Professor Glen O'Hara

Professor of Modern and Contemporary History

School of History, Philosophy and Culture

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Phone number: +44 (0)1865 484166

Email: glen.ohara@brookes.ac.uk

Location: Tonge Building, T535

Glen O'Hara teaches across a range of Oxford Brookes courses. These chiefly concern governance and national identity in modern Britain, both in its domestic and international aspects. His second year course on 'Modern Britain', and his third year courses on 'Anglo-American Relations' and 'Britain and the Sea' deal with the interaction between state and people, and between governments and the outside world, in the modern age.

Professor O'Hara was at Oxford University as an undergraduate and a postgraduate between 1993 and 1997, where he won the Gladstone Prize for History and Politics. After working as a journalist at The Independent, he moved back into academia at University College London, where he completed a PhD in 2002. In 2001 he was appointed Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Bristol, where he spent a year before moving to New College, Oxford, as Lecturer in Modern History. He moved to Oxford Brookes in January 2005. He also serves on the International Advisory Board of Reinvention: A Journal of Undergraduate Research, which aims to encourage students to pursue their own research interests by publishing articles based on original undergraduate work.

You can watch his May 2018 Inaugural Lecture as a Professor here, and you can listen to or download a podcast of the lecture here:

Teaching

Modules taught

Undergraduate

U67724, Politics, Society and Culture in Modern Britain
U67873, Anglo-American Relations in the Twentieth Century
U67778, Blue, White and Green Nation: Britain and the Sea since 1600

Postgraduate

MA Module P67566, Britain and Europe, 1950-1997
This optional MA module follows the UK's often-troubled relationship with the country's European neighbours, from Britain's first rejection of the Coal and Steel Community to ultimate accession to the European Economic Community, and then on to the country's semi-detached role in the 1990s.

Supervision

PhD supervision

George Gosling, 'Co-Ordinating Diversity: The Mixed Economy of Healthcare in Bristol, 1918-48' (completed in September 2011).
Catherine Flinn, '"In Spite of Planning": Reconstructing Britain's Blitzed Cities, 1945-54'' (completed in December 2011).
Nicholas Saunders, 'The Suez Crisis and Britain's European Allies' (completed in May 2015).
Jenny Wright, 'Female Consultants in the National Health Service since 1947' (completed in May 2016).
Melanie Bashor, 'Engineering Tolerance: The Origins of Multicultural Education Policies in the Atlantic World, c.1941-c.1988' (completed in June 2016).
Cat Rushmore (as second supervisor to Dr Viviane Quirke), 'Chemicals and their Users in the British Home: From the 1930s to the 1960s' (completed in January 2017).
Emily Stacey (jointly supervised with Dr James Cooper), 'Preparing for Power: Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Visits as Leader of the Opposition' (completion expected in 2019/20).

Research

Professor O'Hara is primarily interested in British central governments' economic and social policies, focusing especially on the period since the First World War, and has written and edited a number of books on this subject. In 2012 he published another full-length monograph on this theme, entitled Governing Post-War Britain: The Paradoxes of Progress (2012), and he has just published The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain (2017). He writes regularly on current affairs for a range of periodicals and blogs. Professor O'Hara can be followed on Twitter as @gsoh31, and he blogs in a personal capacity at the website 'Public Policy and the Past'.

Professional information

Conferences

Conferences organised since 2001

'The Management of Scarce Resources: Space, Time, History', Oxford Brookes University, November 2016
'Promoting Engagement with the Teaching of Economic History', Oxford Brookes University, March 2012.
'Health Care and the People', Glasgow Caledonian University, January 2009.
'Numbers, Norms and the People: Statistics and the Public Sphere in Modern Britain', Oxford Brookes University, September 2008.
Interdisciplinary conference on the Wilson governments of 1964-1970, New College, Oxford, June 2003.

Conference papers (selected since 2001)

‘The Intellectuals’ Ideal: British Views of Scandinavia in the 1950s and 1960s’, University of Oxford Modern European History Research Centre/ University of Oslo Forum for Contemporary History Workshop, Oxford, May 2006.
‘Numbers, Experts and Ideas: International Organisations, International Surveys and Perceptions of the Outside World in Britain, c.1950-1970', Economic History Society Annual Conference, Exeter, March 2007.
‘Attempts to Reform and Modernise Britain's State-Owned Enterprises and Manufacturing Industries, 1951-1979', Fondazione Instituto per la Riconstruzione Industriale Conference on State-Owned Enterprise, Rome, May 2008.
‘Economic Advice and the British Government in Sterling's “Crisis Decade”, 1961-1969', History of Economics as History of Science Spring Workshop, ENS Cachan, Paris, June 2010.
‘Accounting for Political Discontent in Post-War Britain’, Western Conference on British Studies Fall Conference, Austin, Texas, September 2010.
‘Green, White and Blue Nation: Britain, the Sea and National Identity since 1600’, National Maritime Museum Centre for Imperial and Maritime Studies Annual Public Lecture, Greenwich, September 2010.
‘Sir Alec Cairncross: Economics as Administrative Art’, History of Political Economy Group Fall Conference, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, October 2010.
‘Paradoxes and Complexities in British Economic and Social Policy after the Second World War’, Cambridge University Seminar on Modern Economic and Social History, Cambridge, January 2011.
‘Planning Timeframes in British Government, 1961-1973’, German Historical Institute Conference on 'Time, Futures and Politics in West Germany and Britain: From the 1960s to the 1980s', London, March 2011.
‘“The Turn to the Sea”: Historians and the Recent Recrudescence of Britain’s “Blue Water” History’, National Museum of the Royal Navy Conference on ‘The Navy is the Nation’, Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, Portsmouth, April 2012.
‘The 1976 IMF Crisis: Cuts, Austerity or Growth?’, HM Treasury/ History and Policy Briefing, HM Treasury, London, December 2012.
‘Numbers, Power and Government in the “Golden Age” of Economic Growth’, The Theory and Practice of Measurement: Perspectives from Economic History and the History and Philosophy of Economics, London School of Economics, London, September 2013.
‘Socialism, Social Democracy and the British Labour Party in the 1960s’, Italian-German Historical Institute/ University of Bologna/ Gramsci Institute Conference on the Centre-Left, Bologna, October 2013
‘Positively Northern: The Idea of “Scandinavia” in British Economic and Social Policy, c.1951-c.1979’, University of Oslo Public Lecture, Oslo, October 2014.
‘British Views of the Soviet Economy, c.1950-c.1979’, Queen’s University Belfast/ Society for the Study of Labour History Conference on ‘Socialism and the Cold War in Western Europe’, Belfast, April 2015.
'What is the Role of Business in Britain’s Relationship with the EU?’, Mile End Institute/ British Academy One-Day Conference on ‘Britain and Europe: The Lessons from History’, British Academy, London, November 2015.
‘“Inadmissable and Cruel”: Fear and Risk in Britain’s Post-War Fluoride Debate’, University of Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities/ The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, March 2016.
‘Britain’s Troubled Relationship with “Europe”: Why Did the UK join the EEC, and Why is it Thinking of Leaving the EU?’, Museum of Oxford Public Lecture, Oxford, June 2016.
‘Domestic Water and the Politics of the Home in Post-War Britain’, Institute of Historical Research Contemporary British History Seminar, London, January 2017.
‘Is the Sea Still Swinging into View? Contemporary British History and the Maritime Turn’, International Security Studies Brady-Johnson Colloquium in Grand Strategy and International History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, April 2017.
‘Demons Unleashed? Why Did Brexit Happen, and What Does it Mean?’, Yale Public Lecture, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, April 2017.
‘Britain Divided: Brexit and its Consequences’, Keynote lecture, University of Northampton Conference on ‘Brexit in Context’, Northampton, July 2017.
‘“The Land with the Midas Touch”: British Perceptions of New Zealand Between the 1930s and the 1970s’, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine/ Wellcome Trust Symposium on ‘Entwined Health System Histories’, New Zealand High Commission, London, October 2017.
‘Britain, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, and the Battle Over Maritime Pollution in the 1960s and 1970s', Oxford University Transnational and Global History Seminar, Oxford, November 2017.
‘Britain’s Post-War Fluoride Debate’, Academy of Medical Sciences/ Wellcome Trust Workshop on ‘Oral Health Inequalities, Oral Hygiene Cultures: Past, Present and Future’, University of Kent, Canterbury, June 2018.
‘Politicians and Others: How Have the Reputations of Public Figures Changed over the Past Thirty Years?’, PRMoment Global Reputation Forum, Rhodes House, Oxford, July 2018.
‘The Legal, Economic and Ethical Frameworks of Water Management in Post-War Britain’, World Economic History Congress, Boston, Massachusetts, August 2018.

Further information

Consultancy

Member, Advisory Committee, UK National Archives Cabinet Papers Digitisation Project

Staff Profiles