Harry Parker

Profile

I joined Leeds in September 2025 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Religion, and the History of Science. Prior to this, I was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Science Museum, London (2023-25), and prior to that I completed my BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees at the University of Cambridge.

Research interests

I’m principally a historian of modern Britain, with interests ranging across the cultural, intellectual, and environmental history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To date, my research has mainly fallen under two headings.

The history of the human and social sciences
My PhD, supervised by Peter Mandler, was an attempt to understand how people in Britain sought to know themselves as possessing what anthropologists call a ‘culture’. It did so by tracing a popular, influential, but largely forgotten tradition of fieldwork, surveying, and auto-ethnography in the social sciences in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I’m currently turning this work into a monograph, and a previous article based on this research won the History of Human Sciences journal Early Career Prize in 2022.

At Leeds, I’ll be working on a new project about landscape history writing in the twentieth century. The project will follow the trajectories of a whole range of scholars who studied the environmental past in Britain, from ecologists, to geographers, to archaeologists and historians, asking how their ideas about the environmental past informed environmental politics in the present.

2. Cultural histories of modern Britain

At the Science Museum, I worked on a major international research project about the history of museums. Titled ‘Museums and Industry: Long Histories of Collaboration’ (MaILHoC), the project sought to put contemporary controversies about museum sponsorship in their proper, historical context. The fruits of this work will appear in both a volume I’m co-editing for the University of London Press (with Scott Anthony and Alice Byrne) as well as an upcoming journal special issue (with Thomas Mougey and Miquel Carandell Baruzzi).

I have also researched and published about film and visual culture in twentieth-century Britain. My article about early industrial films, based on my MPhil dissertation, won the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television’s Early Career Prize in 2023.