Dr Thomas Cryer
Departmental Lecturer in Twentieth-Century U.S. History
Email: tom.cryer@history.ox.ac.uk
Academic background
Dr Thomas Cryer is a historian of the twentieth-century United States specialising in the intersecting histories of education, ideas, memory, and race. Taken as a whole, his research interrogates how historical narratives have been strategically appropriated, distorted, and mobilised to serve contemporary political agendas. Before arriving in Oxford, he completed a BA (Hons) in History and an MPhil in American History at Cambridge and a PhD in American History at University College London’s Institute of the Americas.
His research is deeply informed by his commitment to understanding the role of history in public life, on both sides of the Atlantic. He is keenly interested in educational policy and politics, and recently worked as a UKRI Policy Intern within the Royal Society’s Educational and Skills Policy Team. He is also proud to contribute to several international academic networks including History Lab Plus, the Journal ofthe History of Ideas Blog, the Teaching American Studies Network, the Southern Historical Association and the New Books Network.
Teaching
He teaches US history from 1863 until the present, providing tutorials and lectures on topics including the Culture Wars, Cold War Soft Power, and Racial Capitalism and Mass Incarceration. He is currently proud to be supervising dissertations on topics ranging from voodoo to the Junior KKK, Mamie Till-Mobley’s activism, 1980s sci-fi futurism, and Asian American legal activism. In 2025–2026, he will be co-leading the Further Subject “America’s Hidden Empire: Soft Power and U.S. Influence during the Early Cold War” and solo teaching a new MSt Options module (heavily inspired by recent events) entitled “Built to Exclude? Race, Resistance, and the American University 1636—Present.”
Research interests
Thomas’s research investigates how activist-intellectuals reshaped twentieth-century American universities, reconfiguring academic disciplines (including history) to demand social change, both within and beyond campus spaces. He is particularly interested in the public roles of African American intellectuals and how they negotiated both overt and covert forms of racialisation to reassert Black humanity and intellectual presence within academic institutions and disciplines that all too rarely recognised their capacities for thought and critique.
His AHRC-funded PhD project at UCL offered an intellectual biography of the seminal historian and activist John Hope Franklin (1915–2009). Perhaps the pre-eminent historian working in the late-twentieth-century United States, Franklin penned the best-selling Black history survey From Slavery to Freedom (1947) and engaged in tireless historical activism, supporting the NAACP on the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board (1954) and spearheading President Clinton’s One America Initiative. By tracing Franklin’s historical activism, this project sought to capture the profound duality of history’s role in American public life: both as a mechanism of silencing and dehumanisation and a vehicle through which African Americans have continually confronted their nation’s betrayals and historical deficiencies. This commitment to grappling with the public consequences of historical understandings has also inspired Thomas’s research on the U.S. 1976 Bicentennial and a range of other sites of Cold War-era memory politics.
Thomas’s research has been published in journals including Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of American Studies, where his first article won both the 2025 Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States Early Career Article Prize and the 2025 Arthur Miller Institute Article Prize.
Recent Publications
2025 “John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom (1947), Mid-Twentieth-Century Racial Liberalism, and the Dilemmas of African American History in Print” Modern Intellectual History, 21(4), 921–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000544.
2024 “‘A False Picture of Negro Progress’: John Hope Franklin, Freedom to the Free, and the Political (Mis)uses of Black History during the 1963 Emancipation Centennial”, Journal of American Studies. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875824000379 [Winner of the Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States 2025 ECR Article Prize and the British Association for American Studies’ 2025 Arthur Miller Institute Article Prize].