Freddy Foks

I am a historian of modern Britain and its empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My first book is about the history of social anthropology. My new research is about citizenship, racism and emigration.

2019 - PhD, University of Cambridge

2018-22 - Junior Research Fellow, King's College, Cambridge

2021-22 - Lecturer in Modern British History, University of Manchester

2023 - - Simon Research Fellow, University of Manchester

My first book is Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development and the Reinvention of Society in Britain. It was awarded the Constance Blackwell Prize for "the best first monograph in intellectual history published in the previous two years (2022-2023)". The book is about British social anthropology between the 1900s and 1960s, its imperial histories and the reception of anthropological ideas in other academic disciplines. You can hear me talking about Participant Observers on the New Books Network here. 

I am now working on a book about citizenship and migration in the British Empire. For the past few decades scholars have written groundbreaking new histories of the United Kingdom with immigration at their heart. This project builds on that work to tell a different story. Long before immigration captured the headlines, emigration gripped the imagination of policy makers.

This project seeks to measure the impact mass emigration had on the British state since the 19th century. I have published a pilot paper on this project in the Journal of Historical Sociology and a new article applying these ideas to the study of emigrant and immigrant shipping is now out in The Journal of British Studies.