William Garbett
PhD studentResearch Overview
My thesis explores the relationship between comedy and society in Britain between about 1990 and 2010. I am particularly interested in the extent to which historians can retrieve experiences of laughter and disgust from responses to television, when immediate audience responses are not available in the archive.
More broadly, I am interested in humour, language, narrative, the intersection of politics and culture, and contemporary European and North American history. My MA dissertation focused on nostalgia for communism in the former German Democratic Republic, explored through material culture, place and film.
Profile
I am a PhD candidate in the History department at Lancaster University, in England. My research looks at the radio and television comedy produced by Chris Morris between about 1990 and 2010. I have started to build a picture of Britain in the 1990s where attacks on established non-fiction forms and debates around the boundaries of decency and the purpose of broadcasters eroded trust in media institutions.
Writing and Editing
Since November 2024 I have written a Substack, Contemporary History, where I post longform pieces that examine the relationship between the media, culture and politics in history. The piece I am most proud of is an examination of the moral panic around teenage pregnancy in Britain in the late 2000s.
Between 2022-2024, I was the Modern History Editor at EPOCH History Magazine. As well as teaching me invaluable editing and proofreading skills, my experience with EPOCH gave me a taste for wide-ranging, expansive histories of ideas. For example, Polina Ignatova’s ‘Eating Your Enemies in the Middle Ages and Today’, compared medieval and contemporary attitudes to exocannibalism through Undertale, The Umbrella Academy and the fourteenth-century chivalric romance, Perceforest; it is the best article I ever edited.
I began to build a writing portfolio with EPOCH, feeling my way towards pieces where I could take an element of contemporary popular culture and play with the ideas I could see in it. My best work was my latest, ‘Dune and the History of the Future’, where I took the image of the Heighliner from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) and used it to explore how Frank Herbert’s novel had combined contemporary ideas about space travel and psychoactive chemicals in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘electric age’.
Other pieces examined Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front as a prism through which to look at German attitudes to working through the past, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as a way into examining attitudes to modernity and the American West in the mid-twentieth century, and British prank radio phone-ins in the 1990s as a way to shed light on attitudes to criminal justice. I also attempted to map Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, once.
Teaching
In the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years, I taught on first-year and second-year undergraduate history modules at Lancaster University. The first-year undergraduate survey course (HIST100) takes students from Ancient Rome through to Reagan’s America, and teaching this course requires broad historical knowledge and familiarity with many different historiographical approaches. The course also covers a wide geography, including the histories of the Middle East and South Asia.
In Michaelmas term 2024, I taught on HIST269: The Vietnam War in American Culture. By examining the impact of the war through popular culture, race relations and diplomacy, I help students grasp key ideas in the study of modern American history.
Other Activities
Since October 2023 I have organised the History department's postgraduate seminar series. In the 2022-2023 academic year, I chaired the Lancaster History Postgraduate Conference (LHPC) committee. That year, LHPC successfully applied for AHRC funding.