Gavin Schaffer

I joined the School of History and Cultures as Lecturer in British history in September 2010. At the beginning of my career, I studied for my PhD under the supervision of Tony Kushner at the Parkes Centre for Jewish/Non Jewish Studies at the University of Southampton, where I remain an Honorary Fellow. Prior to joining this department, I worked for seven years as lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Portsmouth.  Before starting my present post as the University of Birmingham’s Director of Postgraduate Studies, I worked for two years as the University’s Director of the College of Arts and Law Graduate School.

I am a social and cultural historian specialising in the history of race and immigration in the twentieth century. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which racial ideas have been formulated and disseminated. I have spent several years researching the place of race in science, research which led to my 2008 monograph, Racial Science and British Society. Subsequently, I have written a monograph about racism and the media, looking in detail at television’s attempts to deal with multiculturalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside my work on race, I am also interested in the history of immigrants and minorities, Jewish history, the history of comedy, and the social history of modern warfare, especially the Second World War.