Dr Craig Griffiths

My main areas of research expertise are in the modern history of sexuality, especially queer history, and twentieth-century German History. I am particularly interested in histories of gay liberation (and queer and trans emancipation struggles in earlier and later periods); the history of human rights; the history of emotions and of psychoanalysis; and post-Holocaust memory and testimony.

My first book The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation was published with Oxford University Press in 2021. In the book, I reevaluate ways of thinking, feeling, and talking about homosexuality in the 1970s, a key period sandwiched between homosexual law reform in the late 1960s and the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. In 2022, my book won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize. To find out more, you can read a short interview on NOTCHES, watch the online book launch at the IHR, or listen to podcast interviews with the Waterloo Centre and with the New Books in History network.

My second book project explains how and why human rights discourse has been utilised to talk about sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, over the last 200 years. A Queer History of Human Rights will be a transnational history, especially focusing on the German and American contexts. In 2023, I co-authored a German-language article (with Benno Gammerl) as part of the “key texts in human rights history” series convened by the Centre for Human Rights Erlangen-Nuremberg. In the article, we explain what queer history offers human rights history - and vice versa. As in my recent article on “cultures of conservatism”, in which I bring together distinct historiographies on conservatism and on queer history that are rarely connected, I am primarily interested in showing the power of queer historical approaches to rethink twentieth-century history more broadly. The article can be viewed in German here and in English here.

A Queer History of the Twentieth Century (BA)

Queer Histories: Modern Sexuality in Historical Perspective (MA)

The Holocaust (BA)

I welcome informal approaches from anyone interested in undertaking postgraduate study at Manchester Met. I am happy to supervise work in the modern history of sexuality, queer history, twentieth-century German history, human rights history, or in many other areas of modern European history, especially histories of social protest and cultural change.

I am the Manchester Met History lead for the AHRC North-West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, which offers PhD scholarships here at Manchester Met and at 6 other regional institutions.

I currently co-supervise three PhD students: in History, in International Relations, and in Sociology.