Research Affiliate
Martin Hewitt is a social and cultural historian with interests in questions of identity and temporalities. His current work focuses on the role of generations in nineteenth-century Britain, exploring the extent to which a culture lacking in strong or stable generational self-consciousness could still demonstrate powerful structuring forces of generational difference. His most recent work has involved an extensive study of responses to the work of Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theories in the 50 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, forthcoming as Darwinism’s Generations (OUP, 2024). With Pieter Francois (Oxford) and Helen Kingstone (RHUL) he has been involved in a British Academy funded project looking at how such questions can be explored via the linkage of demographic and literary sources, and also in preparing a large RCUK grant application on ‘Generations without Generationalism, 1851-1921’.
After undergraduate work at Oriel College, Oxford, and study at the Universities of Warwick and New Brunswick, he completed a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford, under the supervision of Asa Briggs, and has held posts at the London School of Economics, the University of Hull, Leeds Trinity University, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Huddersfield, and most recently at Anglia Ruskin University where he was Dean of Arts, Law and Social Sciences, and then Professor of History.
His published work has focused on Victorian Britain. His most recent work includes The Victorians. A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2023), Making Social Knowledge in the Industrial City (Routledge 2020), and The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain (Bloomsbury, 2014). He also edited The Victorian World (Routledge, 2012). He was founding editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture, first Hon Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies, and between 2020 and 2023 was Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
