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Professor Eric Evans

Professor Emeritus

Research Interests

I retired from full-time employment at Lancaster in August 2005, when I became Professor Emeritus of Modern History. I still do some teaching in Lancaster, however, and I maintain an active interest in a number of research fields. I continue to research in British history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, with particular interest in recent years on nineteenth and twentieth-century political history, on national identities and on the development of the school curriculum. I also work on developments in History pedagogy, including work on the 'Gifted and Talented Youth' scheme and on the 'gap' between sixth-form and university history.

Recent Publications

• Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, Power and Party (2nd edn, London, 2006).
• Thatcher and Thatcherism (2nd edn, London, 2004).
• 'The Victorians at School' in M. Taylor and M. Wolff (eds) The Victorians Since 1901: Representations and Revisions (Manchester, 2004).
• The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783-1870 (3rd edn, Harlow, 2001).

Works Forthcoming

I am completing asecond edition of Britain before the Reform Act, 1815-32 (first published by Longman in 1989). I am also taking a fresh look at the so-called 'long eighteenth century' as I work on a substantial reinterpretative synthesis of British history from 1660-1832. T

Further Information

• I have directed a research project on Revisiting and Improving Lecturing, a project sponsored by the Higher Education Academy's Learning and Teaching Centre involving four universities from the North of England: Lancaster, Huddersfield, Manchester and Sheffield Hallam.
• From 2000-05, I was Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Postgraduate Committee, serving on the full board from 2002-04. From 2006, I have been a member of the Council's Audit Committee
• In 2004, I was elected to a Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellowship which has given me opportunity to do comparative work on sixth-form and undergraduate history syllabuses.
• Since 1998, Ihave beenan Auditor for the Quality Assurance Agency
• In May 2006, I received one of the twenty-five Centenary Fellowships of the Historical Association for services to the subject.
• In 2007, I was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of Lancaster University

Career details

Apart from an initial 18 months working at Stirling University, all of my academic career has been at Lancaster, where I served as Lecturer (1971-80), Senior Lecturer (1980-84), Reader (1984-5) and Professor of Social History (1985-2005). During that period, I taught on a wide range of history courses, predominantly British,covering the period from 1660 to the present day. My research interests closely followed by teaching ones - rather than the other way around! - and after my initial work on how the tithe system operated in England, I published widely on the history of social policy, on the agricultural history of Cumbria, and on technical education. I wrote a widely-used synthesis of British history from 1783-1870 which has not been out of print since its first appearance in 1983 and is now in its third edition. I have been Joint Editor of the widely-used Lancaster Pamphlets series since its inception in 1983 and have written short biographies in that series on three British prime ministers, William Pitt the Younger, Robert Peel and Margaret Thatcher.

During my time at Lancaster, I have been both Head of the History Department and Dean of the then Faculty of Humanities.

I have also taken up a number of roles outside Lancaster,working as an assessor for the Economic and Social Research Council, as Convenor of the Postgraduate Panel and Board member for the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council) and as an Auditor for the Quality Assurance Agency.

For much of my career, I have been interested in the links - or, as is often the case, lack of them, between history as taught in schools and in universities. I worked for more than thirty-five years as an A-level examiner, being Chair of Examiners in History for two of the three English awarding bodies.

Although I can see its merits, and have indeed served on a Panel, I have never been over-keen on the Research Assessment Exercise, believing that it has dangerously distorted University priorities, almost encouraging academics to give teaching a lower priority than it deserves. It has also encouraged sophisticated, but ultimately facile, game-playing of the kind academics are rather good at but which, ultimately, is somewhat less useful than crossword solving. Above all, it has taken up too much of too many people's time. Any robust cost-benefit analysis must see it operating securely in the negative ranges. I therefore sincerely hope that the RAE 2008 is the last.

Associated Keywords: Eighteenth century, History, Nineteenth century, Politics, Society, Teaching and learning, Twentieth century

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