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Contact

• workRoom B3a Lenton Grove
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work+44 (0)115 95 15685
• Richard.Hornsey@nottingham.ac.uk

Biography

I began my academic life with a BA Hons in Politics & Philosophy at Leeds University, before staying on to complete an MA in Cultural Studies. After doing a PhD at the University of Sussex, I worked for ten years as a Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. I joined the History Department at the º£½ÇºÚÁÏ in September 2013.

Expertise Summary

• Everyday life in twentieth-century Britain
• Work, leisure and consumption
• Urban and suburban life
• Visual, material and spatial cultures
• Identities (particularly gender and sexuality)

Teaching Summary

My teaching is currently focused on two modules, both of which I convene:

HIST3057 British Culture in the Age of Mass Production, 1920-1950

This module usually runs each year as a third-year Special Subject. It explores the social and cultural impact of Britain's uneven transition towards Fordist systems of mass-production during the middle years of the twentieth-century. Topics include: the meanings of new types of factory work; the modernisation of branding, advertising and retail; interwar suburbia; the impact of the radio and the motorcar; new forms of mass-produced leisure, like the cinema and ballroom dancing; attempts to know 'the masses' through social investigations or market research; and new forms of modernist mass housing and welfare centres. Often the module incorporates a field trip to the Boots D10 factory and an exploration of the Boots Archive. It might also include a dance lesson and a student-led project to recreate an afternoon at the cinema from exactly eighty year ago.

HIST2033 Cultural Histories of Urban Modernity, 1840-1900

This is a one-semester second-year option module that usually runs each year. Using London and Paris as case studies, it charts the rise of the modern city in the second half of the nineteenth century, and how this was experienced by the ordinary people who lived there. Many of the things we explore on the module are now taken-for-granted facets of urban life, but by looking back to a time when they were unfamiliar and strange, we can engage more critically with their power dynamics and everyday politics. Topics include: the rebuilding of the city; the pavement as a social space; ways of looking at and being in the crowd; the rise of maps, statistics and house numbers; the meanings of the home and interior decoration; the department store and the development of shopping as a leisure activity; the contested figure of the public urban woman; how the slums were imagined and understood; the birth of the museum and its ways of knowing the world.

I supervise Dissertations on all aspects of nineteenth and twentieth-century British cultural and social history.

I also contribute to the first-year modules Learning History and Exploring the Modern World, as well as to a number of MA modules.

Research Summary

I am working on two book-length projects, concurrently. The first of these, A Wonderland of Common Things, explores how the development of modern branding techniques in the 1920s and 30s created the… read more

Selected Publications

• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2019. Women's History Review. 28(1), 111-138
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2018. Journal of British Studies. 57(4), 812-839
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2016. Lázló Moholy-Nagy at the London Zoo: Animal Enclosures and the Unleashed Camera. In: MICHAEL LAWRENCE and KAREN LURY, eds., The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter Palgrave Macmillan. 223-246
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2016. Cultural Geographies. 23(2), 265-280

• View all publications

Current Research

I am working on two book-length projects, concurrently. The first of these, A Wonderland of Common Things, explores how the development of modern branding techniques in the 1920s and 30s created the conditions for the imagining of capitalist social democracy in Britain. I have already published some of this work in journal articles on brand mascots and on factory tourism. The second, as yet untitled project, explores the cultural dissemination of Fordist and Taylorist technological objects in the same period, across a range of spatial scales from the dining room home to the London Underground network. I am particularly interested in how those technologies prompted different psychic and somatic responses in different cultural domains.

Past Research

Since joining Nottingham, I have been involved in a long-term collaboration with the archive team at Boots UK. The Boots Archive is a rich and wide-ranging historical resource, frequently used by myself and my students. I have just completed a four-year AHRC-funded research project, 'Chemists to the Nation, Pharmacy to the World', with my colleague Professor Anna Greenwood and Dr Hilary Ingram. This explored Boots' international history in relation to national, imperial and post-colonial culture. Our monograph is forthcoming from McGill-Queen's University Press. I have also collaborated with Boots Archive on two public exhibitions: 'Inspiring Beauty' (Weston Gallery, 2016), which used the 80-year history of the No7 cosmetics brand to explore the social and cultural history of women; and 'Counter Culture' (Djanogly Arts Gallery, 2024), which celebrated Boots' 175th anniversary by exploring how the changing of experience changed over time.

My earlier research focused on the connections between urban reconstruction and the lives of queer men in London after the Second World War. My monograph, (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) explored how post-war everyday life was re-formed by new types of managerial expertise across a range of spatial domains. This drive, which emerged out of such allied disciplines as town planning, psychology and visual design education, sought to combat the instabilities of the commercial metropolis and its disordered dynamics of both sexual and consumerist desire. In particular, the project traced how these disciplinary forces helped transform queer male relations, practices and selfhoods during this period.

• ANNA GREENWOOD, RICHARD HORNSEY and HILARY INGRAM, 2026. Fighting the 'Chain Store Menace': Imperial Dynamics, Professionalising Pharmacists, and the Troubled Entry of Boots The Chemist into 1930s New Zealand History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals. (In Press.)
• ANNA GREENWOOD, RICHARD HORNSEY and HILARY INGRAM, 2025. Journal of Pacific History. 60(3),
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2025. Modern British History. 36(4), 1
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2022. Technology and Culture: The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology. 63(4), 1005-1032
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2019. Women's History Review. 28(1), 111-138
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2018. Journal of British Studies. 57(4), 812-839
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2016. Cultural Geographies. 23(2), 265-280
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2016. Lázló Moholy-Nagy at the London Zoo: Animal Enclosures and the Unleashed Camera. In: MICHAEL LAWRENCE and KAREN LURY, eds., The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter Palgrave Macmillan. 223-246
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2013. Journal of Visual Culture. 12(2), 292-312
• RICHARD HORNSEY, 2012. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. 30(4), 675-693
• HORNSEY, R., 2010. The spiv and the architect: unruly life in postwar London University of Minnesota Press.
• HORNSEY, R., 2010. ‘He who thinks, in modern traffic, is lost’: automation and the pedestrian rhythms of interwar London. In: EDENSOR, T., ed., Geographies of rhythm: nature, place, mobilities and bodies Ashgate, Aldershot. 99-112
• HORNSEY, RICHARD, 2008. Journal of British Cinema and Television. 5(1), 38-52
• HORNSEY, RICHARD, 2008. Journal of Historical Geography. 34(1), 94-117
• HORNSEY, RICHARD, 2007. After the Bathhouse; or, In Praise of Awkwardness English Language Notes. 45(2), 49-62
• HORNSEY, RICHARD, 2007. Francis Bacon at the Photobooth: Facing the Homosexual in Post-war Britain Visual Culture in Britain. 8(2), 83-103
• HORNSEY, RICHARD, 2003. Of Public Libraries and Paperbacks: ‘Deviant’ Masculinities and the Spatial Practices of Reading in Post-war London. In: LEA, DANIEL and SCHOENE, BERTHOLD, eds., Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-war and Contemporary British Literature Rodophi. 35-54
• HORNSEY, RICHARD, 2002. The Sexual Geographies of Reading in Post-war London Gender, Place and Culture. 9(4), 371-384
• HORNSEY, RICHARD, 1996. Postmodern Critiques: Foucault, Lyotard and Modern Political Ideologies Journal of Political Ideologies. 1(3), 239-259