Emily Jones

I arrived at the University of Manchester in 2018, having previously worked at Columbia University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford. My DPhil was fully funded by the AHRC and was published as Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914: An Intellectual History (OUP, 2017; pb 2019), which won the Longmans-History Today prize and was a Financial Times 'Book of the Year'. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy.

I have written and reviewed for the Financial Times, the New Statesman, and History Today, and provided various radio commentary, including for BBC Radio 4, ABC Australia, and ORF Austria.

My second book, The Disraeli Myth: The Making of a Conservative Tradition, is in press and forthcoming with Princeton University Press.

My principal research interests are in the intellectual and political history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. My current work analyses the development of ideas about conservatism as an intellectual and political tradition, and the creative and constructive role of history (and historical analysis, mythmaking included) in British politics.

My first book, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914: An Intellectual History, examined the posthumous career of Edmund Burke (1730-97) in Britain – i.e. his transformation from Whig politician to ‘founder of conservatism’. This was not simply the story of the formative period in which Burke became a canonical political thinker, but the process by which a distinctive intellectual and political tradition – ‘Burkean conservatism’ – was constructed, established, and widely circulated by 1914. The book therefore covers a wide range of topics from constitutional politics and higher thought, to conceptions of national character, publishing history, and the ways in which Burke was both taught and read. It was a Talking Politics and Financial Times 2017 'summer read', and was named a 'best book of 2017' by the Financial Times and History Today. In July 2018 the book won the Longman-History Today Prize.

More recent work has explored further aspects of Conservative and Unionist political thought in Britain, c. 1880-1950, and the history of constitutionalism (popular, political, and in higher thought) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first fruits of this research were published, Open Access, in the April 2019 issue of the English Historical Review: 'Constructive Constitutionalism in Conservative and Unionist Political Thought, c.1885-1914', and I uncovered the origins of the adoption of the terms 'left' and 'right' in Britain in Cosmopolitan Conservatisms (2021).

My second book, The Disraeli Myth: The Making of a Conservative Tradition, will provide an authoritative account of the historic uses and abuses of Benjamin Disraeli and the highly significant construction of a socially minded brand of Conservatism following his death in 1881. The book draws on sources encompassing the full range of the political spectrum, popular and intellectual culture, the creation of scholarly disciplines--including English Literature and socio-economic history--at the turn of the twentieth century, opening questions as to the role of history, and mythmaking, in British politics up to the present day.

HIST 10101 History in Practice

HIST 10191 Imperial Nation: The Making of Modern Britain, 1783-1902

HIST 20181 Making of the Modern Mind: European Intellectual History in a Global Context

HIST 31892 'Brains and Numbers': Intellectual Life in Nineteenth-Century Britain

HIST 60041 Re-making Modern British History

HIST 64392 Boundaries of the Political

HIST 64021 Historical Research 1

I currently have four PhD students, and I welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students interested the political and intellectual history of modern Britain.