Kevin Morgan

I studied History at Manchester (1979-82) before writing a PhD on British communism (1983-7). I then worked for a time in archives and have since been involved with various bodies dealing with labour and political archives including the cataloguing and digitisation of the archives of the British communist party (CPGB). From 1993 I was a lecturer and then professor in Politics at Manchester, retiring in 2022. I was also an editor of the journal Socialist History  (1999-2006) and a founding editor of the Communist History Network Newsletter (1996-2008) and Twentieth Century Communism. I am now an Emeritus Professor of Politics and Contemporary History.

I have published books and articles on many aspects of social, intellectual and political history. These include biographical studies of Harry Pollitt, Ramsay MacDonald, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and A.A. Purcell. The last of these formed part of a broader project on the influence of the Russian revolution on movements and ideas of the British left that also included a study of political funding Labour Legends and Moscow Gold. Through the ESRC-funded CPGB Biographical Project (1999-2001) I produced the co-authored monograph Communists in British Society 1920-91 and have interviews or interview transcripts of around a hundred interviews deposited in the National Sound Archive, the Working Class Movement Library and other repositories. In broadening from my initial interests in British communism, I published a broader study International Communism and the Cult of the Individual in 2017 and continue to work on the political uses of biography within the communist and other radical movements.

I continue to work mainly on the social, cultural and political history of the left in Britain and beyond. I am currently working on two books: a history of world communism No Dream but the Millenium and a study of interactions between the nineteenth- and twentieth century French and British left Between la Marseillaise and le God Save the King. I am also preparing a comparative study of national histories produced from with the international communist movement in the Stalin period.

Comparative history of communism; political ideas and ideologies in Britain and France; radical historiographies; the politics of personality and cults of the individual; political biography and life-history writing; interviewing activists; the politics of housing.

While I no longer teach or supervise research I am happy to assist with any research queries and continue to do occasional media work directly connected with my research interests as indicated below.