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February 2016
Vic Gatrell (or V.A.C. Gatrell) is a prize-winning British historian. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
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Vic Gatrell (or V.A.C. Gatrell) is a prize-winning British historian. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Born to working-class immigrant Londoners in South Africa, Gatrell went to state schools in Pietermaritzburg and Port Elizabeth and then to Rhodes University, where he graduated with first-class Honours and won an Elsie Ballot scholarship to Cambridge. At St John's College he took first-class honours in history and completed his Ph.D. on 'The Commercial Middle Class in Manchester 1820–1857', before becoming a research fellow and later a teaching fellow and tutor of Gonville and Caius College. At the same time he became a lecturer and then Reader in British Social and Economic history in the University of Cambridge History Faculty. [1] He co-edited The Historical Journal , 1976–1986. He became Professor of British History at the University of Essex 2003–2009, but returned to Cambridge in 2009 as a professorial Life Fellow of Caius: he and his wife have lived there since 1970.
His autobiography explains that in Cambridge his lectures and writing 'bypassed the kings, aristocrats, bishop and captains of industry and empire that fascinated most of my Faculty colleagues'. Instead, he found himself 'turning into a historian of the common people.' [2] Gatrell is among the pioneer scholars who have worked on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories of crime, punishment and emotions, and the histories of 'impolite' art and visual satire.
His The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994) won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize, and was nominated as one of the HistoricalCanon in the Times Higher Education Supplement, 2010. It is a seminal study of changing attitudes to and emotions about capital punishment across a period of profound cultural change, and is still in print.
His City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London (Atlantic, 2006) is a study of satirical caricature and manners from 1780 to 1830. It was joint winner of Britain's premier history prize, the Wolfson Prize for History. [3] It also won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, [4] was shortlisted for the Authors' Club Banister Fletcher Award for Art History, and was listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction (now the Baillie Gifford Prize). [5]
His The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age (Allen Lane and Penguin, 2013) is a history of 'proto-bohemian' Covent Garden and the 'lower' art world in eighteenth-century London. It argues for the significance of the arts that celebrated 'real life' in that era. It was shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History.
Each of these books has resulted in extensive television and radio contributions and book festival talks. In 2010 Alastair Lawrence's BBC4 television series 'Rude Britannia' was underpinned by Gatrell's 'City of Laughter'. [6]
Gatrell's Conspiracy on Cato Street: Liberty and Revolution in Regency London was published by Cambridge University Press in April 2022 and was anticipated in his 2020 lecture on the Cato Street Conspiracy for Gresham College. [7] The book was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and was listed as a best book of 2022 by History Today and the Daily Telegraph. [8]
His Farewell the Jacarandas: Growing up in Apartheid South Africa: A Cambridge Historian's Memoir was self-published on Amazon in 2024.
The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize is awarded to the best work of non-fiction of historical content covering a period up to and including World War II, and published in the year of the award. The books are to be of high literary merit, but not primarily academic. The prize is organized by the English PEN. Marjorie Hessell-Tiltman was a member of PEN during the 1960s and 1970s; on her death in 1999 she bequeathed £100,000 to the PEN Literary Foundation to found a prize in her name. Each year's winner receives £2,000.
Richard James Overy is a British historian who has published on the history of World War II and Nazi Germany. In 2007, as The Times editor of Complete History of the World, he chose the 50 key dates of world history.
The Ascension Parish Burial Ground, formerly known as the burial ground for the parish of St Giles and St Peter's, is a cemetery off Huntingdon Road in Cambridge, England. Many notable University of Cambridge academics are buried there, including three Nobel Prize winners.
Richard Peter Treadwell Davenport-Hines is a British historian and literary biographer, and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
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Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Roel Sterckx FBA is a Flemish-British sinologist and anthropologist. He is the Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Clare College.
Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.
Charlotte Higgins, is a British writer and journalist.
David Reynolds, is a British historian. He is Emeritus Professor of International History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Founded in 1921, English PEN is one of the world's first non-governmental organisations and among the first international bodies advocating for human rights. English PEN was the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers' association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. The President of English PEN is Margaret Busby, succeeding Philippe Sands in April 2023. The Director is Daniel Gorman. The Chair is Ruth Borthwick.
Gonville and Caius College, often referred to simply as Caius, is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1348 by Edmund Gonville, it is the fourth-oldest of the University of Cambridge's 31 colleges and one of the wealthiest. In 1557, it was refounded by John Caius, an alumnus and English physician.
Toby Alexander Howard Wilkinson, is an English Egyptologist and academic. After studying Egyptology at the University of Cambridge, he was Lady Wallis Budge Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ's College, Cambridge and then a research fellow at the University of Durham. He became a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 2003. He was Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Lincoln from 2017 to 2021, and then Vice Chancellor of Fiji National University from January 2021 to December 2021. Since 2022, he has been Fellow for Development at Clare College, Cambridge.
Cyprian Broodbank, is a British archaeologist and academic. Since October 2014, he has been Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. From 2010 to 2014, he was Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at University College London.
Avi Shlaim is an Israeli and British historian of Iraqi Jewish descent. He is one of Israel's "New Historians", a group of Israeli scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of Zionism and Israel.
The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age is a 2013 book by the British writer and academic Vic Gatrell.
Edward Wilson-Lee is an English literature academic at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and a specialist in the literature and the history of the book in the early modern period.
Sujit Sivasundaram is a British Sri Lankan historian and academic. He is currently professor of world history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge.
Clair Wills,, is a British academic specialising in 20th-century British and Irish cultural history and literature. Since 2019, she has been King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. After studying at the Somerville College, Oxford, she taught at the University of Essex and Queen Mary University of London. She was then Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Chair of Irish Letters at Princeton University from 2015 to 2019, before moving to Cambridge.
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