Glen O'Hara

Glen O'Hara teaches across a range of Oxford Brookes courses. These chiefly concern governance and national identity in modern Britain, both in its domestic and international aspects. His second year course on 'The Making of Modern Britain', and his third year course 'Britain and the Sea', deal with the interaction between state and people, and between governments and the outside world, in the modern age.

Professor O'Hara was at Oxford University as an undergraduate and a postgraduate between 1993 and 1997, where he won the Gladstone Prize for History and Politics. After working as a journalist at The Independent, he moved back into academia at University College London, where he completed a PhD in 2002. In 2001 he was appointed Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Bristol, where he spent a year before moving to New College, Oxford, as Lecturer in Modern History. He moved to Oxford Brookes in January 2005.

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• The Making of Modern Britain: Politics, Society and Culture, 1815-1997 [Year 2]
  • Examines how industrialisation, immigration, war, political conflict, the growth of cities and the rise and decline of heavy industry helped to forge modern Britain.
• Britain and the Sea since 1600 [Year 3]
  • What does it mean to be an ‘island nation’, and how has Britain’s relationship with the sea affected warfare, immigration, the economy, the environment, travel and tourism?

Postgraduate

• Britain and the European Communities, 1945-2016
  • What were the main reasons for Britain’s troubled relationship with what became the European Union, and what were the issues that both marred Britain’s short membership and caused its eventual exit?

Supervision

• George Gosling, 'Co-Ordinating Diversity: The Mixed Economy of Healthcare in Bristol, 1918-48' (completed in September 2011).
• Catherine Flinn, '"In Spite of Planning": Reconstructing Britain's Blitzed Cities, 1945-54'' (completed in December 2011).
• Nicholas Saunders, 'The Suez Crisis and Britain's European Allies' (completed in May 2015).
• Jenny Wright, 'Female Consultants in the National Health Service since 1947' (completed in May 2016).
• Melanie Bashor, 'Engineering Tolerance: The Origins of Multicultural Education Policies in the Atlantic World, c.1941-c.1988' (completed in June 2016).
• Cat Rushmore (as second supervisor to Dr Viviane Quirke), 'Chemicals and their Users in the British Home: From the 1930s to the 1960s' (completed in January 2017).
• Emily Stacey (jointly supervised with Dr James Cooper), 'Preparing for Power: Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Visits as Leader of the Opposition' (completed in September 2021).

Research

Professor O'Hara is primarily interested in British central governments' economic and social policies, focusing especially on the period since the First World War, and has written and edited a number of books on this subject.

In 2012, he released a full-length monograph on British politics between the 1950s and the 1970s, entitled Governing Post-War Britain: The Paradoxes of Progress (2012), and he followed that up by publishing The Politics of Water in Post-War Britain in 2017. Professor O'Hara is now writing a history of the domestic policies of the Blair Governments between 1997 and 2007, while acting as Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'In All Our Footsteps: Tracking, Mapping & Experiencing Rights of Way in Post-War Britain'.

He is also Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded programme 'Spaces of Hope: The Hidden Histories of Community-Led Planning in the UK'.

He writes regularly in the media on current affairs and policy, for instance in The Guardian and The New European.

Books

O'Hara G, The politics of water in Post-War Britain, Palgrave Macmillan (2017) ISBN: 9781137446398 eISBN: 9781137446404

O'Hara G, Governing post-war Britain: the paradoxes of progress, 1951-1973, Palgrave Macmillan (2012) ISBN: 9780230230569

Crook T, O'Hara G, (ed.), Statistics and the public sphere: numbers and the people in modern Britain, 1800-2000, Routledge (2011) ISBN: 9780415878944 eISBN: 9780203818671

O'Hara G, Britain and the sea since 1600 , Palgrave Macmillan (2010) ISBN: 9780230218291

O'Hara G, From dreams to disillusionment: economic and social planning in 1960s Britain, Palgrave Macmillan (2006) ISBN: 9780230013476;9781349284 eISBN: 9780230625488