Interview with Lucy Noakes

Lucy Noakes is Rab Butler professor of modern history at the University of Essex, specialising in the 20th-century experience of war and remembrance. She will become president of the Royal Historical Society in November.

Where and when were you born? 
In south London in 1964.

How did this shape who you are? 
I was lucky enough to grow up at what we now know was the “tail end” of the welfare state. I benefited from this as the first person in my family to go to university, which I probably would not have done without a full grant, and from a brilliant comprehensive school education, with committed and inspiring teachers. I also grew up hearing stories of the Second World War from my grandparents. It was the stories of the Home Front rather than the military war that always fascinated me as a child: one family was in south London, and lived through the Blitz on that city, while the others had moved from London to Coventry for war work, where of course they experienced the bombing of Coventry in November 1940.

What inspired you to become a historian? 
I always enjoyed history but hadn’t considered studying it until I came across E. P. Thompson through his work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1980s. I found him such an inspiring speaker that I got The Making of the English Working Class from my local library. That led me to return to college and take my history A level at night class and eventually to studying history at the University of Sussex, where Alun Howkins, who later became my PhD supervisor and a great friend, took a chance and offered me a place even though I was heavily pregnant with my first child at the interview.

You study aspects of warfare’s legacy, including grief and commemoration. Why is this an important area to study?
While we study commemoration, memorialisation and acts of remembrance at the collective, public level really well, we have been less good as historians at finding ways of understanding the emotional legacies of war on individuals and families. Grief seems to me to be a key experience and legacy of war, but in Britain our memories of war tend to isolate this within acts of memorialisation; we need to widen our perspective to include both the ways that grief can shape the wartime experience, but also how it can shape the afterlives of wars for many.

Your 2020 book, Dying for the Nation, emerged from research on Remembrance around the time of the First World War centenary. What did this work tell you? 
The book came out of my work with community history groups during the First World War centenary. I was really struck by the contrasts in how we “remember” and commemorate both wars in Britain: the First as overwhelmingly shaped by death, sacrifice and loss, the Second as Britain’s “finest hour”, to be celebrated rather than mourned. So the work I was doing on the First World War led me to write a history that tried to position death, loss and grief more centrally in our histories of the Second World War.

How do you see the role of the Royal Historical Society president? 
I think the RHS president’s role is to represent, and advocate for, history and historians as widely as possible. The current president – Emma Griffin, professor of modern history at Queen Mary University of London – and those who immediately preceded her, have done a fantastic job of advocating for, and defending, the work that historians do in a period that has been very difficult for many of us working in history and the humanities more broadly. I hope that we can continue to showcase the vitality of history today, not just in academia but in the media, museums, galleries and elsewhere; and remind the public and policymakers that knowledge and education do not simply begin and end with the STEM subjects, important as they are. History, and the humanities more widely, are valuable in and of themselves.

You will be only the second academic from outside Oxbridge and the Russell Group of universities to lead the society. Is history a particularly Oxbridge or Russell Group-dominated field? 
It has been, but things have changed for the better in recent decades. There are great historians working across the whole sector, in every kind of institution and from every kind of background. This was strengthened by the expansion of HE that we saw in the 1990s and early 2000s, but I really worry that the lifting of the cap on student numbers in 2015 together with declining finance for universities more widely is pushing things back to the older model of history being seen as something that is “naturally” based in more “elite” institutions. Meanwhile students, and many future researchers, who cannot access these places for a multitude of reasons, are increasingly expected to study more practice-based subjects.

Is there a particular book that changed the way you think about the world? 
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin changed how I saw that particular area of Europe; Joy Damousi’s The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia was a potent reminder of the need to take emotions seriously as historians; and Alistair Thomson’s Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend – and a course he taught on this as a PhD student at Sussex – made me think of history totally differently: not simply “what happened”, but “why and how do we remember the past?”

When are you happiest? 
It’s hard to beat the sense of fulfilment when you finish writing a book or article, but walking on Dartmoor, sitting on the beach with a good friend and good coffee, and a glass of wine in the garden of the house in rural south-west France that we usually rent for a couple of weeks in the summer are all pretty good too. And at the risk of cliché, time with family and friends is a source of happiness. I am very lucky.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com

CV

1991 Bachelor’s degree in history with cultural studies, University of Sussex
1996 DPhil, history, University of Sussex
1996-97 Postdoctoral fellow, University of Sussex
1997-99 Lecturer in cultural studies, University of Portsmouth
1998 War and the British: Gender and National Identity, 1939-91
1999-2003 Lecturer/senior lecturer in cultural studies, Southampton Solent University
2003-07 Senior lecturer in cultural and media studies, University of Portsmouth
2006 Women in the British Army: War and the 'Gentle Sex', 1907-1948
2007-14 Principal lecturer/reader in humanities, University of Brighton
2017-present Rab Butler professor of modern history, University of Essex
2020 Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain

Appointments

Shân Wareing will be the new vice-chancellor of Middlesex University, replacing Nic Beech, who has joined the University of Salford. She will take up the post in July, moving from her current role as deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Northampton. A former pro vice-chancellor for education and student experience at London South Bank University, and pro vice-chancellor for learning and teaching at Buckinghamshire New University, Professor Wareing said she was drawn by Middlesex’s “reputation as a vibrant and inclusive institution”.

Grant Robertson, New Zealand’s former deputy prime minister, has been named vice-chancellor of the University of Otago. An MP for 15 years, Mr Robertson also served as finance minister and briefly as minister for foreign affairs in the administrations of Jacinda Ardern and Chris Hipkins. He succeeds Helen Nicholson, who has been acting vice-chancellor since the departure of David Murdoch in June 2023. A former Otago student, Mr Robertson said he had been seeking “a role that would enable me to make a meaningful contribution with my skills in the region I love”.

Robert Mokaya is joining the University of Sheffield as its next provost and deputy vice-chancellor. He moves from the University of Nottingham, where he is currently pro vice-chancellor for global engagement.

Stephen Agostini will be the next vice-chancellor and chief financial officer of the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently associate vice-chancellor for finance and budget at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Daniel Traça has been appointed director general of Esade business and law school. He moves from the Nova School of Business and Economics in Lisbon, where he is currently a professor, having served as dean from 2015 to 2022.

Anne Barton is taking over as director of the Manchester Biomedical Research Centre. She is currently professor of rheumatology and director of the Centre for Musculoskeletal Research at the University of Manchester.