Dr Max Hodgson

I gained my PhD in 2018 from the University of Reading. I lectured at the University of Buckingham from 2018-19, before moving to Wadham College and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. I then held teaching and research positions at the University of Warwick prior to joining LMH in 2022.

My research focuses on modern Britain and Russia/USSR, with particular interests in socialist depictions of crime, punishment and prisons. More recently my work has engaged with histories of medicine and health in prisons, while I have longstanding interests in the international impact of the Bolshevik Revolution, not least the political, social and cultural interactions of the early Soviet state with Britain. Future research is focused on the development, functioning and influence of the International Penitentiary Congress 1872-1950.

I teach the modern History of the British Isles papers across prelims and finals, as well as a range of European and World History papers, Historiography and Disciplines of History.

‘Pathologizing “refusal”: British prisons, health and conscientious objectors during the First World War’, Social History of Medicine, 35, 3 (2022), 972-95.

‘“If I ever have to go to prison, I hope it’s a Russian Prison”: British Labour, Social Democracy and Soviet Communism, 1919-1925’, Twentieth Century British History, 28, 3 (2017), 344-66.

‘A Gradualist Approach to Criminality: Early British Socialists, Utopia and Crime’, Studies in History, Archaeology, Religion and Conservation, 2, 1 (2015), 48-71.

Labour and the Soviets: Criminality, Cultural Diplomacy, and Socialism in Britain and Russia (in preparation for publication)

‘NEP Anxieties and Bolshevik Borrowings: Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, Penal Policy and the International Feedback Loop, 1919-1927’ (reviewed and under revision for Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History)