Andrew Fearnley

(1) Harlem in the Postwar European Imagination

In the twentieth century, and through to the twenty-first, Harlem has occupied a commanding place in US cultural and intellectual life, celebrated as a 'race capital', the 'capital of black America'. Yet the neighbourhood has also long been presumed to have enjoyed global renown. My current research examines, for the first time, what European, and especially French and West German writers, artists, and journalists made of 'Harlem' in the second half of the twentieth century. 

(2) Ashley Montagu, Freud, and the Mental Sciences around Mid-Century

Ashley Montagu was one of the most prolific and innovative anthropologists in the years around mid-century. Trained at UCL in the 1920s, and Columbia in the 1930s, Montagu inherited a rich intellectual tool-kit, including a grasp of the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis. By fashioning a partial intellectual biography of Montagu, this project will attempt to consider the influence that psychoanalytic precepts had on Anglo-American anthropology in the years between 1920 and 1970. This is a vital tributary of investigation for the history of anthropology, for understanding the place of psychoanalysis in public life, and for those more narrowly interested in the work of Montagu. When complete the project will make two significant contributions: firstly it will raise questions about the history of methodological innovation within the human sciences (what exactly did anthropology think it could extract from Freud?); and secondly it will provide one of the fullest intellectual biographies of Montagu to date. A piece based on this research was recently published on the History of Anthropology Review blog, Clio's Fancy. 

(3) Learning to do 'the Wave' in the Late Twentieth Century US

In early-1980s, a new ritual took root among US sports spectators, involving ‘a general waving of arms by standing customers, spreading section to section,’ and it soon became known as ‘the Wave’. This project tracks the emergence and entrenchment of this gesture, and considers how sports spectators learned to do “the Wave” in the late twentieth century. That is: How did this ritual become a commonplace mass gesture, widely recognized by US sports fans? How were potentially tens of thousands of spectators able to choreograph themselves to perform such a movement? In addressing these questions I argue that we need to approach the sports spectator as an historical figure, whose comportment, gestures, sartorial decisions, understanding of what they were watching, and sense of themselves have changed over time, and that we think of sports spectatorship as a learned cultural practice, honed through (perhaps surprisingly) printed manuals, by cheerleaders, television graphics and commentators, and, by the 1980s, large-screen video display boards, such as Mitsubishi’s DiamondVision and Sony’s JumboTRON. It relates the Wave’s emergence in the early-1980s to the broader transformation in sport stadium operations, and especially the shift in the technology used to prompt cheers and coordinate crowds, and in so doing expands previous scholarship on the history of gesture, beyond a concern with the meanings of actions, and towards a contemplation of their historical mechanics.

I am interested to hear from postgraduate students wishing to work on any of the following fields and topics:

• African American intellectual history
• History of racial thought, particularly in the modern US
• History of the mental and medial sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Studies of work and leisure in the twentieth-century US

In 2023-24, once again alongside my first-year students, I put together a walking tour of Manchester's American Connections, spotlighting those prominent or influential Americans who journeyed to the city between roughly the 1770s and 1960. I spoke about that project on Manchester's community radio station allfm.