Graduate Student and Associate Lecturer, Department of History, Philosophy and Religion
Thesis Title: Conspiracy as culture in the English fin-de-siècle: espionage, terrorism and immigration in popular politics, c.1880-1914
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Dr. Tom Crook
Dr. Donal Lowry Professor Roger Griffin |
About
My AHRC funded doctoral research functions as an investigation of popular anxiety about immigration, terrorism and espionage in English fin-de-siècle culture. Cultural production relating to such concerns often featured the attribution of conspiratorial agentive structures.
It is this ‘conspiratorial mindset’ which my research seeks to address.
Building upon the work of philosophers, social scientists and historians since the early 1990s, this research follows J.M. Roberts’ argument that it is as important to study ideas about conspiratorial organisations as it is to study the actual organisations (extant or not) themselves. As such, this study eschews parliamentary speech-making and high-literature, instead focusing more on popular and populist expression, in order that we might better understand the ‘conspiratorial mindset’ in English culture in the long fin-de-siècle. As a result of a four month research residency the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, my research also features comparative, cross-cultural analyses of the US/UK conspiratorial contexts.
Future planned research includes further comparative research into the position and nature of conspiratorial though in popular culture in other English speaking countries, particularly Canada and Australia. More broadly, this will examine invasion anxieties in non-UK dominions, in order to better situate our understanding of popular ‘loyalty’ to Britain in the decades leading up to the First World War.
