Dr William Whyte
Dr William Whyte
Tutorial Fellow in History
Email: Dr William Whyte
Teaching Interests
I teach British and European history since about 1660 for both the first year course (Prelims) and papers taken in the second and third years (Finals). For Prelims I also teach Approaches to History and Historiography, as well as a paper on Europe in the Nineteenth Century. For Finals I teach Disciplines of History, a further subject on Victorian Thought, and a special subject on English Architecture Between 1660 and 1720. At graduate level, I teach courses on the theory and methods of History and on global religious movements in the twentieth century. I also supervise a number of masters and doctoral students working in areas closely related to my own research.
Research Interests
I am interested in things and places – how they are made, what they mean to people, and how historians can use them to illuminate the fairly recent past. Although I am a historian by training, my work is deliberately interdisciplinary. My first book was on the Victorian architect and author, T. G. Jackson, and sought to show how his approach to architecture was used by educational reformers to exemplify their reforms and express their identity.
Since then, I’ve co-edited four books on religion, nationalism, and modern British history more generally. I have also written articles and essays on architectural history, town planning, the media, and intellectual life in Britain, Europe, and West Africa.
Following a two-year period of research leave funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I am just finishing my second major project - a history of Britain’s modern universities. Redbrick: Britain’s New World of Universities will be an attempt to bring social and architectural history together and will be the first full scale history of Britain’s higher education to be written for a generation.
