Who we are

Callum Brown FRSE

Professor of Religious and Cultural History

Profile

I joined the History Department (now the History Programme in the School of Humanities) at Dundee in October 2004 after nineteen years at the University of Strathclyde.

I am a social and cultural historian with special research interests in the social and cultural history of religion and secularisation, the social history of modern humanism, and the history of community ritual, all in the post 1750 period and more especially in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. I look most closely at Scotland and Britain, but also increasingly at Canada, USA and Ireland. I also have special interests in historical theory (postmodernism), personal testimony (using oral history and autobiography), in quantitative methods, and in the cultural history of Britain in the twentieth century (with special focus on the 1960s). I research, publish and teach in most of these areas and methods.

My current research has three major projects. The first is A Social and Cultural History of Modern Humanism, covering Scotland, UK, Ireland, Canada and USA and using especially oral history. I am working with David Nash at Oxford Brookes (author of various studies of the history of blasphemy) on this during 2009-13. In this project, I will be focussing on the social and cultural origins of individuals' humanism, looking at issues like family background, religious experiences, and cultural alignments, whilst David will focus especially on intellectual origins and development of individuals' humanism.

My second project is connected though slightly to the side: Religion and the Demographic Revolution since c.1960. In this I am looking at the impact of religious change, including secularisation, the rise of the new age and modern humanism, upon demographic behaviour in the North Atlantic world. Here, I am interested in gender change, the sexual revolution, changes in patterns of marriage and cohabitation, and changes in religious ritual (such as religious solemnisation of marriage, baptism and funeral rites). This project will build on work I have been doing since 2001 (some of it at Dundee Historical Research Online) on femininity and masculinity, but will incorporate considerable statistical research.

The third project is a study of The Parish State: Scotland's governance of the people 1707 - 1929. In this I use local case studies to expose the operation of the presbyterian kirk session, parochial boards and parish councils, school boards and registrars system.

Recent work completed includes a large text book, Britain since 1707 (Longmans, with W. Hamish Fraser). I have also completed two articles on the decline of the Sabbath in twentieth century Scotland and on statistical charting of everyday life in Scotland 1900-2000, both appearing in Everyday Life in twentieth Century Scotland (EUP, a co-edited book with Lynn Abrams). Essays on religion and masculinity and (separately) femininity have also been completed, one to appear in a co-edited book Secularisation in the Christian World (Ashgate, co-edited with Michael Snape).

Teaching interests

Undergraduate modules:

• The Sixties Cultural revolution in Britain. This new Level 3 module (starting 2010) will focus on the various ways in which the 1960s produced massive change in the popular culture, gendered and sex lives, and religious and racial character of Britain.
• Customs and Culture in Britain and Europe 1500 to the Present (Levels 3 and 4 Honours)
  This class uses theory from cultural history, symbolic anthropology, folklorism, Marxism and elsewhere to explore community rituals of the calendar like Carnival and New Year, and the forms within those customs including fire, gunpowder, guising, drama and animal-usage.
• People and Culture in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s (Level 4 Special Subject).
  This two-semester class on the cultural change and transformation to personal identities that occurred in Britain in the mid twentieth century looks at things like youth culture, the women's liberation movement, and de-Christianisation.
• Making History: Issues in the Study of the Past (Level 3)
  I team-teach on this class on historical theory for honours students.

Postgraduate modules:

Master (MLitt) in History and Masters (MLitt) in Humanities

• Religion, gender and secularisation: Britain in the 20th century This class examines theories of secularisation, and focuses on the influence of gender upon understandings of de-Christianisation, the rise of militancy and the emergence of the New Age.
• Church and Society in Scotland 1750 to the Present. This class looks at the ecclesiastical responses to major social and economic change in Scotland, focussing especially on religious the experiences of the people.
• Theory in the Humanities One I contribute to a teach-taught core module on the themes of the empiricism and postmodernism.
• An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians I teach a hands-on small module on use of statistical method in history, ranging up to and including multiple variable linear regression analysis.
• Oral History (Masters) I co-teach a short module on theory and practice of oral history in historical research.

Research

• Publications
• Research Statement
• Suggested areas for postgraduate supervision

Publications

Recent Books

• Britain since 1707 (with W.H. Fraser) (Harlow, 2010)
• The Death of Christian Britain Second Edition (London, Routledge, 2009).
• Religion and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (Harlow, Pearson, 2006).
• Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, Pearson, 2004).
• The University Experience 1945-1975: An Oral History of the University of Strathclyde (with A. McIvor and N. Rafeek) (Edinburgh, 2004).
• The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000 (London, Routledge, 2001).
• Up-Helly-Aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland (Manchester, 1998).
• Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 (Edinburgh, 1997).

Articles/chapters

• 'Women and religion in Britain: the autobiographical view of the fifties and sixties', in C.G. Brown and M. Snape (eds.), Secularisation in the Christian World c.1750-c.2000 (2010)
• 'Spectacle, restraint and the twentieth-century Sabbath wars: the "everyday" Scottish Sunday', and 'Charting everyday experience', in L. Abrams and C.G. Brown (eds.), Everyday Life in Twentieth-century Scotland (2009).
• Masculinity and secularisation in twentieth-century Britain', in Yvonne-Maria Werner (ed.), Christian Manliness - a Paradox of Modernity (Leiden, Brill, forthcoming)
• 'Gendering secularisation: locating women in the transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s' for G. Stedman Jones and I. Katznelson (eds), title tba, (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
• 'Secularisation, the growth of militancy and the spiritual revolution: religious change and gender power in Britain 1901-2001', Historical Research vol. 80, no. 209 (August 2007), pp. 393-418.
• 'Religion', in L. Abrams et al. (eds.), The Gender History of Scotland (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 84-110.
• 'The unconverted and the conversion: gender relations in the salvation narrative in Britain 1800-1960', in W. J. van Bekkum, J. N. Bremmer, and A. L. Molendijk (eds.), Conversion in Modern Times (Leuven, Peeter, 2006), pp.183-99.

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Research Statement

My core research agenda for 30 years has been the nature of secularisation (or the decline of religion) in Scottish and British society since the late eighteenth century. Operating chiefly through social-science methodology, I used to argue within traditional class-based, quantitative and qualitative parameters in an attempt to refute the theory of secularisation. [The Social History of Religion in Scotland, (1987), and 'Did urbanisation secularise Britain? Urban History Yearbook 1988.] In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I re-contextualised the decline of religion within the 'field' of popular culture, drawing me to locate religious issues as central to the ethical construction of both popular culture and the individual. [Religion and Society in Scotland (1997), Up-helly-aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland (1998), and 'Sport and the Scottish Office in the 20th century,' European Sports History Review (1999).] In my work on the Shetland winter fire festival of Up-helly-aa especially, I started to take the linguistic turn, and in 2001 I 'turned' upon the theory of secularisation in The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000 (2000, second edition 2009), which explores the gendered and discursive nature of religious identity between 1800 and 1960. I got drawn more and more to gender and cultural history, looking at how the masculinities and femininities operate in symmetrical relationships which can break down (because of a break in one construction of gender, for instance), as in the 1960s (see Religion and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (2006)).

More recently, I have focussed even more upon the period since the 1960s and at the demographic changes of the period, and at the influence of the decline of Christian discourse and the rise of humanist ideas and culture. It is these topics upon which I am concentrating for the next few years.

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Suggested areas for postgraduate supervision

I am interested in encouraging social and cultural history, especially in relation to twentieth-century Britain. This can include case studies at Scottish or local level, as well as more national studies (of modern media for instance). I am interested in promoting postmodern, personal testimony and quantitative methods, separately or in conjunction. Any interested students in the areas of the social history of religion, spiritual history, and the application of the study of the Self to cultural history in general I would be very pleased to talk with.

Postgraduate Research

• Sarah Browne 'The women's liberation movement in Scotland c1969-1979' (PhD current)
• Nathalie Rosset 'Representation of the Body in 19th century Scotland.' (PhD awarded 2007, now a book from VDM Verlag)
• Angela Bartie 'Festival City: Arts, Culture and Moral Conflict at the Edinburgh Festivals 1947-67.' (PhD awarded 2007)
• Ann Petrie 'Scottish culture and the First World War' (PhD awarded 2006)
• Paul Burton 'An active and united body: change in the Society of Friends in Scotland 1800-2000' (PhD awarded 2005, now a book from Edwin Mellen)
• Iain Hutchison 'The Experience and Representation of Disability in 19th century Scotland' (PhD awarded 2004, now a book from Edwin Mellen)
• Sarah J Smith 'Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids (PhD awarded 2002, now a book from I. B. Taurus, 2005)
• Annmarie Hughes: 'A rough kind of 'feminism': the formation of working-class women's political identity, Clydeside c.1919-39' (PhD awarded 2001)
• Paul Maloney 'Scotland the Music Hall 1850-1930' (M.Phil. awarded 2000, now a book from Manchester University Press, 2003)

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