Dr. Michael Reeve PhD, FHEA, FRHistS

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Introduction

Michael Reeve is a social and cultural historian, interested in modern war and conflict, particularly military and civilian resilience. His current work is primarily concerned with responses to the threat of enemy attack on the home front during the First World War (1914-18), utilising a social and cultural approach to a wide array of primary sources, from government memoranda and plans, to printed postcards, film, landscapes and material objects.

For more information on Michael’s research outputs, click here.

A concurrent strand is the social-psychological function and cultural significance of smoking for soldiers at the front and civilians at home, where tobacco becomes a means to steel resolve in the face of attack and to stave off pre-attack anxieties. Michael also has broader research interests and teaching experience in the social and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain and Europe, including labour and communist history, the Second World War, the Cold War, consumption and the British empire.

Since December 2022, Michael has worked as Lecturer in Modern British History at the Open University, following more than two years as Lecturer in History at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln. In April 2020, Michael joined the relaunched committee of History Lab Plus, a network for Early Career Researchers based at the Institute of Historical Research, London. His first monograph, Bombardment, Public Safety and Resilience in English Coastal Communities during the First World War, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.

Read Michael’s biography here.

Header image: ‘Soldiers smoking’, c. 1917, National Army Museum

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