Professor Matt Cook

I am a social and cultural historian specialising in LGBT and queer history. My books include London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003), A Gay History of Britain (lead author; 2007), Queer Domesticities (2014), Queer Beyond London (with Alison Oram; 2022) and Writing Queer History (2026). I have also co-edited six further books on LGBTQ+ history – including, most recently, A Queer Scrapbook of Britain and Ireland (2026) - and contributed to a range of leading history journals. I have been an editor of History Workshop Journal since 2002.

I have acted as a consultant on a number of films, documentaries and stage shows, and advised on a wide range of LGBTQ+ community history, archive, museum and heritage projects, including for the nightclub Duckie, The National Trust, the Museum of London and the Pitt Rivers Museum. I was visiting researcher and project adviser for the Norwegian ‘Queerdom’ initiative at the University of Bergen (2021-2026) and am currently advising on ‘Picture Me: presenting queer visual history’ at Tampere University, Finland, and ‘Queer Liberation Beyond the Metropolis: Lesbian and Gay Lives and Politics in the Danish Province, c. 1965-85’ at the University of Copenhagen.

I joined Oxford’s Faculty of History and Mansfield College as the inaugural Jonathan Cooper Professor of the History of Sexuality in October 2023. Prior to that I spent 18 years at Birkbeck, University of London, including as Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, and latterly as Professor of Modern History and Head of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. I was educated at state secondary school in Staffordshire, at Sheffield University (BA English Literature) and at Queen Mary, University of London (MA ‘Literature Culture and Modernity' and PhD in History). My first academic job was as Lecturer in Modern History at Keele University (2002-2005).

At Oxford, I chair and the LGBTQ+ History Working Group and co-convene the Centre for Women’s Gender and Queer Histories with Professor Sarah Knott, the Hilary Clinton Chair in Women’s History. Together we are working to bring these subfields into closer conversation and to create a vibrant research culture around them - with graduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, visiting scholars, and a wide-ranging events programme.

Research Interests

I am particularly interested in queer urban, public, community and local history in the 19th and 20th centuries. I am also fascinated by cross-period, transnational, comparative and cross-disciplinary work. I have worked especially on: urban queer cultures (especially London); queer provincial lives; the AIDS crisis; queer domesticities; queer arts and culture; and LGBTQ+ public history and heritage.