Academic Background

I grew up just outside Scunthorpe, the 'industrial garden town'. After getting a BA in History from Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Essex I ended up as a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. From 2003 to 2008 I worked at the University of Liverpool, most recently as Senior Lecturer in British Cultural History. Then it seemed time for a change of scene... I have an obsession with mountain bikes that borders on the unhealthy.

Research Interests

I work on the cultural history of 20th century Britain, with a particular interest in gender, sexualities and selfhood. Up to now, most of my research has explored the relationship between the city, social practice and sexual identities--how modern urban culture shaped the ways in which men and women experienced, organised and understood their sexual desires and practices. Part of this was published as Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-57 by the University of Chicago Press in 2005. Queer London was awarded both the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize for the best first book on British history. Since I finished Queer London, I've started work on a couple of new projects--both of which have grown out of things I've become interested in while teaching on Britain during and after the First World War. The first of these is my take on the cultural history of the postwar decade--'People of the Aftermath: War, Sex and Culture in Roaring Twenties Britain'. The second has the working title 'The Prince of Tricksters: Netley Lucas and the Culture of Confidence in Interwar London'. In broad terms I'm interested in the profound public fascination with individuals who 'faked it' - who crossed boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity or age in masquerading as something they were not. Although the book focuses on one 'international man of mystery', it's about conmen, chancers, vamps and wannabes, and what their lives can tell us about the relationship between British culture and changing ideas of selfhood after the Great War.

Selected Publications

Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-57 (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Matt Houlbrook and H.G. Cocks (eds.), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (Palgrave, 2005).

Matt Houlbrook, ‘A Pin to See the Peep Show: Culture, Fiction and Selfhood in the Letters of Edith Thompson’, Past and Present, 207 (1) 2010.

Matt Houlbrook, 'The Man with the Powder Puff in Interwar London’, Historical Journal, 50 (1) 2007, pp. 145-171.

Matt Houlbrook and Chris Waters, ‘The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London’, History Workshop Journal, 62, 2006.

Matt Houlbrook, ‘Sexing the History of Sexuality’, History Workshop Journal, 60 (1) 2005, pp. 216-222.

Matt Houlbrook, ‘Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards: c.1900-1960’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (3) 2003, pp. 351-388.

Matt Houlbrook, ‘“Lady Austin’s Camp Boys”: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London’, Gender and History, 14 (1) 2002, pp. 31-61.

Matt Houlbrook, ‘Towards a Historical Geography of Sexuality’, Journal of Urban History, 2 (4) 2001, pp. 497-504.

Matt Houlbrook, ‘The Private World of Public Urinals: London 1918-1957’, London Journal, 25 (1) 2000, pp. 52-70.

Matt Houlbrook, ‘Daring to Speak Whose Name? Queer Cultural Politics: 1920-1967’, in Marcus Collins (ed.), The Permissive Society and its Enemies (Rivers Oram, 2008).

Matt Houlbrook, ‘For Whose Convenience? Gay Guides, Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Homosexual London: 1917–1967’, in Simon Gunn and RJ Morris (eds.), Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850 (Ashgate, 2001) pp. 165-186.