Professor William Whyte

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 (OUP, 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 (OUP, 2015). My third, Unlocking the Church: the lost secrets of Victorian sacred space (OUP, 2017), grew out of my Hensley Henson Lectures. 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. Current projects include the six-volume Cultural History of Objects, which I am editing with professor Dan Hicks. 

Within the university, I am one of the electors for the Ford Lectures and sit on the editorial boards of both the Oxford Historical Monographs series and the Rewley House Studies in the Historic Environment series.

Beyond the university, I am chairman of the Oxford Preservation Trust and the Oxford Historical Society. I sit on the board of the Oxford Review of Education and am a member of the International Commission for the History of Universities/Commission internationale pour l'histoire des universites.

Research Interests

As professor of social and architectural history I am very glad to discuss graduate supervision with anyone whose interests fall within these fields. In the past, I have supervised doctoral theses on science in the nineteenth century, theology in the twentieth, and architectural history over both periods. Recent theses include Will Clement on nineteenth-century French housing and Graham Harding on the history of Champagne. Current DPhil projects include work on architectural publishing in eighteenth-century England, church building in nineteenth-century Canada, planning in twentieth-century Russia, the Italianate style in Regency London, hotels in Victorian England, and neo-Georgian houses in interwar Britain.

To get a sense of the sort of work I have supervised, it is worth looking at the publications of previous doctoral students. Edward Gillin and Horatio Joyce have recently published Experiencing architecture in the nineteenth century (2018), a project which grew out of work we did – and a conference they ran – during their doctorates. Other students have published revised versions of their theses. 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 (2011), Daniel Inman, whose thesis was published as The Making of Modern British Theology: God and the Academy at Oxford, 1833-1939 (2014), Edward Gillin, whose thesis became The Victorian Palace of Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Building of the Houses of Parliament (2017), Matthew Andrews, whose thesis became Universities in the Age of Reform, 1800–1870: Durham, London and King’s College (2018), and Sam Brewitt-Taylor, whose thesis was published as Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties (2018).

Forthcoming books include David Lewis’ biography of Giles Gilbert Scott (RIBA), Neal Shasore’s Architecture and the public in interwar Britain (OUP), and Simeon Koole’s work on touch in Britain, 1870-1960 (Chicago).

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' (Architectural History 59 [2016]), 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).

College website: https://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/people/reverend-professor-william-whyte/