Dr Gary Rivett

Teaching

I have designed and taught on a range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I currently teach in the following modules:

• HIS4009M Global York: A Social and Cultural History
• HIS4012M People and Nature: an Environmental History
• HIS5002M Making History
• HIS5004M Watchers and the Watched: Society in Early Modern England
• HIS6005M Special Subject in Early Modern British History: The English Revolution
• HIS7011M Historians and the Writing of History
• HIS7013M MA Dissertation
• HIS7017M Bloody, Broken and Brave Communities: Microhistories of Everyday Life in the English Revolution

For 10 years I was the module director for 'History, Community and Culture', the History programme's flagship employability module. I am currently deputy chair of the School Quality Panel for the School of Humanities. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a teaching mentor, and an external examiner at Bath Spa University. I have also taught at the University of Sheffield (2006-2013) and the University of York (2008-2009).

Research

My principal interests are in the social, cultural, administrative and environmental history of Early Modern Britain and Europe.

I am currently writing a social and administrative history of religious reform in the English Revolution, which emphasises the significant role played by the Committee for Plundered Ministers in pursuing the practical and everyday efforts of Parliament's reform polices, especially at the parish level. The themes of surveillance and the information state in early modern England are central to the project. In addition, I am also developing a new project on mental health, imprisonment and debt in seventeenth-century England.

I have previously published on historical culture, print culture and peacemaking in early modern England, with a specific focus on the 1640s and 1650s. This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I also have interests in historical theory, and have published work on theories of change.

As part of my public engagement activities, I have co-written articles that critique and reflect upon the possibilities and failures of public history. I also co-produced several activities and publications, including choral performances, city tours, practical workshops, and, with Sheffield Women Against Pit Closures, a book entitled 'You Can’t Kill the Spirit: Stories from Houghton Main Pit Camp, 1993', published in 2018.

I have held a David Walker Memorial Fellowship at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford and a Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library, California. I have also received a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grants award. I have given research papers in Sydney, Venice, London, Berlin, Le Mans, Cambridge, Sheffield, Reading, Bristol and Liverpool.

Public engagement

Committed to working with members of the public to create stories about their past, I am, with Dr Adrian Bingham, a co-director of ‘Stories of Activism in Sheffield, c. 1960-2012’. Working closely with activists and campaigners from the City of Sheffield, the project which collects and archive campaign materials and oral testimonies from Sheffield’s activists.

Publications

Book

Conflicted Pasts: Politics, Parliament and Historical Culture in the English Civil Wars [in preparation]

A Social and Administrative History of Surveillance, Information and Religious Reform in England, c. 1640-1650 [in preparation]

Chapters

‘Revivifying and Reconciling the State: Peacemaking and Narrative Hegemony in Post-Civil-War England, 1646-7, in Karine Deslandes, Fabrice Mourlon and Bruno Tribout (eds.), Civil War and Narrative: Testimony, Historiography, Memory (Palgrave, London, 2017), pp. 175-190.

Journals

(with Sarah Lloyd), ‘Fraught Spaces: The Risks, Challenges and Failures of Collaborative Public Histories’, Rethinking History (accepted for publication, 2023)

(with Rory Pilossof), ‘Imagining change, imaginary futures: “conditions of possibility” in pre-independence Southern Rhodesia, 1959-1963’, Social Science History, 43, 2 (2019)

(with Laura King), ‘Engaging the Public in Making History: Impact, Public Engagement and the World Beyond the Campus’, History Workshop Journal, 80 (2015), pp. 218-233.

Editorial Introduction: Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement in Comparative Historical Perspective’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 28, 1 (2015), pp. 1-10.

‘Peacemaking, Parliament and the Politics of the Recent Past in the English Civil Wars’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 76, 4 (2013), pp. 589-615.

‘English Newsbooks, Storytelling and Political Criticism: Mercurius Aulicus and the Solemn League and Covenant, September-October 1643’, Media History, 19, 1 (2013) pp. 3-16.

Edited collections

(with Michael Braddick), ‘Activism, Mobilisation and Political Engagement in Comparative Historical Perspective’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 28, 1 (2015).

Conferences and seminars

‘Information Regimes and Governance in the English Revolution: Parliament and the Case of the Committee for Plundered Ministers’, Institute of Historical Research, Parliaments, Politics and People Seminar, 2016

‘Cities, Communities and Civil Engagement: Stories of Activism in Sheffield’, University of Sheffield, Urban History Centre launch event, 2015

‘Revivifying and reconciling the state: history and politics in Civil War England, c. 1640-1650’, University of London: ‘Civil War and Narrative’, 2015

‘A Portrait of a Committee: Microhistorical approaches to the history of Parliament in the English Revolution’ , Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference: ‘New Directions in Microhistory’, Berlin, 2015