Rate My Professor Paul Readman

Professor Paul Readman is Professor of Modern British History and Head of the Department of History at King’s College London. His research specializations encompass the cultural and political history of modern Britain, with particular emphasis on British national identities, the politics of patriotism, the land question, landscape preservation, historical pageants, and the place of the past in modern British culture. He is the author of Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914 (Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2008). Readman has also published numerous articles, including ‘Walking, and Knowing the Past: Antiquaries, Pedestrianism and Historical Practice in Modern Britain’ in History (2021) and ‘The Place of the Past in English Culture, c. 1890-1914’ in Past & Present (2005).

Readman has co-edited several influential volumes, such as The Land Question in Britain, 1750-1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Walking Histories, 1800-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Restaging the Past: Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain (UCL Press, 2020), and Culture, Thought and Belief in British Political Life since 1800: Essays in Honour of Jonathan Parry (Manchester University Press, 2025). As Principal Investigator, he directed the major AHRC-funded project ‘The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016’, which produced a multi-million-word online database documenting over 650 pageants and organized exhibitions and public events in Carlisle, Bury St Edmunds, Scarborough, St Albans, and London. He has led additional funded projects, including ‘Landscape and the Writing of History in Modern Britain’ (Leverhulme Trust, 2023-2024), ‘Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives’ (AHRC, 2020-2022), and ‘In Search of Provincial England: Place and Regional Identity, 1918-2018’ (Leverhulme Trust, 2017-2020). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2001 and a member of its Council since 2018, Readman serves as co-editor of Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. He delivered his Inaugural Professorial Lecture, ‘Landscape and the Writing of History’, on 14 November 2023. His scholarship has significantly influenced understandings of landscape, identity, and heritage in modern British history through academic publications, public exhibitions, and collaborative research networks.