Senior Lecturer
<p>My research interests are centred on responses to, and perceptions of, industrial and urban life in nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between political economy, social investigation and the everyday experience of business and work.</p><p><em>‘Life writing and Victorian culture’</em><br />This research considers how middle-class men emerged as a historical force in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the way economic and social transition were understood through life writing and the different types of temporalities used to explain continuity and change.</p><p><em>‘Capital and labour: Manufacturing consensus’</em><br />This project examines the use of capital and labour as mechanisms for describing capitalism and organising industry in nineteenth-century England. It explores the co-existence of the free market, self-help and social mobility alongside more rigid ideas of community and class.</p><p><em>‘Work in Nineteenth Century London’</em><br />A third aspect of research, initially funded through the Open University’s Research Development Fund and the Economic History Society, explores the nature of work in London, the links between production and consumption and the status of the small master who is neither capitalist nor artisan. This area of research is currently being developed into a study of the everyday logic of the late nineteenth century metropolitan manufacturing economy.</p><h2> </h2>
<p>I am Associate Dean for Curriculum, Qualifications and Partnerships in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and a Senior Lecturer in the History department.</p><p>I joined the OU in 2000 after research and teaching posts at the University of Portsmouth and the University of Chichester including a British Academy funded project,‘Autobiography and the Victorian middle-class’. I have continued to develop research and teaching on nineteenth-century British socio-economic and cultural history. Working at the OU has enabled me to pursue interests in inter-disciplinarity, opening up traditional topics to new methods, questions and approaches, and helping make British history relevant to a broad range of students.</p>
Dr Donna Loftus
Loftus
Donna
D.
376d50ddd0d2899b81e16cce5cf5dc94f970b700
Donna Loftus
D. Loftus
Dr
<p>I am Associate Dean for Curriculum, Qualifications and Partnerships in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and a Senior Lecturer in the History department.</p><p>I joined the OU in 2000 after research and teaching posts at the University of Portsmouth and the University of Chichester including a British Academy funded project,‘Autobiography and the Victorian middle-class’. I have continued to develop research and teaching on nineteenth-century British socio-economic and cultural history. Working at the OU has enabled me to pursue interests in inter-disciplinarity, opening up traditional topics to new methods, questions and approaches, and helping make British history relevant to a broad range of students.</p>