Benjamin Copeland

I am a DPhil candidate in History at Wolfson College, Oxford. My research focuses on contemporary intellectual history, mainly in the British context but the US often features in my work.

For my PhD thesis – under the supervision of Professor Ben Jackson – I am looking to trace the intellectual lineages and antecedents of the ‘individualization’ discourse of the late twentieth-century. Made famous by the sociologist Ulrich Beck in the late 1980s, and later taken up by Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, this concept referred to the weakening of traditional frames for individual identity formation – class, gender, family, neighbourhood – and the move towards people idiosyncratically ‘picking’, ‘discovering’, or ‘constructing’ an identity for themselves. Social historians of Britain have provided an empirical backing for this thesis, finding testimonies from ordinary people that support the idea that postwar British society increasingly rejected collective identities and embraced autonomy. Intellectual historians, however, have done little work on how contemporary observers interpreted this shift, which my research aims to rectify.

I have previously completed a BA in History and Politics at Newcastle University, and an MPhil in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge, where I was awarded a Cambridge Trust & Wolfson College Studentship to help fund my studies. My PhD research is generously funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP and the Clarendon Fund.

Previous dissertation titles:

MPhil - The ‘Me Decade’ Critiques in Britain

BA - Censorship or Editorial Control? The BBC and the Anti-Nuclear Movement, 1977-1985