Chris Moores

I joined the University of Birmingham as a Birmingham Fellow in 2013 before becoming a Lecturer in 2018. Prior to this I was a Global Research Fellow at the University of Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study. Before that, I completed my PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2011 and spent two years there as a Teaching Fellow between 2010 and 2012.

I am Associate Editor of Contemporary British History and served as Director of Modern British Studies from the Research Centre's formation in 2014 until 2018. I also served as Academic Lead on a Heritage Lottery Funded Project entitled Selly Oak Activism which I am continuing to develop with different community groups.

My broad research interests are in Contemporary British History and the histories of social, cultural and political activism in British and transnational contexts. I have written a number of articles on the history of civil liberties activism in Britain since the 1930s and my book entitled Civil Liberties and Human Rights in Twentieth Century Britain was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 and was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize in 2018.

I am now working on the history of extra-parliamentary conservative activism in the second half of the twentieth century which examines various different short-lived, single-issue campaigns, movement organizations, quasi-party organizations as well as NGOs, voluntary associations, think tanks and charities. Work developing out of these research interests include articles on the history of Neighbourhood Watch and opposition to CND and the Greenham Women's Peace Camps which have been published in Contemporary British History and History Workshop Journal. I also edited with my colleagues Professor Matthew Hilton and Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite a collection of essays on the history of Britain in the 1980s (see below for full list of publications). 

In addition to this, I am keen to explore histories of activism in Birmingham outside formal academic outputs. Some initial work has been carried out for this in relation to the Heritage Lottery Funded Activist Selly Oak Project on which I acted as academic league and involved map-building, plaque-making, oral histories, newspaper production and walking-tours as a collaboration between volunteers, community groups, local artists and academics.