Hester Barron arrived at Sussex in 2007, having completed her D.Phil. at Oxford. She specialises in modern British social history. Her first book, 'The 1926 Miners' Lockout: Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield', was published by OUP in December 2009. It focused on the miners' lockout of 1926, exploring the relationship between class, region and nation and community. Themes of identity and community thread throughout her work, and since then her research has converged around the broad themes of childhood, parenting and schooling. She has also taught and supervised extensively on the British experience of the Second World War. In 2021 she published a trade book, co-authored with Claire Langhamer, 'Class of '37: Voices from working-class girlhood', which drew upon essays written by schoolchildren for the research organisation Mass-Observation in 1937. Her second monograph, 'The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London' was published by MUP in 2022. She is currently completing an anthology of women's writing from the Mass Observation Archive (co-edited with Fiona Courage), to be published by Virago in spring 2027, and is in the early stages of a new project exploring the educational and intellectual lives of British housewives across the mid-twentieth century. 

Hester has convened and/or taught on the following modules:

Y1: The Making of the Modern World

Y2: 'Britain in the Twentieth Century', 'Childhood in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain'; '1916: The Somme', '1926: The General Strike'

Y3: 'Britain and the Second World War', 'Childhood and History'

MA: 'War, Gender and British Society, 1914-45', 'Historical Skills and Methods', 'The People's Century', 'People's Heritage'

She welcomes enquiries from postgraduates seeking to research aspects of British social history in the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the labour movement, childhood or education.