I'm an historian specializing in the history of political thought, the history of universities, and the history of the humanities and social sciences. I was educated at St Catherine's College, Oxford and at Nuffield College, Oxford (D.Phil 1988). I was a Research Fellow of Nuffield College (1986-88) and Lecturer at New College, Oxford (1988-90), before appointment at Manchester in 1990. I was Head of History from 2000 to 2003. I have been Professor of Intellectual History since 2008. I now serve as Director of Research for the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, overseeing a thriving community of some 500 researchers across the arts and humanities disciplines.

I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for the period 2020-23, was Christensen Fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford from April to June 2021, and Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford from September to December 2023.

I have a particular interest in PhD supervision and training, and served as Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research in the Faculty of Humanities from 2017 to 2020, overseeing programmes with around a thousand research students. From 2014-17 I was Director of the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, which in 2013 was awarded around £14 million by the AHRC to provide doctoral training across seven universities and HEIs in the region. I led the DTP's successful reapplication to AHRC, which has supported seven further cohorts of doctoral students starting in 2019.

I am the author or editor of eight books, including two monographs with Cambridge University Press and one with Princeton, and my papers have appeared in the Historical Journal, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Modern Intellectual History, the European Journal of Political Theory, History of European Ideas, etc. I have held a number of research grants (AHRC, British Academy, Leverhulme) and visiting appointments, including a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, where I studied the vices of endowed foundations. I have held external examiner appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, Huddersfield and Cardiff.

Main research interests:

• modern intellectual history (19th century, France and Britain);
• modern political thought (liberalism; civil society and the state; the theory and practice of democracy; nationalism);
• history of universities; history of the humanities and social sciences
• French political culture since 1789

I have recently completed a major intellectual biography of James Bryce, 1838-1922, historian, jurist, Liberal cabinet minister,Ambassador to Washington, humanitarian campaigner. This was supported by a Major Research Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, 2020-23. Since Bryce was a quintessential polymath, this project engages with a wide range of themes including constitutional theory and comparative politics, public history and the organization of knowledge, and cultural diplomacy and the birth of the discipline of IR. It is centrally concerned with the relationship with liberalism and democracy, in Britain, the United States, and beyond. It was published by Princeton University Press in November 2025, under the title Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect. For some reviews: Greg Conti in History of European Ideas and Stefan Collini in Dublin Review of Books. 

I also have two edited books both published by Manchester University Press in September 2024:

Manchester minds: a university history of ideas

The Simons of Manchester: how one family shaped a city and a nation (co-editor)

And finally, also with MUP in December 2024, a special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 'Higher Learning and Civic Cultures of Knowledge: Manchester 1824-2024'. This includes an article and an introduction by me.

Building on these edited works, I am interested in working further on  place-based intellectual history as a genre, and also in developing historical perspectives on the civic mission of universities. I'm currently writing on the long history of what are now starting to be called the civic humanities. This builds on a series of articles and essays excavating the intellectual vision that inspired the early civic universities: for example, this essay from 2019 and this article from 2024

My work on Bryce has led me into a broader interest in religious dissent, especially aspects of the intellectual history of unitarianism, in the relationship between religious dissent and university history, and indeed in the broader problem of pluralism and the university. I have written on this subject in a blog post on 'The abolition of religious tests: some historical context', and in chapter 2 of Liberal Worlds. This is an interest I plan to develop further in view of the recently announced partnership between the John Rylands Library and Dr Williams's Library.

I belong to our research group on Political Cultures, which aims to develop innovative approaches to the history of politics, the state, and public policy. I also convene the University's Research Group on University History, an informal grouping which promotes research in the history of universities. 

Research supervision

I am an experienced research supervisor and have supervised 21 PhDs to completion. Seven of these have led to monographs with major academic publishers. I remain keen to encourage new research in modern political thought and intellectual history (British and continental European) and the history of universities and the history of the humanities and social sciences. But prospective applicants should note that from 2026 onwards I am unlikely to accept new PhD students as main supervisor, though I will continue to take part in supervisory teams.  

Current PhD students:

• John Ayshford, 'On Liberty and Virtue: Unearthing John Stuart Mill's Republicanism'. History Departmental Studentship. With Professor Christian Schemmel and Dr Emily Jones

PhDs supervised to completion 

* = funded by AHRC or its precursors

David Worsley: 'Sir John Robert Seeley and his Intellectual Legacy: Religion, Imperialism and Nationalism in Victorian and Post-Victorian Britain'. 2001. Now working in transport strategy as Associate Director at WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff Engineering Services, and a Visiting Lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering at Newcastle University.

* Leif Jerram: 'Building, Spaces, Politics: Munich City Council and the Management of Modernity, 1900-1930'. 2001. Published by Manchester University Press as Germany's Other Modernity. Subsequently Senior Lecturer in History, University of Manchester

* Richard Wright: 'Italian Fascism and the British-Italian community 1928-43: experience and memory'. 2005.

* Katherine Davies: 'Three voices of the interwar French Catholic revival: Jacques Maritain, Charles du Bos and Gabriel Marcel and the tensions of reconciliation with the world'. 2008. Publications include article in Journal of the History of Ideas.

George Haralambakis: 'The Action Française: Ideology and Political Identity' 2009

* Vicky Morrisroe (later Randall): '"The Sword of the Lord": West vs. East in the Historical Works of E.A. Freeman'. 2010. Publications include articles in the Journal of Victorian Culture and Modern Intellectual History, and a 2020 monograph with Manchester University Press. Vicky was subsequently Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Gloucestershire †2026

Gareth Davies: 'From André Tardieu to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: The Evolution of the Modéré Tradition in France from 1929 to 1981'. 2010. Download. Publications include  DOI: 10.3917/hp.016.0094

* Matthew Adams: '"The Truth of a Few Simple Ideas": Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Read and the Tradition of Anarchist Communism in Britain, 1886-1968'. 2011. Now published by Palgrave DOI: 10.1057/9781137392626. Senior Lecturer in History, Loughborough University. 

* Iain Stewart: 'Raymond Aron and the Roots of the French Liberal Renaissance' 2011. Iain is now Lecturer in History, UCL. Publications include a 2019 monograph in C.U.P.'s premier series, Ideas in Context, and articles in European Review of History and Sartre Studies International.

Michael Perduniak: 'Pamphlets and Politics: The British Liberal Party and the "Working Man", c. 1867-c. 1925'. 2013.

* Victoria Glass, 'British Intellectuals in the Age of Total and Nuclear Warfare'. 2014. Victoria is now a management consultant at PwC.

James Shaw, 'The Great Desideratum in Government: James Madison, Benjamin Constant, and the Liberal-Republican Framework for Political Neutrality’. 2016. Funded by the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures. James now works in content marketing.

* Sean Irving, 'Friedrich Hayek: An Unrepentant Old Whig', 2016. Now Senior Research Officer at Essex University. Sean's publications from his PhD include articles in the European Journal of Political Theory and in History of European Ideas, and monograph with Routledge.

Luke Heselwood, 'British Liberals and China in the Era of the Second Opium War' (co-supervisor). 2016. Luke is now Senior Consultant at Capgemini Invent

*Jessica Patterson, ‘Enlightenment, Empire and Deism: Interpretations of Hinduism in the Work of East India “Company Men”, 1760-1790’. 2017. Jessica is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Trinity College, Cambridge.  Her first monograph appeared with the C.U.P. Ideas in Context series in 2021.

*Daniel Edmonds, 'Unpacking "Chauvinism": The Interrelationship of Race, Internationalism, and Anti-Imperialism amongst Marxists in Britain, 1899-1933'. 2017. Currently Postdoctoral Research Associate, Royal Holloway University of London

Nicholas Loizou, 'Before New Liberalism: The Continuity of Radical Dissent, 1867-1914', 2019.

Liam Stowell, 'The Athens of Example: The Classical World in British International Thought, 1900-1939', 2020. Liam was Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Manchester, 2021-2 and now works as a policy professional.

Anna Lanfranchi, 'Negotiating Italian Translation Rights across Anglo-American and Italian Publishing (1900-1947)', 2020 (co-supervisor). Anna is currently Teaching Fellow in Translation and Transcultural Studies, University of Warwick. Her first monograph was published by Palgrave in 2024.

Xuan Zhao, 'The Eighteenth-Century Entrepreneurial State in the Political Economy of Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi (1717-1771)', 2021 (co-supervisor). Now Assistant Professor, Shanghai University of Finance

Juliano Fiori, 'The humanitarian imagination: L.T. Hobhouse and the dialectic of liberal utopia', 2023 (co-supervisor). Now Director of the Alameda Institute, Brazil

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society