Dr. Max Long

I am a historian of media, science, and the environment in twentieth-century Britain. I am currently a Research Fellow in History at Jesus College, University of Cambridge.

I recently completed a PhD dissertation entitled “Mass Media and public understandings of nature in interwar Britain”, which looks at films and BBC radio broadcasts about nature from the 1920s and 1930s. I am preparing a book manuscript based partly on my PhD dissertation, with the provisional title The Science of Everyday Life: Natural History and Mass Media in Modern Britain.

I have recently begun working on a post-doctoral research project at Jesus College in Cambridge, which will explore the history of agriculture in the British Empire between 1880 and 1960 through the lens of communication.

I teach courses on the cultural, social, and political history of modern Britain to undergraduates reading for the degree in History at Cambridge. I also have several public engagement projects underway, including Secrets of Nature, an online resource about natural history films which is based on my PhD research. 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.

My PhD 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.