British Scholar is proud to present the July 2007 Scholar of the Month
Martin Francis.  Francis is the Henry R. Winkler Associate
Professor of Modern History at the University of Cincinnati.  His
published works include:

- Ideas and Policies under Labour, 1945-51 (New York:  St. Martin's
Press, 1997)

- The Conservatives and British Society, 1880-1990 (Cardiff:  University
of Wales Press, 1996)

- The Flyer in Love and War:  Men of the Royal Air Force and British
Culture, 1939-45 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
1.  Where, when, and why did you become interested in British history?

MF:  I’ve loved history for as long as I can remember, and, growing up in
Britain, British history was obviously that which was most immediately
accessible to me.  I was privileged in being born in a county – Norfolk – where
the past features dramatically in the landscape, whether it be in the form of the
ramparts of Roman forts, the towers of medieval churches, nineteenth-century
rural workhouses or the overgrown runways of World War Two airbases.  I was
equally fortunate in having parents who indulged my passion for the past by
uncomplainingly taking me to prehistoric remains, ruined castles, and vintage
air displays when I was a child.  Oddly, however, as an undergraduate I
specialized in everything other than British history, and, if my language skills
had been better, I would probably have become a historian of modern
Germany or of the medieval period.

2.  Who most influenced your academic development?

MF:  I was an undergraduate at the University of Manchester in the early
1980s.  Looking back, I’m now struck by how conservative the curriculum was.  
Gender and culture had yet to establish themselves, and there was still a
strong, quasi-Marxist, insistence on the primacy of economics in social
change. That said, I was fortunate to be taught by a cluster of genuinely
inspirational tutors, such as Ian Kershaw, Terence Ranger and Alan Forrest,
who, even now, remain my models for how to conduct an undergraduate
seminar or lecture.  As a graduate student in Oxford, researching socialism
and the Labour Party between 1945 and 1951, I was extremely fortunate to
work under the supervision of Kenneth Morgan, whose pioneering study of the
Attlee government had just been published, constituting the first real attempt to
historicize a period of British history which had previously been abdicated to
political mythologizers, journalists and political scientists.  In the last two
decades, I have obviously been influenced by many historians (and also
scholars from adjacent fields), many of whom have been colleagues as well as
mentors, but many of whom I have never met in person. They are, unfortunately,
too numerous to list here. If I had to single out one individual, it would have to
be Stephen Brooke (currently Professor of History at York University in
Ontario), who was my exact contemporary at Oxford. In the two decades since
we first met, his writings on twentieth-century Britain have consistently inspired
me through their scholarship and eloquence, and his friendship has given me
the courage to wholeheartedly embrace a cultural turn in our work which neither
of us would have anticipated when we began our careers as conventional
political historians.

3.  If you hadn’t become a historian what career path would you have chosen?

MF:  I did briefly consider a political career, and it’s rather alarming to see how
many of my graduate student contemporaries have subsequently become
government ministers.

4.  What project are you currently working on?

MF:  I have just completed a manuscript for a full-length book entitled The
Flyer: Men of the Royal Air Force and British Culture, 1939-1945, under
contract with Oxford University Press. While there has been an enormous
amount written about the wartime RAF, this is the first sustained account of
their place in British culture, using lives and representations of aircrew to
contribute to our understanding of gender, class, national identity, emotional
culture and popular memory in twentieth-century Britain.  I particularly hope that
the book will make an important intervention in the history of modern British
masculinity, by stressing how, in spite of the pressures of military obligation
and the attractions of the all-male camaraderie of service life, young flyers
remained wedded to identities which were rooted in the discourses of
heterosexual romance, male-female companionship and domesticity.  With a
first draft of The Flyer completed, I’m taking time to reflect on my next major
project.  I’m attracted to the possibility of writing a cultural history of the Eighth
Army’s war in North Africa and Italy, in the context of the eclipse of the British
Empire.  In the short term I’m researching an article on the reception of
continental film in 1950s Britain, using this case study to question entrenched
assumptions (which are regularly asserted, but rarely tested) about British
cultural antipathy towards the rest of Europe in this period.

5.  Of your academic projects, which one has proven to be most fulfilling?

MF:  It might sound like a cliché, but I’ve found all my projects exciting and
rewarding, albeit in very different ways.  Writing about Cecil Beaton’s wartime
photography was an interesting departure for me, allowing me for the first time
to consider the relationship between aesthetics and politics. The
interdisciplinary approach adopted in The Flyer gave me scholarly sanction to
indulge my private pleasures of watching 1940s British feature films and
reading middlebrow fiction.  However, in retrospect, I see my two pieces which
dealt with the relationship between party politics and the ‘emotional economy’
of Britain in the 1940s and 1950s as a critical moment in my scholarly career.  
They were originally intended as the first instalment of a larger comparison of
the emotional styles of British and American politics (prompted, in part, by
wanting to reflect on the apparent collapse of the legendary British ‘stiff-upper
lip’ in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in 1997), a project I later
abandoned.  However, I like to feel that they did make some minor contribution
to collapsing the boundaries between the histories of culture and politics in
twentieth-century Britain, or at least offered an example of the rewards to be
gained from looking at established narratives from unfamiliar perspectives.

6.  Where do you see the field of British history moving towards in the next few
years?

MF:  I feel I can only comment on my area of expertise, the twentieth century,
and even here I would be reluctant to claim any significant authority. I still sense
a tremendous gulf between the scholarship being produced in the UK and that
emerging in the USA. Work being produced by US-based scholars is usually
much more methodologically and conceptually innovative, partly because the
precarious status of British history in the US academy requires scholars to be
more comparative and more imaginative. The regular access UK-based
scholars have to archives ensures their work is always highly impressive in
terms of its empirical grounding, but the relative security engendered from
writing in a field which is so dominant in UK History Departments has produced
an unfortunate conservatism, with scholars, particularly those working on post-
1945, content to remain within familiar and stagnant paradigms. Looking
across the work being produced on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s difficult to
detect a clear pattern.  There seems to be an increased interest in the 1960s,
in particular the links between the state, civil society and social change in that
decade.  I think the emerging frontier of research is that which builds on the
‘new imperial history’ but which uses post-foundational approaches to consider
Britain from a globalized perspective which is not limited by the formal
territorialization of British imperial dominion. In particular, studying the cultural
exchanges between Britain on one hand and China, Japan or Latin America on
the other, will offer exciting new insights into the development of metropolitan
identities.  

7.  What advice do you have for graduate students and beginning academics
about finding a topic of interest and publishing on it?

MF:  Clearly much of the advice one offers graduate students and beginning
academics has to be of a tactical or instrumentalist nature.  For example,
patterns in the job market in the last decade would suggest the benefits of
working on topics with a focus not confined to metropolitan Britain.  However, I
also genuinely believe that the most impressive job candidates are those who
are enthused by their subject, and wish to share that engagement and
enthusiasm with others, whether they be colleagues or students.  Find a topic
which you are seriously passionate about. Completion of a doctorate and a
first monograph will take up a decade of your life, and involve considerable
sacrifices for yourself and your loved ones. When the going gets tough, you
need to be able to draw on that enthusiasm and self-belief which brought you to
your topic in the first place.
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Scholar of the Month
July 2007