Jon Lawrence


Jonathan Mark Lawrence, FRHistS is a British historian. He is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter.

Early life and education

Born in Bristol in 1961, he attended King's College, Cambridge; after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983, he completed doctoral studies. In 1989, he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for his thesis "Party Politics and the People: Continuity and Change in the Political History of Wolverhampton, 1815–1914", which was supervised by Gareth Stedman Jones.

Career

Lawrence subsequently taught at University College London and the University of Liverpool before he was appointed a university lecturer in modern British history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2004. He was promoted to a senior lectureship in 2006 and to a readership in 2011. In 2017, he moved to the University of Exeter to be an associate professor; he was promoted to be Professor of Modern British History in 2019. He retired to become emeritus in 2024.
As of 2021, he is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2017, he gave the annual Neale Lecture at University College London on the topic "The Culture Wars of Class in Post-War Britain".