Department of History
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About the department
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Dr Hugh Pemberton
Senior Lecturer in Modern British History
Office: G.76, 15 Woodland Rd: Consultation hours (PDF)
Phone: +44 (0)117 928 7621
Email: h.pemberton@bristol.ac.uk
Web: Hugh Pemberton's personal website
Research interests
Dr Hugh Pemberton is interested in the history of Britain, and particularly of British politics, since the Second World War. His work focuses principally on economic and social policy. He has a particular interest in the means by which radical policy change occurs (and why it sometimes doesn't), in why such change sometimes turns out to be temporary despite intentions to the contrary, and in why it is that changes that might seem apparently superficial sometimes turn out have enduring consequences. He is currently pursuing two parallel research projects: one on the postwar history of British pensions; the other on the importance of the 1970s in postwar British history. He is also an investigator on the AHRC-funded Penguin Archive Project.
Research supervision
Dr Pemberton welcomes proposals from prospective postgraduate students interested in researching contemporary British history, particularly but not exclusively in the fields of economic or social policy, the process of government, and party politics. Examples of current and recently completed PhD and M.Phil projects supervised by Dr Pemberton include:
- The Labour Party and 'nostalgia'
- Penguin Specials and the centre-left in Britain
- The development of personal social services in postwar Britain
- The Thatcherite economic policy revolution of the 1980s
- The social costs of unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s
Undergraduate teaching
- Britain's Cold War (1st year Special Topic)
- Politics and society in contemporary Britain (2nd year Lecture/Response unit)
- Decade of discord: Britain in the 1970s (2nd year Special Field)
- The politics of 'decline' in Britain's postwar 'golden age' and after (3rd year Lecture/Response unit)
Postgraduate teaching
Dr Pemberton contributes to teaching the contemporary history pathway of the MA in History:
- Teaches on the core unit 'Themes in contemporary history'
- Offers a taught optional unit: 'New Labour in its historical context'
Selected publications
Books
- Reassessing 1970s Britain (edited with Lawrence Black and Pat Thane) (MUP, forthcoming)
- Britain’s pensions crisis: history and policy (edited with Pat Thane and Noel Whiteside) (Oxford University Press, 2006)
- Policy learning and British governance in the 1960s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
- An affluent society? Britain's 'golden age' revisited (edited with Lawrence Black) (Ashgate, 2004).
Articles and chapters
- 'The failure of "nationalization by attraction": Britain’s cross-class alliance against earnings-related pensions in the 1950s', Economic History Review (in press).
- 'Economic policy and practice', in M. Wadsworth and J. Bynner (eds.), A Companion to Life Course Studies (Routledge, 2011)
- '"What matters is what works": from "national superannuation" to "personal accounts"', British Politics, vol. 5, no. 1 (2010), pp. 41-64.
- 'Strange days indeed: British politics in the 1970s', Contemporary British History, vol. 23, no. 4 (2009), pp. 583-595.
- 'The ‘winter of discontent’ in British politics' (with Lawrence Black). Political Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 4 (2009), pp. 553-561.
- 'Taxation and Labour’s modernisation programme, 1964–5', Contemporary British History, vol. 20, no. 3 (September 2006), pp. 423-440.
- 'Relative decline and British governance in the 1960s', The Historical Journal, vol. 47, no. 4 (2004), pp. 989-1013.
- 'Learning and change in 20th century British economic policy” (with M.J. Oliver), Governance, vol. 17, no. 3 (July 2004), pp. 415-441.
- 'Learning, governance and economic policy', British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 5, no. 4 (2003), pp. 500-524.
- 'Policy networks and policy learning: UK economic policy in the 1960s and 1970s', Public Administration, vol. 78, no. 4 (2000), pp. 771-792.
See the full list of Dr Pemberton's publications held in the University's IRIS publications database
Note: some of the documents on this page are in PDF format. In order to view a PDF you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader