Contributors

John Ayshford is a doctoral researcher in history at the University of Manchester. Interested in the history of political thought, his doctoral studies focus on radical republican themes in the ideas of John Stuart Mill. He has written articles for the Journal of Liberal History and, reflecting his longstanding interest in the Simon family, he co-curated an exhibition in 2022 on Ernest and Shena Simon’s role in the creation of Wythenshawe.

Martin Dodge is a Senior Lecturer in the Geography Department at the University of Manchester. He has worked at Cardiff University and University College London. Much of his research is currently focused on the historical geography of Manchester’s transport and town planning. In 2018 he co-wrote Manchester: Mapping the City (Birlinn, 2018) and in 2022 he co-curated a public exhibition, Who Built Wythenshawe?

Chris Godden is a Senior Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Manchester. He has published on the history of economic ideas in the early part of the twentieth century, and the pedagogy of economic history. In 2017, he was the editor of a special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library marking the centenary of the death of the Manchester historian, Mark Hovell.

Brendon Jones works in the Directorate of the Student Experience at the University of Manchester as Residential Life Manager in the Halls of Residence. His PhD, which he completed at the University of Manchester, focused on Manchester Liberalism between 1918–29 with special reference to the career of Ernest Simon. He authored the entries for Ernest and Shena Simon in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and has written articles relating to Liberal Party history. He is currently working on an article which analyses the views of the Manchester Liberal MPs, including Ernest Simon, on the first Labour government.

Stuart Jones (H. S. Jones) is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Manchester. He is a specialist in the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on Britain and France, and in the history of universities. His books include Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is currently completing an intellectual biography of James Bryce for Princeton University Press, and editing Manchester Minds: A University History of Ideas for Manchester University Press.

Diana Leitch MBE is the former Deputy University Librarian of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester and Associate Director of the John Rylands Library. A chemist by academic discipline, she was a member of the JISC Electronic Resources Committee and deeply involved in the transformational digitisation of printed books, periodicals and other works both in the UK and internationally. She is a local and family historian and has written many articles and books on these subjects.

Margaret Littler is Professor Emerita in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester, where she taught primarily in German studies. Her research interests include gender studies, migration studies and the new materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. She is co-author (with Brigid Haines) of Contemporary Women’s Writing in German: Changing the Subject (Oxford University Press, 2004) and has also published widely on the Turkish German authors Zafer Şenocak, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu. Her online exhibition Germans in Manchester was initially curated at Manchester Central Library in 2015.

Stephen V. Ward is Professor Emeritus of Planning History at Oxford Brookes University. He has edited the international academic journal, Planning Perspectives and is a past president of the International Planning History Society. His books include: The Garden City (E. & F. N. Spon, 1992), Selling Places (E. & F. N. Spon, 1998), Planning the Twentieth-Century City (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), Planning and Urban Change (Sage, 2004) and The Peaceful Path (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2016). In 2022 he received the International Planning History Society’s Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement in Planning History.

Charlotte Wildman is a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. She is an expert in the history of cities, the North, women and local government. Her first book, Urban Redevelopment and Modernity in Liverpool and Manchester, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2016, and she is currently working on a project on crime, and working-class homes and family life.

Janet Wolff is Professor Emerita in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. She has also taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Rochester (USA) and Columbia University. She is the author of a number of books on aesthetics and the sociology of art. Her most recent books are a memoir/social history, Austerity Baby (Manchester University Press, 2017), and (co-edited with Peter Beilharz) The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman (Manchester University Press, 2023).