Professor Martin Hewitt

A research Professor in History, Martin's current projects include a study of the reception of Darwin in Victorian Britain, and the Very Short Introduction: the Victorians for Oxford University Press.

Background

Professor Hewitt read History at Oriel College Oxford, before embarking on postgraduate work which took him to the University of Warwick (MBA), the University of New Brunswick (MA in History) and then back to Nuffield College, Oxford, where he completed a DPhil on mid-nineteenth century Manchester with Asa Briggs.

He has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Hull, and Leeds Trinity University, where he was Director of Research and Professor of Victorian Studies. He was Head of History and then History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University (2008-12), and has since September 2012 been Dean of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield.

Professor Hewitt was the founding editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture and first Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies. His published work has ranged across topics including the Victorian city and its cultural institutions, diaries and life-writing, Victorian Studies as a field, and the Victorian press.

Research interests

• Nineteenth Century Britain
• Victorian Studies
• Press and Periodical History
• Public Lecturing

Professor Martin Hewitt has broad interest in the social and cultural history of the nineteenth century, broadly conceived. He has worked on the history of Victorian Manchester, including work on literary associations, libraries, public lectures, social and philanthropic associations. He has also worked on the nineteenth century press. His current broad project is a consideration of the role of generational patterning in the Victorian period. This focus of this work is currently on a project looking at generational influences on the reception of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking in the 50 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species.

Areas of research supervision

• Modern British History
• Victorian Culture, especially life writing

Qualifications

• BA (Hons) Modern History, Oriel College, Oxford
• MBA, University of Warwick
• MA in History, University of New Brunswick
• DPhil in History, Nuffield College, Oxford

Memberships, editorial boards

• Member of Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College
• Jury member, Colby Prize (2013)
• Honorable mention, Colby Prize (2014)
• Donald Gray prize for the best essay in Victorian Studies in 2006 by the North American Victorian Studies Association (2007)
• Library History prize (2001)

Research grants, consultancy, knowledge exchange

Curran Fellowship of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (2013) to support the research which led to The Dawn of the Cheap Press.

Selected recent publications

Hewitt, M., "The Law and the Press", in Joanne Shattock ed. Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 147-164.

Hewitt, M., "Fifty years ahead of its time? The provident dispensaries movement in Manchester, 1871-1885", in Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt eds. Essays in Honour of Mike Rose (MUP, 2017), 84-108.

Hewitt, M., "A little bit of a Victorian? Asa Briggs and Victorian Studies", in Miles Taylor ed. The Age of Asa: Asa Briggs and the shaping of History and Higher Education in Modern Britain (Palgrave: 2014), 46-78.

Hewitt, M. The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain. The campaigns against the taxes on knowledge, 1849-1869 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

Hewitt, M. "Preaching from the platform: popular religious lecturing and the challenge of the churching the masses", Keith Francis and William Gibson eds. The Oxford Handbook to the British Sermon, 1689-1901 (OUP 2012), 79-96.

Hewitt, M. ed. The Victorian World (Routledge, 2012).

Recent presentations and conferences

‘Reception of Darwinism in Later Victorian Britain’, ‘Victorian Fears’, Newman University, June 2018.

‘Victoria’s Victorians and the mid-Victorian Generation’, Generation of 1819 symposium, University of York, April 2018.

‘Victorian Generations’, Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Santa Barbara, March 2018.

Media experience

Martin is regularly consulted by broadcasters, journalists, television production companies (recently appearing on the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Power to the People'), and in April 2016 consulting on two episodes of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, including filming for one episode), and other history-sector organisations.