Dr Tom Cutterham

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2016
• DPhil (Oxford) 2014
• MSt (Oxford) 2010
• BA (Oxford) 2009

Before joining the American historians at Birmingham in 2016, Tom completed his PhD and a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford. He has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the history of colonial North America and the early United States, as well as of the British empire, the history of capitalism, and the history of political thought. He has also supervised PhD projects in colonial and revolutionary American history.

Tom's teaching and service to the university also extends beyond straightforward history courses. He has led the Professional Skills work placement module, and currently teaches a cross-CAL module called "Media in Practice" which supports students to undertake their own journalistic projects. In autumn 2020, he co-taught an innovative collaborative module called "Election: The History and Politics of Choosing America's Leaders."

• (American & Canadian Studies) Foundations of American History to 1890
• Making of the Modern World: lectures on the Age of Revolutions
• (Practicing History A) “Remember the Ladies”: Women and the American Revolution
• (Group Research) The Worlds of the Founders: Revolutionary America, 1750-1826
• Give Me Liberty: The Meaning of Freedom in American History, 1776-1890
• MA Historical Methods: lecture on “Class and Marxist History”

Tom has also supervised undergraduate dissertations on a range of American topics, from twentieth-century economic ideas to nineteenth-century slavery, loyalism in the American Revolution, and the depiction of the American west in scholarship and film.

Dr Cutterham will consider proposals for doctoral work in topics closely related to the politics and political thought of the American revolution and the early republic. He is also open to joining supervision teams for topics connected to the Atlantic world or the British empire in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, or for projects that address questions of class-formation and class struggle.

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Tom’s current work focuses on the Atlantic World in the late-eighteenth century Age of Revolutions. He is writing a biography of Angelica Schuyler Church, which explores the processes of bourgeois class-formation in this period through the lens of her ideas, exploits, and transatlantic voyages. This project has benefited from the support of the International Center for Thomas Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Virginia. He is also working on a number of articles about merchants, finance, and commerce in the 1780s.

Alongside regular teaching and research, Dr Cutterham writes frequently in the public sphere in the United States and United Kingdom, for venues such as Times Higher Education, The Nation, and The New Republic. He is a founding member of the early American history group blog The Junto, and a contributor to other blogs, including Notches and Age of Revolutions. Tom is also interested in public engagement and the interactions between history and policy. In spring 2017 he hosted a symposium on “History and Public Policy”. In November 2017, as part of Being Human Festival, he will chair a public debate titled “Must Bankers Be Bad?” at Birmingham Impact Hub. He also gave a keynote talk at this year’s “Life Beyond the PhD” conference, at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor.