Marcus Collins

Marcus Collins is Professor of British History at Loughborough University. He is the author of The Beatles and Sixties Britain (2020) and Modern Love (2003), co-author with Peter N. Stearns of Why Study History? (2020) and editor of The Permissive Society and Its Enemies (2007). He is currently completing a book entitled Arrested Development: Homosexuality and Broadcasting from Wolfenden to AIDS and running a related AHRC-funded public engagement project on ‘Re-viewing LGBTQ+ Lives through Broadcasting in Postwar Britain’. A play based on his research on the world's first major radio documentary about gay men, Stephen M. Hornby's The BBC's First Homosexual, is being staged at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer after winning awards at the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival and selling out venues on a six-city English tour.

Projects underway include The Beatles’ World, a multi-authored monograph entitled Visions of Decolonisation: Representations of Africa in British Broadcasting, c. 1945–75, and a collaboration with the political scientist Ben Clements which uses polling data to reassess classic models of social change and national identity in mid twentieth-century Britain.