Anglia Ruskin University

Dr Jonathan Davis is a Russian historian whose particular interest is in the Soviet era and the changing nature of socialism during this period. His research focuses on Labour Party-Soviet relations, examining the ideological links which Labour had with the Soviet Union and the visits made by British Labourites to the USSR in the inter-war years.

The ways in which Soviet socialism influenced Labour's political thought was the subject of his chapter in his edited collection of essays The Labour Party and the Wider World: domestic politics, internationalism and foreign polic' (P. Corthorn and J. Davis, I. B. Tauris, 2008) and his article in Revolutionary Russia (vol. 18, 2005) assesses visits made by Labourites to Soviet Russia in 1920. He has also published on various aspects of Soviet history, including Stalin: From Grey Blur to Great Terror (Hodder Education / Philip Allan Updates, 2008).

His latest book is The Second Labour Government 1929-1931: a reappraisal (Manchester University Press, 2011). It is a co-edited collection of essays from the papers given at a very successful LHRU conference Jon jointly organised in May 2009, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of Ramsay MacDonald's second government. Jon's chapter in this book assesses the ways in which Labour dealt with the USSR and the problems this caused the party while it was in power.

---

Dr Rohan McWilliam is a social and cultural historian who works on nineteenth-century working-class history. An abiding theme in his work is the relationship between popular politics and popular culture.

In terms of Labour History, he has an interest in revisionist and post-revisionist approaches to class and politics, which was a theme of his first book Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England (Routledge, 1998). More recently, he has written The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (Continuum, 2007) and edited (with Kelly Boyd) The Victorian Studies Reader (Routledge, 2007). He is reviews editor and a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Victorian Culture. He is also a member of the editorial board of the book series Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies (University Press of New England).

 

---

Mary Joannou is Professor of Literary History and Women's Writing at Anglia Ruskin University and is interested in working-class women's writing, autobiography, Chartism, the women's suffrage movement, the history of the Communist Party and the literature and history of the 1930s. She is a former Convener of the Women's History Network, (a flourishing association which brings together all those interested in women's history inside and outside academia), and has served on the editorial group of 'Women's History Magazine'.

Mary has published on many nineteenth and twentieth-century socialist women writers including Nancy Cunard, who edited the pioneering Negro Anthology in 1934, and has organised colloquia on the liberal-left women writers of the inter-war period including Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson and Rosamond Lehmann. She was especially pleased to have been instrumental in bringing Ellen Wilkinson's forgotten novel, 'Clash', set during the General Strike of 1926, back into print and to have co-edited an early edited volume of critical essays on the women's suffrage movement which has recently been reissued.

---

Dr Richard Carr is a Research Fellow in History at Anglia Ruskin University. His latest book, Veteran MPs and Conservative Politics in the Aftermath of the Great War, surveys the post 1918 careers of the 448 men who fought in the Great War, subsequently became Tory members of parliament, and discusses how Labour responded to the electoral threat they posed.

With Dr Bradley Hart, he is editing a volume - The Foundations of the British Conservative Party: Essays on Conservatism from Lord Salisbury to David Cameron - to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2013. His essays in this book include ones touching on Labour's reticence towards the concept of European union after 1945, and a conclusion which discusses Labour's handling of the economic crisis of 2008. He contributed an essay to Jon Davis et al.'s volume on The Second Labour Government and is currently researching a co-authored biography of the Wilson era minister, Alice Bacon.