Dr Matthew Houlbrook

Tutorial fellow and lecturer in modern British History

Magdalen College

Email: matt.houlbrook@magd.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests

I work on the cultural history of 20th century Britain, with a particular interest in gender, sexualities and selfhood. Up to now, most of my research has explored the relationship between the city, social practice and sexual identities; and how modern urban culture shaped the ways in which men and women experienced, organised and understood their sexual desires and practices. Part of this was published as Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-57 by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. Queer London was awarded both the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Royal Historical Society's Whitefield Prize for the best first book on British history. Since I finished Queer London, I've started work on a couple of new projects - both of which have grown out of things I've become interested in while teaching on Britain during and after the First World War. The first of these is my take on the cultural history of the postwar decade - 'People of the Aftermath: War, Sex and Culture in Roaring Twenties Britain'. The second has the working title 'The Prince of Tricksters: Netley Lucas and the Culture of Confidence in Interwar London'. In broad terms I'm interested in the profound public fascination with individuals who 'faked it' - who crossed boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity or age in masquerading as something they were not. Although the book focuses on one 'international man of mystery', it's about conmen, chancers, vamps and wannabes, and what their lives can tell us about the relationship between British culture and changing ideas of selfhood after the Great War.

Supervision Interests

Social and cultural history of modern Britain; gender, sexualities and urban culture

Selected Publications:

• 'The Private World of Public Urinals: London 1918-1957', London Journal. Vol 25 (1) (2000)
• 'Towards a Historical Geography of Sexuality', Journal of Urban History. Vol 2 (4) (2001)
• 'For Whose Convenience? Gay Guides, Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Homosexual London: 1917–1967' in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850. (Aldershot, 2001)
• '“Lady Austin’s Camp Boys”: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London', Gender and History. Vol 14 (1) (2002)
• 'Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards: c.1900-1960', Journal of British Studies. Vol 42 (3) (2003)
• Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-57. (Chicago, 2005)
• (ed.) Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality . (2005)
• 'Sexing the History of Sexuality', History Workshop Journal. Vol 60 (1) (2005)
• 'The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London', History Workshop Journal. Vol 62 (2006)
• 'The Man with the Powder Puff in Interwar London', Historical Journal. Vol 50 (1) (2007)
• 'Daring to Speak Whose Name? Queer Cultural Politics: 1920-1967' in The Permissive Society and its Enemies. (London, 2008)

Future Publications:

• 'A Pin to See the Peep Show: Culture, Fiction and Selfhood in the Letters of Edith Thompson', Past and Present. (2009)

Research Interests and Activities

• Modern Britain and Europe