Dr Phil Child

• PhD in History, University of Exeter (2016)
• MPhil in Modern European History, King's College, University of Cambridge (2012)
• BA (Hons) in History with European Study, University of Exeter (2010)

Phil studied history at undergraduate level at the University of Exeter and took his MPhil at the University of Cambridge, before returning to the University of Exeter for his PhD. He began working at the University of Birmingham in July 2017, as a Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Community-level perspectives on post-war change in the British voluntary sector’ based in TSRC. Following completion of that project in December 2019, Phil returned to the department as an Honorary Research Fellow in March 2020. 

Phil has contributed to a number of undergraduate and postgraduate modules, including: 

• Philosophies of Welfare
• Policy into Practice
• Policy Analysis
• From Beveridge to May
• Dissertation Supervision

Phil’s research is focused on the political history of urbanism in twentieth-century Britain. 

He is nearing completion of his first book, foregrounding our cultural memory of post-1945 urban modernism - a truly global phenomenon - within a context of left-wing political ideas about the future of Britain. This study utilises the perspectives of Labour Party activists to determine how political visions of the future entangled with urban modernism in the making of urban policy, centring political ideas as a key influence on policy development. Part of this research has been published in a well-received article on rent control in Twentieth Century British History. 

Phil's concern for putting political ideas and ideologies at the heart of our understanding of urbanism is reflected in his most recent and forthcoming published articles: the first, situating elite understandings of what voluntarism ought to be against the complexity of an overlooked 1940s Mass-Observation urban district survey; and the second, exploring 1980s inner-city policy in the light of black youth homelessness and the neoliberal welfare state. A further article in preparation considers how late-twentieth century urban spaces intersected with sexual violence and feminist activism, through a study of the Rape Crisis movement. 

His next major research project, for which he has begun preliminary research, takes a neglected section of post-war British history as its starting point through an investigation of the political history of private renting since 1957.