Profile
Dr Max Long
Profile
I was born and spent the first eighteen years of my life in Madrid, Spain, before moving to the UK in 2012. I studied for an undergraduate degree in History at Magdalen College, Oxford, after which I spent a year as a visiting student at Princeton University. I then did an MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Cambridge, followed by a PhD in History, also at Cambridge. In 2022 I joined Jesus College, Cambridge as a Research Fellow, where I taught undergraduate and graduate courses in modern British history. During this time I also spent one year as a Research Fellow in Digital History at the Science Museum in London. I joined Lincoln as a Darby Fellow in Modern History in 2025.
College Teaching
I teach a range of undergraduate papers, focussing principally on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in both British and European and World history. These include:
Prelims
- History of the British Isles, 1830-1951
- European and World History, 1815-1914
- Historiography
- Spanish Foreign Text
Final Honours
- History of the British Isles, 1815-1924
- History of the British Isles, 1900-Present
- The European Century, 1820-1925
- Europe Divided, 1914-1989
- The Global Twentieth Century, 1930-2003
- Research
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I am a historian of modern Britain, with expertise in histories of science, the environment, and the mass media. My work seeks to understand how people in the past understood concepts like "nature" or "the environment", drawing on a wide range of sources including films, radio broadcasts and popular magazines.
I am developing two new research projects at Lincoln College:
- A history of river pollution in Britain since the Industrial Revolution
- A social history of the sleep condition Narcolepsy - Select publications
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‘“Photography versus the Pest”: Shell Chemicals, visual media, and pesticides in post-war Britain’, Media + Environment. 2024. https://mediaenviron.org/article/123796-photography-versus-the-pest-shell-chemicals-visual-media-and-pesticides-in-postwar-britain, archived at https://perma.cc/Z5SB-WYUZ
Tinkering with nature: craft, domesticity and female labour in F. Percy Smith’s ‘Data’ notebooks (1925–1944), Science Museum Group Journal. 2023. https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/tinkering-with-nature-craft-domesticity-and-female-labour-in-f-percy-smiths-data-notebooks-1925-1944/
‘Nature on the airwaves: natural history and the BBC in interwar Britain’, Archives of Natural History. 2023. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3366/anh.2023.0824.
‘“Accustomed to female domination”: Women, mass media and animal intimacy in interwar Britain’, Environmental History. 2022. 140-154. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/717440.
‘The ciné-biologists: natural history film and the co-production of knowledge in interwar Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science. 2020. 527-551. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087420000370.
Position
- Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History