Martin Farr

Originating in north London, I proceeded via secondary education in the home counties, undergraduate study in the West Country, doctoral study in central Scotland, and varied short-term and hourly contracts and appointments in and around the South East, before arriving in the North East in 2000.

I teach, supervise, and research Britain, and its foreign relations, since the First World War. With degrees in politics and history, I'm interested in contemporary history and its applications, particularly concerning politics and public life, and foreign and security policy.

My research interests centre on British politics and public life, biography, political parties, elections, foreign policy, government, and media. I welcome enquiries for research supervision in these areas.

Most recent publications include 'Obituarial Lives', a chapter about newspaper political obituaries and what I coin the 'obituarial turn', for Genres of Political Writing in Modern Britain (Cambridge). In press are 'Menzies' and Britain's Common Era', for Menzies and the British Commonwealth (Melbourne University Press, forthcoming); and 'Britain and the Australian Embrace' for Britain and the World.

I have two forthcoming monographs: Margaret Thatcher's World (De Gruyter), an international history of Thatcherism, and Reginald McKenna: Statesman among Financiers, 1916-1943 (Routledge), the second (and final) volume of my biography.

I'm writing three chapters (on Douglas Hurd, John Moore, and Norman Tebbit) for a book I'm co-editing called Thatcher's Ministers (Palgrave Macmillan); ‘Changing Conservatism in the 1970s’, in The Routledge Handbook of the Conservative Party, (Routledge, forthcoming); and ‘Donald Trump and Keir Starmer: the Provisional Relationship’, in Keir Starmer and the Politics of Caution: Governing the United Kingdom in the 2020s (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

In the pipeline are two journal articles: 'When Party Leaders Die: the Deaths and Afterlives of Hugh Gaitskell and John Smith’, and one on the film version Oh! What a Lovely War (1969).

I've published on Barack Obama and David Cameron, and Donald Trump and Theresa May, and Trump and Boris Johnson for the Palgrave Handbook of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Before that was a chapter on popular culture in 1960s Britain for a volume on imperial history, one on the 1970 General Election for a book marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Heath government, and another on Parliament and the death of Margaret Thatcher for a book about Thatcherism.

I've also written about declinism and British coastal resorts, British mass tourism in the 1970s, the 1918 Reform Act and the House of Commons, and the Labour Party in the 1980s (in Labour and the Left in the 1980s). Other publications include the first volume of a political biography, and articles on British politics and strategy in the First World War, the 1918 General Election, and the Labour Party and strategic bombing in the Second World War.

I've co-edited two volumes on the British abroad: Travellers and Tourists and Experiencing Imperialism, in the former of which I've a chapter on British mass tourism. I was principal investigator for the North East and Cumbria on the AHRC/BBC project World War One at Home. I also interview former MPs for the History of Parliament Oral History Project.

I head Britain and the World, an international research association which has a peer-reviewed journal, book series, and an annual conference which alternates be-tween the US and the UK. I also write for The Conversation. All my publications are freely available on Academia.edu.