Brad Beaven

Brad Beaven is a Professor of Social and Cultural History and joined University of Portsmouth in 1994. Since 1990, he has published widely on urban popular culture in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His publications include Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Culture, 1850-1945 (2005, 2009 paperback edn), Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1850-1939, (2012, 2017 paperback edn) and Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfont, c. 1700-2000 (eds with Karl Bell and Rob James, 2016).

He leads the Port Towns & Urban Cultures research group which explores the social and cultural history of port towns from the eighteenth century to the modern period. His current research focuses on the sailortown district of London’s Ratcliffe Highway in the nineteenth century.

Brad teaches on the History BA (Hons) undergraduate course, specialising in popular culture and the city in the era of empire between 1800 and 1939. He also teaches on the MA in Victorian Gothic (DL) and the History Master of Research course. He has successfully supervised over 15 PhD students researching popular culture, urban and maritime history during the nineteenth and early twentieth cities. Brad is also regularly invited to externally examine PhDs.

He is one of the series editors of the Palgrave series Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History (with Joanne Begiato, Quintin Colville and Isaac Land) and serves on the board of Sage’s Coastal Studies and Society Journal that was established by the Port Town and Urban Cultures research group.

He has been appointed as a member of the ‘Experts Review College’ of the European Science Foundation and is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.