Professor Bob Harris
Harry Pitt Fellow & Tutor in Modern History and Senior Treasurer of Amalgamated Clubs
Professor of British History
Education
BA (Durham), MA DPhil (Oxford)
I joined Oxford in 2006, having spent 13 years at the University of Dundee where I held a personal chair in British history.
My research interests are quite diverse, but focus on the political, cultural and social history of Britain and Ireland in the long eighteenth century. My early work was on the rise of the newspaper press and the relationships between print culture and politics. This led me to a broader interest in the political culture of the British Isles in the central decades of the eighteenth century. My published work on these themes includes the books Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France 1600-1800 (1996) and Politics and the Nation: Britain in the mid eighteenth century (2002). Whilst in Scotland, I developed a keen interest in Scottish history, notably the impact of the French revolution on Scottish politics and society, and on British political economy in the eighteenth century. My work on this includes the book The Scottish People and the French Revolution (2008). More recently, I have been interested in the growth and development of provincial Scottish towns in the later Georgian period, and the impact and diffusion of enlightenment culture and values. In 2014 the results of this work were published in The Scottish Town in the Age of the Enlightenment, 1740-1820, which won the Saltire Society’s Scottish Book of the Year prize for 2014. My most recent book is a thematic biography of the radical aristocrat, Lord Daer entitled A Tale of Three Cities: The Life and Times of Lord Daer, 1763-1794 (2015). I am now working on a project on gambling and attitudes towards risk in Britain and the British empire between c.1660 and 1850.