Harry Parker

Harry Parker is studying for a PhD in history at Cambridge, where he also completed his undergraduate and MPhil degrees. He works on modern British cultural history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his thesis project is an attempt to understand the transformation of social knowledge production in this period: how, in other words, ‘ordinary’ people were thinking about their ‘culture’, and how this changed. He does so through looking at a range of practices that he considers under the (somewhat inelegant) heading ‘popular (auto)ethnography’. These include the surprisingly prolific world of amateur social science, as well as amateur photography, documentary broadcasting, and journalism.

Harry also retains a strong interest in the study of visual culture, and his MPhil thesis, also funded by an AHRC DTP award, looked at industrial filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century.