Explore our campus, including our modern accommodation and innovative course facilities on our virtual tour.

Staff Profile

  • Matthew developed an interest in British history as an undergraduate at York and as postgraduate and ESRC postdoctoral fellow at Manchester. 

    He arrived at Northampton in 2004 and is now Professor of History and Head of the Graduate School. He also leads the PGCert in Research Degree Supervision. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

  • Matthew teaches a range of modules on the BA History course. These include:

    • HIS1028 ‘United States: War and Society, 1610-2020’
    • HIS3018 ‘Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1760-1918’

    Matthew also supervises dissertations and doctoral theses in the areas of British cultural, political, gender and military history.

  • Matthew’s research has explored the history of masculinity in Britain since 1700. He has studied what it meant to be a man in ‘public’ contexts such as politics and the military, and in particular its implications for citizenship. He examined this in the books The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (2005), Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (2015) and Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688-1928 (2019).

    His current work focuses on gender in relation to the body and material culture. He explored this theme in relation to footwear in Shoes and the Georgian Man (2025).

    Matthew also conducts pedagogical research, and co-edited (with Ruth Larsen and Alice Marples), Innovations in Teaching History: Eighteenth-Century Studies in Higher Education (2024).

    Matthew edited Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2015-20) and is President of the British Society 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.