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Prof Joe Moran

Humanities and Social Science

Faculty of Arts Professional and Social Studies

Email: J.Moran@ljmu.ac.uk

Telephone: 0151 231 5120

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ORCID

I have been, and sort of still am, a cultural historian focusing on Britain in the very recent past. My interest was/is in the seemingly banal and uninteresting details of the everyday, what the German critic Siegfried Kracauer calls 'a life that belongs to no one and exhausts everyone'.

My books in this vein are Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime (2007), a cultural history of daily habits in Britain in the postwar years, inspired by the work of Mass Observation; On Roads: A Hidden History (2009), a circuitous journey around the British motorway system; and Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (2013), the story of watching television from Baird's first demonstration in Selfridge's in 1925 to the switching off of the analogue signal in 2012.

More recently I've experimented with a more personal and essayistic non-fiction writing, particularly in Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness (2016), First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing ... and Life (2018) and If You Should Fail: A Book of Solace (2020).

Alongside my academic writing, I've written for newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, Times Higher Education, BBC History Magazine, the TLS and others.

I teach a wide range of courses, from first year introductory courses to Masters level. I especially like teaching poetry and short pieces that require close reading, such as on the module Poetry Matters and my own module Short Cuts: Writing in Brief. I like discussing with students how sentences are put together, and helping them with their own writing.

I'm interested in supervising PhDs in the following areas especially: postwar and contemporary British cultural history; histories and theories of everyday life; and contemporary writing, especially nonfiction and poetry.

I blog at joemoran.net and tweet @joemoransblog

Degrees

1996, University of Sussex, UK, PhD
1992, University of Sussex, UK, MA, Twentieth Century English Literature
1991, University of Leeds, United Kingdom, BA Hons, International History and Politics

Academic appointments

Professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University, 2012 - present

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