Ben Harker

I joined the Manchester Department in 2014; before that I worked at the University of Salford.  In 2016-17 I was an AHRC Leadership Fellow for a project entitled Wars of Position: Marxism and Civil Society, run in collaboration with Manchester's People's History Museum.  My books include Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl (2007) and The Chronology of Revolution: Communism, Culture, and Civil Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (2021). My articles have appeared in journals including ELH, History Workshop, Textual Practice and Literature & History.  I’m Chair of the Raymond Williams Society and on the editorial board of Twentieth-century Communism. 

My current work focuses on the following areas:

Culture in interwar Britain

Cultural periodicals in Britain, 1920-1980

Marxist theories of culture

Culture and Popular Front politics

The invention of modernism  

Late modernism

Virginia Woolf

Working-class writing

Writers and Communism in Britain

The BBC

Culture and the Factory

Theatre and the political Left

I welcome enquiries from prospective doctoral students interested in any of my research specialisms.