Dr Ben Mechen

Ben Mechen is a social and cultural historian of modern Britain. Much of his work to date has focused on histories of sex and sexuality in late twentieth century Britain, and especially the various meanings given to sexual health, happiness and freedom across pop culture, politics, commerce and the human sciences.听

This research, which began during his PhD at 果冻影院, has resulted in a number of articles, book chapters, edited volumes and journal special issues, as well as a first monograph to be published by University of California Press.听

Overall, his research in this area reopens a critique of the period鈥檚 apparent sexual liberalism by considering what and who this idea left out, as well as the new rules and norms 鈥榩ermissiveness鈥� paradoxically put in place.

More recently, Ben has begun two new projects in modern environmental history.听

The first, developed with Simeon Koole (Bristol), is an embodied and sensory history of the European timber trade of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project draws upon strands in posthuman and 鈥渘ew materialist鈥� thought to consider the interconnected vulnerabilities of Rotherhithe鈥檚 dockside labourers, the Thames floodplain, and Sweden鈥檚 forests in the ages of capital and empire.听

The second, to be the basis of a second monograph, is called Salvage Ecologies in Late 20th Century Britain. It tries to offer a history of ecological thought and praxis in Britain that reaches beyond a history of organised environmentalism, ecological 鈥減ioneers,鈥� environmental policy or 鈥淓arth System鈥� science 鈥� the strands of analysis dominant in the historiography.听

Instead, the project identifies a series of largely unhistoricised experiments in everyday ecology between the 1970s and 1990s, from re-naturing sites of dereliction to making art out of waste. Many were rooted in queer, feminist, Black or anarchist thinking about the environment. And joining them together, the project argues, was an attempt to salvage from the ruins of late modernity new ways of living on, and with, the Earth, in a departure from seeking mastery over it.听

Ben rejoined 果冻影院 History in 2023 after holding a variety of research and teaching roles at the University of Bristol, King鈥檚 College London, Royal Holloway and the University of Birmingham. Before this, he completed his PhD, MA and BA at 果冻影院 History.

Selected publications

鈥楲ines of Force: Labour, Tides and Precariousness in London鈥檚 Docks, 1880-1930鈥�, with Simeon Koole (forthcoming)
(Manchester University Press, 2024), edited with Matt Houlbrook and Katie Jones
鈥楢lex Comfort鈥檚 The Joy of Sex and the Tensions of Liberal Sexpertise鈥�, in 鈥楨veryday Health鈥�, Embodiment, and Selfhood since 1950, edited by Tracey Loughran, Hannah Froom, Kate Mahoney and Daisy Payling (forthcoming Manchester University Press, 2024)
, Contemporary British History, 36:2 (2022), 174-206
, Contemporary British History, 36:2 (2022), 165-173, with Matt Worley and Laura Cofield
, in Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Jennifer Evans and Ciara Meehan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
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Teaching

Further information about Ben is available on his
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