Staff Profile

  • Matthew developed an interest in British history as an undergraduate at York and as postgraduate and ESRC postdoctoral fellow at Manchester. His PhD on the idea of ‘independence’ in Georgian England started out as a study in political culture, but increasingly became focused on issues of gender as he tried to understand the role of masculinity in debates about citizenship.

    Matthew arrived in Northampton in 2004 and is now Associate Professor and course leader for MA History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Higher Education Academy.

  • Matthew teaches on a range of modules relating to his research on British history:

    • Introduction to Women’s History
    • Power and Protest in British Society
    • Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1760-1918

    Matthew is also course leader for MA History and supervises PhD projects.

  • Matthew built on his doctoral work by focusing upon the wider relationships between politics, war and masculinity in modern Britain. His first book, The Independent Man, explored the ways in which political and personal freedom were conceived of in terms of ‘manly independence’, particularly in relation to the vote.

    More recently, Matthew has worked on the social and cultural history of the military in the long eighteenth century. He explores the themes of gender and citizen soldiering in his latest book, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England.

    He sits on the executive committee of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and edits the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

  • For publications, projects, datasets, research interests and activities, view Matthew McCormack’s research profile on Pure, the University of Northampton’s Research Explorer.