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Staff Profiles

Professor Matt Perry

Professor of Labour History

  • Address: School of Historical Studies
    Armstrong building
    University of Newcastle
    Newcastle
    NE1 7RU
Background

Introduction

Matt Perry has taught broadly across Twentieth Century European History. He has research interests in British and French labour and social history, particularly in the fields of protest and social memory. He has also published on questions of general historiography in particular the Marxist school of history.

Research

Research Interests

Twentieth-century French and British social and labour history. The history of the protests of the unemployed, particularly in the interwar period. British and French labour history. Social movements and protest. Social memory and oral history. Biography, intellectual itineraries, obituaries and cultural afterlives.  Transnationalism. France and the experience of the two world wars. History of subjectivity: the mind, emotion, memory, the senses and constructions of space and place. Working minds and labour environments.

Intellectual trajectory

My first degree and PhD were in European Studies, namely French language and the social sciences. I have retained my commitment to an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approach since that point. My work is theoretically informed by engagements with Marxism and post-68 social theory. My PhD was in the comparative measurement of unemployment in Britain, France and Poland in the post-war era, understanding unemployment data - and official statistics more generally - as a social construction prone to political manipulation. The dissertation historicised both the state's statistical apparatus and the emergence of unemployment as modern phenomena.

On gaining my first permanent academic job in the History department at Sunderland University, I turned more systematically to the history of unemployment and in particular, though not exclusively, to the history of the protests of the unemployed, a relatively neglected field of history, particularly in the French context. Monographs followed on the Jarrow Crusade, the French hunger marches as well as editing a special edition of the Labour History Review and an Oxford University Press book on the contentious history of the unemployed. I have tried to blend social movement theory with Marxist approaches to scrutinize patterns of protest and the conscious experience of the unemployed. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin, I have also developed an interest in the visual representations of the unemployed and the generation of documentary photographers and photojournalists of the 1930s for whom the jobless were a major preoccupation. I guest edited a special issue of the Labour History Review on visualising labour, with an introduction and a chapter on photographic representations of the French unemployed in the photomagazines of the 1930s. 

I then wrote a monograph on a little known French novelist César Fauxbras as a vehicle for a microhistory of the period of the two world wars. It was based on Fauxbras's novels, journalism, correspondence, diaries and social investigation. This work cut across the debates about the validity of the testimony of witnesses to the Great War, the social constructions of death during wartime (particularly in the maritime setting), the experience of veterans in interwar France, unemployment, the Popular Front, the defeat of France and everyday life during the German occupation of Paris.

My next project was a biography of Ellen Wilkinson, MP. It engaged with the emerging scholarship of ‘new biography’ to push at the boundaries of this conventional form. I tried to challenge to the assumptions of the unitary or consistent self, revealing compartmentalisations of political ideas and practices and the chronological thresholds of her outlook. I adopted a transnational approach examining how her ideas and activity could not be fully understood within national boundaries. I re-examined her death, memorialisation and myth linking this with the gendered problematic of the hero(ine). Using social movement theory, I sought to connect together the history of her political ideas with cycles of contentious politics. Alongside this methodological innovation, an imaginative and resourceful approach has secured a rich weave of primary materials located internationally (Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Madrid, London). I used the oral testimony regarding Ellen Wilkinson. All this has prised open new insights into a figure who played a significant role in transnational activist networks, social movements (Labour, anti-fascism, pacifism, anti-imperialism, women) and in the wartime and Attlee governments (1940-7). There have been spin-off articles about Wilkinson’s transnationalism using social network analysis and intellectual history and in on her death and myth-making using obituaries as a historical source.

My most recent book Mutinous Memories: a Subjective History of French Military Protest in 1919 (Manchester University Press, 2019) concerns the Black Sea Mutiny of 1919 from the perspective of the subjectivity of the mutineers. This project scrutinizes mutineer testimony for their reasoning and emotions, their sensory experience, their appreciation of time and place. I take a multidisciplinary stance situating the account in terms of social movement theory, the scholarship on emotions (attempting to transcend disciplinary boundaries and dualistic approaches) and the concept of social memory. It therefore attempts to engage with the neuro-turn in history. As a follow on from this work and after a major conference based at Newcastle University, I edited a volume entitled The Global Challenge of Peace: 1919 as a Contested Threshold to a New World Order in the Studies in Labour History Series at the Liverpool University Press.

A second significantly updated version of Marxism and History was published in 2021.

Current Work

I am also preparing on a multidisciplinary research project with the Oral History Unit regarding the memory of the shipyard past in the north east of England. I am working on new directions in labour history at the intersection of labour environments and working minds.



Research Roles

Convenor of the Labour and Society Research Group

Former Deputy Director of Research, School of History, Classics and Archaeology

Current Supervisions

Joe Redmayne, 1919 and County Durham: a multi-occupational study

Katherine Waugh, Former mining villages in County Durham: an oral history


Recent completions

Ben Partridge, The Entangled sites of Memory: The Significance of Photography for the Contentious Movements of May 1968 and June 1936. (Northern Bridge funded scholarship).

Jack Hepworth, The Heterogenity and Evolution of Irish Republicanism, c. 1969-1994

Bill Paxton, An Examination of the Decline of Shipbuilding on the North East Coast of England the West Coast of Scotland in the interwar period, 1919-39

Michael Langthorne, 'Staying Healthy in an Austere World: is history repeating itself?”

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

HIS3022 Jarrow Crusade


HIS3025 May 68


HIS2086 Twentieth Century France


HIS2116 French Communism

HIS2219 Oral History and Memory

Postgraduate Teaching


HIS8025 Pathways in British History

HIS8041 Love on the Dole a cultural history of unemployment in the 1930s

HIS8052 Conflict in European History

HIS8053 Conflict in European History: Case Studies

HSS8004: Qualitative Methods and Critical Analysis in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

HIS8061 Practice of History


Publications