Dr Matthew Kidd

Departmental Lecturer and Course Director for the Advanced Diploma in Local History

Biography

Dr Matthew Kidd is a Departmental Lecturer and Course Director for the Advanced Diploma in Local History. He was awarded a doctorate by the University of Nottingham in 2016, and since then has held various positions at the University of Oxford. He has taught in the Department since 2019, and has led two major projects focusing on the collection and preservation of stories and artefacts from the First and Second World Wars.

Matthew is committed to engaging a broader audience with history. He’s featured in a variety of media, including podcasts and magazines as well as appearances on Sky News, BBC Radio 5, and BBC Radio 4's Today programme. You can find him on X @englishradical.

Research Interests

Matthew's research focuses primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English history, with a particular emphasis on how 'ordinary' people interpreted and articulated political movements, parties, ideas, ideologies, and identities at the local level. His first book, The Renewal of Radicalism: Politics, Identity and Ideology in England, 1867-1924 (Manchester University Press, 2020), explored the continuity of radical traditions within the early Labour Party. In addition to his work on radicalism, he has co-edited volumes and published articles on topics including nationalism, internationalism, socialism, and local English history.

Matthew's current research builds on his interest in how ordinary people interpreted and shaped wider political and intellectual phenomena, with a sharper focus on memory and oral history. In ''Us and them': exploring social difference in an English spa town' (Oral History, 2020), he revisits interviews with former residents of Cheltenham's Lower High Street to challenge the notion of a clear working-class identity, contributing to debates on class in post-war Britain. He is currently working on several publications relating to Their Finest Hour, an Oxford-based project which he has managed since 2022 and which has produced an archive of over 25,000 crowdsourced objects and stories from the Second World War.