions of childhood, terrorism, the sexual revolution, and the 'new world order' of the 1990s.
Together wir my colleague Dean Blackburn, I convene the HIST 4058 MA module "Past Futures", a team-taught module that looks a the global twentieth century through the lens of temporality.
I also contribute to the first-year module Learning History as seminar tutor and lecturer as well as to first-year module, "The Contemporary World" and the MA module "Research methods in History".
Current Research
My first book, based on my PhD and published with CUP in 2011, is a comparative study of the cultural aftermaths of Allied bombing in the Second World War. It explores the ways in which urban communities sought to come to terms with the memory of devastating air raids in the half century or so after the bombs had stopped falling. The book was reprinted as a paperback edition in 2016. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/allied-air-war-and-urban-memory/449BA9342ACF3EAE2A8575900698EFF5
My second area of research asks about the political, social and cultural fallout of de-industrialization. My research focuses on the British coal miner as an emblematic figure in the British political and cultural imagination. It charts the cyclical process by which the miner came to be re-configured during the age of de-industrialization, from classic loser of History to awe-inspiring agent and back again. The research has resulted in numerous peer-reviewed articles, a special issue with Contemporary British History and my second monograph study, published by OUP in 2023:
Future Research
Most recently, I have moved into the field of historical biography and the history of knowledge, with a project called, "Timothy Mason, Detlev Peukert, and the Practice of Doing Radical History in the Age of Extremes".
Timothy Mason (1940-1990) and Detlev Peukert (1950-1990) rank among the most influential historians of the twentieth century. More than thirty years after their premature deaths, their interventions in the fields of labour history, women's history, history 'from below' and 'history and theory' remain benchmark moments in the development of the profession. Their rich body of empirical work on the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany continues to inspire today's historians.
The project will offer the first monograph study of the two historians. Combining oral history with archival work, the project aims to produce a social history of knowledge through a biographical lens. The study embeds the lives of Mason and Peukert within the context of academic practice, political activism and transnational collaboration.