Dr. Max Long

I am a historian of media, science, and the environment in twentieth-century Britain. Currently I am based at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, where I am a Darby Fellow and Tutor in Modern History.

My first book, A Science for Everyday Life: Mass Media, Natural History and the Environment in Britain, 1900-1945, will be published with University of Pittsburgh Press in December 2026. The book offers an account of the formation of popular ideas about the environment in early-twentieth century Britain. It argues that a range of mass media – including films, radio broadcasts, magazines, lantern slides and museums – shaped new attitudes towards the environment and the natural world in the first half of the twentieth century.

I have several public engagement projects underway, including Secrets of Nature, an online resource about natural history films. My article ‘The ciné-biologists: natural history film and the co-production of knowledge in interwar Britain’, published in the British Journal for the History of Science, was named runner-up for the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize in 2021.

I am currently working on several new areas of research including:

• A project about the controversy over the introduction of the Little Owl (Athene Noctua) in England and New Zealand
• A history of river pollution in Britain
• A social history of the sleep condition narcolepsy

During the academic year 2023-4, I was a Research Fellow in Digital History at the Science Museum in London, working on the AHRC-funded project Congruence Engine: Digital Tools for New Collections Based Industrial Histories.

I teach courses on the cultural, social, and political history of modern Britain and Europe to undergraduate students at Oxford.

My doctoral research was funded by a Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. My research has also received support from the Isaac Newton Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the DAAD, the Centre for History and Economics, and a William Alexander Fleet Fellowship at Princeton University.

I have worked as a historical consultant and researcher for Film and TV productions in the past, and I am available to discuss future projects of this kind.