Professor William Whyte

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Professor William Whyte
Professor of Social and Architectural History
St John's College
01865 (2)77338
william.whyte@sjc.ox.ac.uk

Like all historians, I am interested in people, but unlike many I am also equally preoccupied by things and places.  I'm especially intrigued by what the serious investigation of the built and natural environment does to existing accounts of modern British and European history. My research has consequently often focused on architecture, and I have a special interest in institutions like schools, universities, and churches.

My first book, Oxford Jackson: architecture, education, status, and style, 1835-1924 (2006) explored the work of an influential university architect.  My second, funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, was Redbrick: a social and architectural history of Britain's civic universities (2015; paperback 2016). My third, Unlocking the Church: the lost secrets of Victorian sacred space, grew out of the Hensley Henson Lectures I gave in 2014 and will be published by OUP in 2017. Now, as the final part of what's become a trilogy on university architecture, I am working on The University: a material history, for Harvard University Press. Along the way, I have edited or co-edited eight other books. 

With Professor Dan Hicks, I am series editor of the six-volume BloomsburyCultural History of Objects. With Dr Oliver Cox, I am leading a joint AHRC/Innovate UK/National Trust Knowledge Transfer Project, providing aTrusted Source for visitors to National Trust properties. With Professor Maggie Snowling and Professor Kate Nation, I am also working on a Wellcome Trust/John Fell funded project on the history of dyslexia. 

Within the university, I sit on the editorial boards of the Oxford Historical Mongraphs series and the Rewley House Studies in the Historic Environment series.

Beyond the university, I am chairman of the Oxford Historical Society, I sit on the London Advisory Committee of Historic England and I am editor of the Oxfordshire Records Society. I have recently been appointed a trustee of the Oxford Preservation Trust and elected a member of the International Commission for the History of Universities/Commission internationale pour l'histoire des universites.

Prospective graduate students can find details of my interests on the research page of this profile.

 

See page on St John's College website

Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain's Civic Universities (OUP Oxford, August 2016).

Cover for Redbrick

In the last two centuries Britain has experienced a revolution in higher education, with the number of students rising from a few hundred to several million. Yet the institutions that drove - and still drive - this change have been all but ignored by historians. 

Drawing on a decade's research, and based on work in dozens of archives, many of them used for the very first time, this is the first full-scale study of the civic universities - new institutions in the nineteenth century reflecting the growth of major Victorian cities in Britain, such as Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham - for more than 50 years. Tracing their story from the 1780s until the 2010s, it is an ambitious attempt to write the Redbrick revolution back into history. 

William Whyte argues that these institutions created a distinctive and influential conception of the university - something that was embodied in their architecture and expressed in the lives of their students and staff. It was this Redbrick model that would shape their successors founded in the twentieth century: ensuring that the normal university experience in Britain is a Redbrick one. 

Using a vast range of previously untapped sources, Redbrick is not just a new history, but a new sort of university history: one that seeks to rescue the social and architectural aspects of education from the disregard of previous scholars, and thus provide the richest possible account of university life. 

It will be of interest to students and scholars of modern British history, to anyone who has ever attended university, and to all those who want to understand how our higher education system has developed - and how it may evolve in the future.

As professor of social and architectural history I am very glad to discuss graduate supervision with anyone whose interests fall within these categories. In the past, I have supervised doctoral theses on science in the nineteenth century, theology in the twentieth, and architectural history over both periods. Current DPhil projects in architectural history include work on the Gothic and Italianate Revivals, workers' housing in nineteenth-century France, and gentlemen's clubs in Victorian New York. In the the field of social history, I am working with graduate students on history of universities, the Victorian champagne industry, and the history of touch. 

To get a sense of the sort of work I have supervised, it is worth looking at the publications of previous doctoral students. These include Ursula De Young, whose DPhil thesis was published as A Vision of Modern Science
John Tyndall and the Role of the Scientist in Victorian Culture (London, 2011) and Daniel Inman, whose thesis was published as The Making of Modern British Theology: God and the Academy at Oxford, 1833-1939 (Minneapolis, 2014). Sam Brewitt-Taylor's Christian Radicalism in the Church of England, 1957-71 will be out with OUP very soon.

I encourage my students to publish whilst working on the DPhil, and they have been very successful in so doing. Sam Brewitt-Taylor won the Duncan Tanner Prize for his essay 'The invention of a "secular society"? Christianity and the sudden appearance of secularization discourses in the British national media, 1961-64', which was published in Twentieth Century British History 24 (2013). Philip Aspin won the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain essay prize for his article '"Our ancient architecture": contesting cathedrals in late-Georgian England', Architectural History 54 (2011). Edward Gillin won the same award in 2015 for his 'The Stones of Science: Charles Harriot Smith and the importance of geology in architecture, 1834-1864', as well as the Society for the History of Technology's Usher Prize for his "Prophets of Progress: Authority in the Scientific Projections and Religious Realizations of the Great Eastern Steamship" in Technology and History 56 (2015). 

I am a convener of the Modern British History Seminar and of the Architectural History Seminar, and also teach graduate papers on theory and methods and on global religion in the twentieth century.

  • General introduction to 'The English Parish Church through the centuries: daily life and spirituality, art and architecture, literature and music [Sections 5 & 6: 1689-1945, and 1945-present]'

    Media

  • Which elite? Whose university? Britain’s civic university tradition and the importance of place

    Conference paper

  • Architecture

    2017 |
    Chapter

  • 'Only Connect': Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain

    2017 |
    Journal article

  • "The school of the wide street ... the advocates of the narrow road": the international town planning conference in London in 1910

    2017 |
    Chapter

  • Neo-Georgian: the other style in British twentieth-century university architecture?

    2016 |
    Chapter

  • The Gentleman's House in the British Atlantic World, 1680-1780

    2016 |
    Journal article

  • "The home of lost causeways": Oxford, experts, and the Motor Age

    2016 |
    Chapter

  • 'Some dreadful buildings in Southwark’: a tour of nineteenth-century social housing

    2016 |
    Chapter

  • Octavia Hill: the practice of sympathy and the art of housing

    2016 |
    Chapter
    • More

Restoration Man, Channel 4:

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-restoration-man/on-demand/50459-013

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-restoration-man/on-demand/50459-009

The architecture of Keble College:

 

The architecture of the Oxford mathematical institute:

The Long View, policy reversals:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y2d7g

 

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