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Professor Matt Cook

Positions held:
  • Professor of Modern History, Department of History, Classics & Archaeology
  • Assistant Dean and Head of Department, Department of History, Classics & Archaeology
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  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography


    Matt Cook is a cultural historian specializing in the history of sexuality and the history of London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has a background in literary and cultural theory and strong interests in cross-disciplinary work and queer, public and community history. He is an editor of History Workshop Journal,  sits on the steering committee of the Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality (BIGS), and was director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre (2009 - 2018).


    In 2014 Matt was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy for his work at Birkbeck and in archive and community settings. He has advised on a number of community and oral history, archive and museum projects including for the Pink Singers,  the nightclub Duckie, Heritage England’s 'Pride of Place' and the Pitt Rivers Museum's 'Beyond the Binary'. He worked with the National Trust on their Prejudice and Pride year (2017), and co-authored the associated LGBTQ guidebook. He appears regularly on radio, occasionally on TV, and has acted as a consultant on a number of series and documentaries.

    Matt joined Birkbeck in 2005 and was previously a lecturer in modern history at Keele University. 

    Administrative responsibilities

    • Assistant Dean and Head of Department

    Professional activities

    Matt sits on advisory boards for research projects nationally and internationally and regularly peer reviews for academic  journals and publishers. 

    Professional memberships

    • Matt is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHS) and an member of the History Workshop Journal editorial collective

  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Matt works on the history of sexuality and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on queer histories and cultures (including queer local, community and public histories), on the history of London, and on histories of home and family.

    Research Centres and Institutes

    Research clusters and groups

    • Difference, race and inequality
    • Public History
    • Mind and body
    • Environment: global, rural, global

    Research projects

    Sexualities and Localities, c. 1965-2013.

    Funded by
    Arts and Humanities Research Council

    Historic Passions: queer history making in Britain.

    Funded by
    Leverhulme Trust
  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Supervision

    Supervisions within Birkbeck:
    8

    Matt is happy to discuss the supervision of projects in  19th- and 20th-century social, cultural and public history and especially  on queer histories and cultures, on histories of gender and sexuality, and on urban history. He is also interested in interdisciplinary projects and is happy to co-supervise with Birkbeck colleagues working in other schools and departments.


    He has supervised successful doctoral projects on:
    Queer Catholicism in the nineteenth century; The History of Euphoria; The Ghanain community in London; Literary murder in the nineteenth century sensation fiction and theatre; Folk music in post war London;
    Medical treatments for homosexuality in the post world war II period;
    Bachelor domesticities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
    Fandom and sexuality;Post-war representations of the paedophile; 
    and Anarchist communities in Britain and Italy.

    He currently supervises projects on 1980s gay radicalism; London lesbian and gay switchboard; Black queer women in interwar London and New York; and Caroline Ganley and radical women's networks in London. 

    Current doctoral researchers

    • JO BRYDON-DICKENSON
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, onwards
    • IDROMA MONTGOMERY
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
    • LEILA SELLERS
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      The Beaumont Society: Trans Cultures, Identities and Everyday Subjectivities, 1966-2004
      Description:

      This project will be the first comprehensive history of the Beaumont Society, a UK based trans support network. It will focus on the ways that members of the Society conceptualised their sense of self,  both within the organisation and in relation to other trans and cis gender people and cultures. This research will be much more than a history of the society itself but will make significant strides in historicising trans identities and experiences in the UK, exploring the ways trans people negotiated medical and health discourse alongside other ways of understanding and interpreting gender crossing in their everyday lives. These perspectives will in addition allow for reconsideration of wider themes of belonging and selfhood and the changing nature of social movements from the 1960s to the advent of the internet. Using a combination of archival research and oral history the project will be organised thematically, examining trans subjectivities through the everyday including domestic life, work, clubs and leisure, and other countercultural and political movements. The relationship of trans identities and experience to shifting gender norms will be a cross cutting theme. 

    • MATTHEW LITTLEFORD
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      Stonewall, OutRage! and their battle to occupy civic and public space under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, 1989-1997.
      Description:

      This thesis reappraises the history of Stonewall and OutRage!, arguably the two most influential British LGBTQ+ rights groups of the late 20th Century, through two specific inter-connected arguments.

       

    • RALPH DAY
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor, onwards
    • YVETTE WILLIAMS ELLIOTT
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor, onwards
      Title of thesis:
      Caroline Ganley and Networks of Public Life in London, 1900-1940

    Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

    • LEE ARNOTT
      Nature of supervision:
      Joint Principal Supervisor,
      Title of thesis:
      Deconstructing the myth of the British military masculine ideal. Military masculinities in the British Army,1960-2020
      Awarded:
      2023
    • NICK BASANNAVAR
      Nature of supervision:
      Principal Supervisor
      Title of thesis:
      History Research
      Awarded:
      2019

    Teaching

    Matt mainly teaches on the postgraduate gender and sexuality programmes, including on the modules Theorising Gender; Queer History, Queer Cultures; and Sex, Gender and the City. 

  • Publications

    Publications

    Article

    Book

    Book Section

    • Cook, Matt (2017) The nursery. In: Gorman-Murray, A. and Cook, Matt (eds.) Queering the Interior. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474262224.
    • Cook, Matt (2017) A bend in the river: queer home and heritage in a house in Hammersmith. In: Pilkey, B. and Scicluna, R.M. and Campkin, B. and Penner, B. (eds.) Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474239646.
    • Cook, Matt (2016) London, AIDS and the 1980s. In: Avery, S. and Graham, K.M. (eds.) Sex, Time and Place Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781474234924.
    • Cook, Matt (2013) Oscar Wilde’s London. In: Powell, K. and Raby, P. (eds.) Oscar Wilde in Context. Literature in Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107016132.
    • Bauer, Heike (2012) Sexology backward: Hirschfeld, Kinsey and the reshaping of sex research in the 1950s. In: Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt (eds.) Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke, Uk: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 133-149. ISBN 9780230300699.
    • Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt (2012) Introduction: Queer 1950s: rethinking sexuality in the postwar years. In: Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt (eds.) Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years. Gender and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1-10. ISBN 9780230300699.
    • Cook, Matt (2012) Warm homes in a cold climate: Rex Batten and the queer domestic. In: Bauer, Heike and Cook, Matt (eds.) Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years. Gender and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 115-130. ISBN 9780230300699.
    • Cook, Matt (2012) Squatting in history: queer pasts and the cultural turn. In: Roseneil, Sasha and Frosh, Stephen (eds.) Social Research after the Cultural Turn. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 93-109. ISBN 9780230241589.
    • Cook, Matt (2012) Queer domesticities. In: Briganti, C. and Mezei, K. (eds.) The Domestic Space Reader. Toronto, Canada: Toronto University Press. ISBN 9780802096647.
    • Cook, Matt (2011) Homes fit for homos: Joe Orton, masculinity, and the domesticated queer. In: Arnold, John H. and Brady, Sean (eds.) What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World. Genders and Sexualities in History. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230278134.
    • Cook, Matt (2009) Wilde lives: Derek Jarman and the queer eighties. In: Bristow, J. (ed.) Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend. Athens, U.S.: Ohio University Press. pp. 285-304. ISBN 9780821418376.
    • Cook, Matt (2007) From gay reform to gaydar. In: Cook, Matt (ed.) A gay history of Britain: love and sex between men since the Middle Ages. Oxford, UK: Greenwood World Publishing. pp. 178-214. ISBN 1846450020.
    • Cook, Matt (2006) Law. In: Cocks, Harry G. and Houlbrook, Matt (eds.) Palgrave advances in the modern history of sexuality. Palgrave Advances. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 64-87. ISBN 1403912904.
    • Cook, Matt (2006) Law. In: Houlbrook, Matt and Cocks, H.G. (eds.) Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9780230501805.
    • Cook, Matt (2006) Sex lives and diary writing: the journals of George Ives. In: Amigoni, D. (ed.) Life Writing and Victorian Culture. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate. pp. 195-214. ISBN 9780754635314.
    • Cook, Matt (1996) Words written without any stopping: Derek Jarman's written work. In: Wollen, R. (ed.) Derek Jarman: A Portrait. London, UK: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 9780500017234.
  • Business and community

    Business and community

    Media

    I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

    • LGBTQ histories and cultures
    • History of London

      Outreach

      Matt has appeared in radio and TV documentaries, debates and phone-ins. He has worked extensively with LGBTQ community groups delivering talks and workshops and has advised on a range of queer public and community history projects.