BENJAMIN BLAND

Profile

Biography

BA History, MA Modern History (York); PhD History (London); FHEA

Ben joined the NSC in September 2025. He is primarily a historian of identity (particularly "race" and class), culture (especially popular music), space (especially cities) and memory in modern Britain. His interdisciplinary research and teaching is heavily informed by approaches from cultural studies and sociology. Ben's work regularly emphasises global connections and contexts, and his teaching stresses the fundamental importance that histories of migration, imperialism, the Black Atlantic, and continental Europe play in understanding modern Britain. Ben has previously taught in York's Department of History and has also held teaching and/or research posts at various colleges of the University of London (King's College, Queen Mary, Royal Holloway) and at the universities of East Anglia, Hertfordshire, Reading, and Roehampton. 

Between 2022 and 2025 Ben held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Reading, working on the relationship between "race" and popular music in postwar Britain. Initial outputs from this project have appeared in Atlantic Studies and the Journal of British Studies. Several more articles are forthcoming from this project, as well as a book that uses the history of transatlantic hip-hop culture to explore the relationship between race and the politics of cultural consumption in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 

Departmental Roles

Chair of the Departmental Education Committee

External Activity

Ben has been actively involved with several scholarly organisations, including the Modern British Studies Association (MBSA), the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS), and the Subcultures Network. He has peer reviewed for numerous journals and publishers, as well as for the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grants scheme.

Research

Overview

My main research focus at present is a book centred around the history of transatlantic hip-hop culture. It will use the transmission of hip-hop from the urban United States to urban Britain to tell a new story about the cultural politics of race, class, and youth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The book interrogates the meaning of hip-hop in Britain in a number of different contexts, ranging from economically deprived and ethnically diverse inner-cities to overwhelmingly white, middle-class suburbia. In the process it asks how hip-hop might transform our understandings of racialisation in Britain since the 1980s. An article relating to this book, reflecting on hip-hop's reception in the late twentieth century British music press, has already appeared in the Journal of British Studies. 

I am also currently completing a trio of articles regarding the history of jazz culture in Britain. The first explored questions of whiteness and critical expertise regarding jazz in late imperial and early post-imperial Britain. It is now available in Atlantic Studies. A second, centring on the relationship between jazz in Britain and wider cultures of Black internationalism, is currently in progress. I will then complete a third article, assessing the relationship between jazz and the transatlantic cultural politics of whiteness. 

Whilst my current research energies are devoted to work on race and popular music, I maintain a broader interest in histories of race and memory since the Second World War. When time allows I do intend to complete another book, which has its origins in my AHRC-funded doctoral research, analysing the ways in which understandings of fascism and the Holocaust have reshaped the nature of British national identity in a global context since the 1940s. 

Publications

Publications with hyperlinks are available open access.

• "'I Am Not Anti Black Music But...': Popular Music, the NME, and Race in Late Twentieth Century Britain". Journal of British Studies 65 e11 (2026), 1-20.
• "'Imperial Musicology' at the End of Empire: Jazz, Race, and Musical Criticism in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain". Atlantic Studies 23 (2026), 1-18.
• "Debate: Decolonising Fascist Studies" (w/ Liam J. Liburd, Paul Jackson, et al). Fascism 10 (2021), 323-45.
• "Global Fascism?: The British National Front and the Transnational Politics of the “Third Way” in the 1980s". Radical History Review 138 (2020), 108-30. 
• "'Publish and Be Damned'? Race, Crisis, and the Press in England During the Long, Hot Summer of 1976". Immigrants & Minorities 37:3 (2019), 163-83.
• "Holocaust Inversion, Anti-Zionism and British Neo-Fascism: The Israel-Palestine Conflict and the Extreme Right in Post-War Britain", Patterns of Prejudice 53:1 (2019), 86-97.
• "'Don't Do As You're Told, Do As You Think': The Transgressive Zine Culture of Industrial Music in the 1970s and 1980s", in The Subcultures Network (ed.), Ripped, Torn and Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 150-69.

Teaching

Short Course

Ben's short course offerings may include:

• Cities, Class, and Capital
• How to Write a Protest Song
• Memories of Empire in Twenty-First Century Britain
• Public History and Heritage in Contemporary Britain
• Public History and Heritage in York
• 'Race' in Modern Britain

YorkCourse

My "Modern Britain in a Global Context" module uses the history of Britain since 1945 to explore several of the most important themes in contemporary global history, ranging from decolonisation and the rise of mass migration to the ascent of neoliberalism and collapse of environmental stability. 

I also convene the co-taught interdisciplinary "Food Glorious Food" module, on which I emphasise (amongst other things) the importance of historical imperialisms to creating the food regimes of the present day.