Dr Ben Harker

Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies

• Crescent House 206
• T: 0161 295 5163
• E: b.harker@salford.ac.uk
• SEEK: Research profile

Mondays, 12.00-2.00 pm

Ben joined the Salford team in January 2007; before then he worked as a musician, a lecturer at the University of York, and a tutor in adult education.  His first book, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl (2007), was critically acclaimed as ‘wonderful...balanced, generous and beautifully written’ (History Workshop Journal). Recently he co-edited British Communism: a Documentary History (2011) with Professor John Callaghan.  He’s now working on two books, a cultural history of British Communism, and a monograph analysing the cultural formation of the Popular Front in Britain.  He’s an editor of Key Words: a Journal of Cultural Materialism.  His articles on British and American culture and politics have appeared in journals including ELH, Literature & History, History Workshop and Textual Practice. 

Module convenor for Writers on the BBC (level 5), British Writers and Popular Culture (level 5), the Twentieth-Century British Working-Class Novel (level 6), Culture and the Popular Front (MA).

Teaches on Popular Fiction (level 4), Utopias and Dystopias (level 5), Modernism (level 6) and Theory, Text and Writing (MA).

Principal supervisor for 3 PhD students working on: interwar leftist fiction; fictions of neoliberalism; Communists and secondary education.

Late modernism

Culture and the left in twentieth-century Britain

Marxism and culture

BBC radio

The 1930s

Qualifications:

 Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education and Research Training.  Passed with distinction, June 2008.

Ph. D., Department of English and Related Literature, University of York, 2001.

M.A., University of York, 1994.  Passed with Distinction.

B.A., English, University of Reading, 1993.  First Class Honours.

Memberships:

British Association of Modernist Studies

Raymond Williams Society

Socialist History Society

North West Labour History Group

Books

British Communism: A Documentary History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).  Co-edited with John Callaghan.  304pp. ISBN 10 0719082110

 Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).  348pp. ISBN 9 780745 321653

Articles in Refereed Journals (recent selection)

‘ “The trumpet of the night”: interwar Communists on BBC radio.’ History Workshop 75 (Spring 2013).  In press.

‘ “On different levels ourselves went forward ”: pageantry, class politics and narrative form in Virginia Woolf’s late writing.’ ELH 78 (2011), pp. 433-56. 

‘ “Communism is English”: Edgell Rickword, Jack Lindsay and the Cultural Politics of the Popular Front’.  Literature and History 20.2 (2011), pp. 23-40. 

‘Adapting to the conjuncture: Walter Greenwood, history and Love on the Dole’, Key Words: a Journal of Cultural Materialism 7 (2009), pp. 55-72.

‘Class composition: The Ballad of John Axon (1958), cultural debate and the late 1950s British left’.  Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis 73.3 (July 2009): 340-355.