Humanities Staff

Neil Armstrong

Position
Course Leader, History

Contact
Email: narmstrong@glos.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1242 714867

Teaching
I teach nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, gender history, and the cultural and social history of modern Germany. I also contribute teaching to the MA in The Child: Language, Literature and History.

Research
My research considers the impact of broad processes of modernisation on aspects of intimate daily life, particularly in relation to secularisation, the rise of ‘consumer society’ and the growth and splintering of civil society in modern Britain.  This research began in 2000 and led to the award of a PhD in History by the University of York in 2004. My thesis was a socio-cultural study of the English Christmas in the long nineteenth century. I am currently revising the thesis for publication as a monograph entitled Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England. The book is under contract with Manchester University Press and will appear in their Studies in Popular Culture series. It examines the emergence of modern family emotions and ritualised time in relation to an expanding consumer and civil society.

The next phase of my research will be a new but related project focusing on the Anglican and nonconformist clergy in England c.1870 — c.1970. This study will take a cultural history approach to the study of the clergy, with the intention of charting changes to notions of masculinity, professional identity, community leadership, and in particular the maintenance of personal and professional authority in an age which many people believed was becoming increasingly secularised. This research will integrate the public and private lives of a still influential but under researched professional group, and fully engage in recent debates concerning the nature and extent of secularisation.

Publications

• Christmas in Nineteenth-Century England (Forthcoming, Manchester University Press, 2009)
• ‘England and German Christmas “Festlichkeit”, c.1800-1914’, German History, 26 (4) (2008), 486-503
• ‘Father(ing) Christmas: Fatherhood, Gender and Modernity in Victorian and Edwardian England’ in T. L. Broughton and H. Rogers (eds), Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2007), 96-110
• ‘Christmas in Nineteenth Century Britain and America: A Historiographical Overview’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (1) (2004), 118-25