PhD Thesis

I was a graduate student in the Department of History, Classics & Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. My PhD thesis, ‘Machine Past, Machine Future: Technology in British Thought, c.1870-1914’, was supervised by Professor Daniel Pick and is available here via Ethos.

The thesis (which is reviewed here) is about understandings of machinery in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. It explores the importance of temporality in Victorian and Edwardian thinking about machines, and the role of disciplinarity in shaping the ways in which we think about technology today.

The thesis uses a wide range of sources from the period which relate to the processes of  industrialisation, to the relations between science, technology and the State, to the impact of technology in the workplace, and to the cultural representation of machines and mechanisation.

The material I examine includes the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the writings of JA Hobson, HG Wells and GK Chesterton.

My PhD research was supported by an AHRC doctoral studentship and a Birkbeck College Research Studentship.