Andrew Seaton

Andrew Seaton is a Hallsworth Research Fellow. His work centres on politics, social history, medicine, and the environment in modern Britain and the world. 

Before joining Manchester he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University College London and, before that, the Plumer Junior Research Fellow in History at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He gained a doctorate in History from New York University in 2021. 

Andrew's first book, Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best-Loved Institution (Yale University Press 2023) is an expansive history of a world-famous universal health care system. Through the perspectives of patients, medical practitioners, policymakers, trade unions, overseas health experts, and assorted cultural figures, the book explains how the service became an integral part of British identity and why it survived the rise of neoliberalism. In doing so, the book calls attention to the endurance of social democracy in a nation where this form of politics is commonly depicted as vanquished by the late-twentieth century. Our NHS was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and won the American Historical Association's Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in British history. Oxford University Press awarded an early article from this research the Duncan Tanner Prize. 

As part of his Hallsworth Fellowship, Andrew is writing a new book in environmental history titled The Ends of Coal. This work is a wide-ranging history of Britain's relationship to coal since 1800, exploring its legacies on the landscape, human health and population, political economy and social change, environmentalism, as well as empire and decolonisation. 

Andrew has either written for or had his research discussed in The Financial Times, Guardian, Le Monde, London Review of Books Blog, New York Review of Books, New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, among others. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4's 'Start the Week', BBC Radio 5 Live, the HistoryExtra podcast, and The Majority Report. He welcomes contact from media organisations, journalists, and relevant external organisations. 

Andrew's work has attracted funding and grants from the American Philosophical Society, History & Political Economy Project, Leverhulme Trust, New York Academy of Medicine, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. 

Andrew is a first-generation university student from a low income family who experienced homelessness as a teenager, which he wrote about for the New Statesman. Accordingly, he has long volunteered with 'access' programming to encourage students from similar backgrounds to enter higher education.

You can read more about his work at andrew-seaton.com.