Prof Matthew McCormack

Matthew developed an interest in British history as an undergraduate at York and as a postgraduate and ESRC postdoctoral fellow at Manchester. He lectured at the universities of Manchester and Sheffield.

Matthew arrived in Northampton in 2004 and is now Professor of History and Head of the Graduate School. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

He edited Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2015-20) and is President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Matthew built on his doctoral work by focusing upon the wider relationships between politics, war and masculinity in modern Britain. His first book, The Independent Man (2005), explored the ways in which political and personal freedom were conceived of in terms of ‘manly independence’, particularly in relation to the vote. He examined this further in a textbook, Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688-1928 (2019).

Matthew has also worked on the social and cultural history of the military in the long eighteenth century. He explored the themes of gender and citizen soldiering in Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (2015). More recently, he has focused on material culture, thinking about shoes in relation to masculinity and the body. His latest book is Shoes and the Georgian Man (2025).

Matthew also conducts pedagogical research and co-edited Innovations in Teaching History: Eighteenth-Century Studies in Higher Education (2024).

Kathrina Perry

Philanthropy in the Northampton boot and shoe industry

Hilary Hillman

The development of Earls Barton in the nineteenth century

Melanie O'Brien

Masculinity and the Irish soldier in the nineteenth century

Emma Tyler

Women and property in eighteenth-century Britain

Matthew teaches on a range of modules relating to his research on British history:

• Politics and Society in Britain since 1945
• United States: War and Society, 1610-2020
• Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1760-1918
• Narrating the Nation: Rethinking Modern British History
• History Research Methods