Rate My Professor Martin Francis

Martin Francis is the Professor of War and History in the Department of History at the University of Sussex, a position he assumed in 2015 as the inaugural holder of the chair. He earned his BA from the University of Manchester in 1985 and his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1994, with a thesis titled 'Labour policies and socialist ideas: the example of the Attlee government, 1945–1951'. Before joining Sussex, Francis served as the Henry R. Winkler Professor of Modern History at the University of Cincinnati from 2003 to 2015. Earlier appointments included positions at Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Francis's research interests center on twentieth-century British history, particularly gender history with an emphasis on masculinity in modern Europe and the United States, alongside the cultural history of war, emotions, film, and fashion. He also explores histories of British politics. His major publications include the monograph The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2008), which was runner-up for the Longman-History Today Prize; Ideas and Policies under Labour, 1945–1951: Building a New Britain (Manchester University Press, 1997); and the co-edited volume The Conservatives and British Society, 1880–1990 (University of Wales Press, 1996). Other notable works encompass Empire, Celebrity and Excess: King Farouk of Egypt and British Culture, 1936–1965 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and articles such as 'Tears, Tantrums and Bared Teeth: The Emotional Economy of Three Conservative Prime Ministers, 1951–1964' (Journal of British Studies, 2002), 'The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity' (Historical Journal, 2002), and 'Attending to Ghosts: Some Reflections on the Disavowals of British Great War Historiography' (Twentieth Century British History, 2014). His scholarship has advanced understandings of political ideologies, emotional histories, and gendered experiences in modern Britain and beyond.