Dr Marcus Morris

Young People and the First World War - AHRC First World War Public Engagemen Centre (Voices of War and Peace - University of Birmingham) funded project working with local youth groups assessing the impact of the First World War on young people in the Greater Manchester area.

I am heavily involved in the department’s Widening Particpation and School’s Outreach initiatives. I have delivered a number of sessions (classes, workshops, lectures) for students from a number of local schools.

Learning is a personal thing, but it is also a shared experience and this is central to my teaching. We learn from one another, it is a two-way process, and that’s what we’ll do in our classes. I hope classes will also be fun and engaging, but it’s also important we develop skills that can be used beyond the classroom. It is also important for me to get students questioning their assumptions, their ways of looking at the world, and to think about the past in different ways. 

I teach across the undergraduate and postgraduate courses we offer here at Manchester Met. I contribute to most of the core units, a number of optional units and run my own third-year unit, ‘A People’s War? Britain’s Domestic Experiences in the Second World War’. 

I supervise a number of research students across a number of topic areas. I am currently principal supervisor for the following PhD students: 

David Barrett, ‘Popular Music Hall Song Lyrics and the Lived Experience of the Urban Poor in Britain, c.1900-18’ 

Dominic Barron-Carter, ‘The Politics of Participation in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ 

Anna Wright, ‘The supporters and benefactors of the Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM): musical patronage and philanthropy in Manchester, 1891–1920’ 

I welcome proposals from students on the social, political and cultural histories of Britain and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

My work focuses on a variety of historical approaches, including labour, social, cultural, political and imperial histories, as well as taking an interdisciplinary approach. In my research I interrogate issues of class, race and empire, nationalism and internationalism, industrial relations, domestic and international politics, and Marxist theory.

My main current research project looks at the rhetoric of internationalism and British and European socialists (especially those in the Second International) in the years preceding the First World War. I am focusing in particular on how such rhetoric reflected reality, especially in the context of growing military tension, the subsequent arms race, collective calls for peace and the outbreak of conflict, especially in 1914. 

I am also working on a number of other publications, which look at various aspects of labour and socialist history, and British history more generally. 

 Online Publications:

M. Morris, ‘Manchester’s Voices of Peace’, Voices of War and Peace: AHRC Engagement Centre, 3 November 2014. http://www.voicesofwarandpeace.org/portfolio/manchesters-voices-of-peace/

M. Morris, ‘‘The first chapter’: Magna Carta and British socialism’s struggle for freedom in late Victorian and
Edwardian Britain’, Great Charter Convention Series, Politics in Spires,Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, 23 April 2015. http://politicsinspires.org/the-first-chapter-magna-carta-and-british-socialisms-struggle-for-freedom-in-late-victorian-and-edwardian-britain/

Also published at openDemocracy:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/marcus-morris/first-chapter-magna-carta-and-british-socialism%E2%80%99s-struggle-for-freedom-in-l

M. Morris, ‘‘Girls Who Would Fight’: Young Women and the Call to Arms’, Voices of War and Peace: AHRC Engagement Centre, 14 June 2017. http://www.voicesofwarandpeace.org/portfolio/girls-who-would-fight/

M.Morris, ‘Being Young: Understanding Young People’s Experiences in the First World War’, AHRC WW1 Engagement Centre Blog, 10 May 2018. http://beyondthetrenches.co.uk/