Benjamin Jackson

I am a social and cultural historian of Britain in the long eighteenth century. I research the history of gender and masculinities 1660–1832 and am most interested in how the social and economic transformations of eighteenth-century Britain, such as commercialisation, industrialisation and professionalisation, animated gender identity-formation and experience. My first monograph Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (forthcoming with Manchester University Press in 2025) is the first book-length study of Englishmen’s material and consumer practices in the period.

I am currently a British Academy Research Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute where I am researching the professional, social, and masculine identities of Anglican clergymen 1660–1800 in Britain, Europe, and the British Empire. This research will provide the basis for my next book The Georgian Clergyman: At Home, In the Parish, and Abroad.

My published work has investigated the materiality of eighteenth-century diplomatic identities (Gender & History) as well as the visual and literary history of eighteenth-century carriage driving (Palgrave). My forthcoming publications examine gendered mobility in eighteenth-century England and the materiality and sociability of early modern country sports.

Before joining Manchester in 2024, I taught early modern history at the University of Birmingham (2021–2023) and undergraduate history at UCL (2019–2021) and QMUL (2017–2021).

After undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of York, I completed my PhD in History at Queen Mary, University of London in 2020 with Prof. Amanda Vickery. I have been awarded research fellowships by The Huntington Library, San Marino, The Clark Library, UCLA, the John Rylands Research Institute, and the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship scheme. 

I have broad research interests in the history of gender (particularly masculinity and manhood), domestic life, professionalisation, mobility, religion, manufacturing and consumption (in both a national and international context), material and visual culture, and the built environment in the later part of the early modern period, specifically in Britain and its empire.

Since my doctoral studies, I have explored the materiality of masculine identity formation and gendered consumer practices in the eighteenth century, a period of rapid industrialisation and commercialisation. Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England brings together over 20 years of scholarship on masculine consumption, but is the first monograph to write the history of eighteenth-century men and their possessions. Men, it reveals, came to rely on goods to construct and perform a variety of masculine identities. In doing so, their material choices, desires, practices, and knowledges shaped the material and consumer culture of eighteenth-century England. 

My current project, funded by a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, examines the life-writing of Anglican clergymen, the largest and most socially and economically diverse professional group in eighteenth-century England, from the Restoration in 1660 to the Evangelical Revival of the early nineteenth century. I chart how the clergy responded to, and experienced, the professionalisation of their vocation, established their clerical households, contributed to local government and education, embodied virtues of Christian masculinity in their parishes, and embraced the itineracy of their profession both domestically and internationally. While doing so, I examine not only these social and economic patterns but also the lived experiences of individual clergymen and ask how clergymen negotiated conflicting demands of their gender, profession, and denomination, within their homes and communities and on their travels. I hope to provide a new account of how a significant eighteenth-century masculine group saw themselves and what determined their experiences.

Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

Member of the Social History Society 

Member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 

PhD in History, Queen Mary, University of London (2016-2020)

MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York (2015-2016) 

BA in English and Related Literature, University of York (2012-2015)