rebecca goldsmithJesus College |
Rebecca Goldsmith is undertaking a PhD in History at Jesus College under the supervision of Dr Geraint Thomas. She obtained her undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil dissertation, supervised by Dr David Cowan, used archived social-science material to analyse popular political culture in London at the 1945 general election.
Her doctoral project is concerned with shifting working-class support for the Labour Party in Britain in the period 1931-1951. Rather than assuming any 'natural' relationship between class and politics, her research places official party-political strategies in dialogue with 'vernacular' testimony, to better understand how Labour achieved majority working-class support for the first time in 1945. Her work privileges an engagement with local popular ideas of politics, political economy and class, and more generally with the 'structures of feeling' emerging from working-class people's experiences of everyday life. In this way, her project seeks to provide a more contingent account of 'the making of "Labour's working class"' in the mid-twentieth century.