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 (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.

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

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

Unlocking the Church (Oxford University Press, 2017)

The Victorians built tens of thousands of churches in the hundred years between 1800 and 1900. Wherever you might be in the English-speaking world, you will be close to a Victorian built or remodelled ecclesiastical building. Contemporary experience of church buildings is almost entirely down to the zeal of Victorians such as John Henry Newman, Samuel Wilberforce and Augustus Pugin, and their ideas about the role of architecture in our spiritual life and well-being.

In Unlocking the Church, William Whyte explores a forgotten revolution in social and architectural history and in the history of the Church. He details the architectural and theological debates of the day, explaining how the Tractarians of Oxford and the Ecclesiologists of Cambridge were embroiled in the aesthetics of architecture, and how the Victorians profoundly changed the ways in which buildings were understood and experienced. No longer mere receptacles for worship, churches became active agents in their own rights, capable of conveying theological ideas and designed to shape people's emotions.

These church buildings are now a challenge: their maintenance, repair or repurposing are pressing problems for parishes in age of declining attendance and dwindling funds. By understanding their past, unlocking the secrets of their space, there might be answers in how to deal with the legacy of the Victorians now and into the future.

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

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 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).

Buildings, Landscapes, and Regimes of Materiality

Journal article
|
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
Introducing Thomas Rickman

Journal article
|
Studies in Victorian Art and Architecture
The Phantasm of an University: imagining new landscapes in post-revolutionary Britain and Ireland

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

Conference paper
|
Danish Royal Academy
‘Private benefit, public finance? Student funding in late-twentieth-century Britain’

Chapter
|
Welfare and Social Policy in Britain since 1880: essays in honour of Jose Harris
‘University Libraries’

Chapter
|
Building for Special Collections
‘Architecture’

2019
|
Chapter
|
A Cultural History of Objects, Volume 5: Age of Industry (AD 1760-1900)
‘Old Corruption and New Horizons, 1714 – 1836’,

2019
|
Chapter
|
Westminster Abbey: Church, State and Beyond
The too clever by half people and parliament

2018
|
Journal article
|
Parliamentary History

© The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust 2018. The role of intellectuals in shaping pressure on parliament has often been neglected and still more frequently downplayed. Even intellectuals themselves have doubted their own political importance; hence Walter Bagehot’s observation that ‘the too clever by half people, who live in Bohemia, ought to have no more influence in parliament, than they have in England, and they can scarcely have less’. This article considers what it is to be an intellectual in politics – and what political role intellectuals played in Victorian Britain. It concludes that intellectuals were crucial in helping to define the nature of parliament and of the political process, articulating an ideology which shaped the ways in which other groups put pressure on parliament.
Which elite? Whose university? Britain’s civic university tradition and the importance of place

2018
|
Journal article
|
Scientia Danica