About me

I am a historian of technology and of modern Britain. I write about defence policy, industrial strategy, and British politics.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. I was previously the Humanities and Public Policy Officer at the University of Oxford.

My first book, The End of the British Future: nationalism, liberalism, and 'high technology' in the post-war era, looks at the critics of Britain's attempts to be the Science and Tech Superpower of the post-war period. In doing so, it tells a new story of Britain's changing political economy: rather than a ‘neo-liberalism’ from without, my work draws our attention to an economic liberalism from within. I suggested it was Whitehall, not Thatcherite ministers, who ensured a withdrawal from the spectacular industrial ambition that did so much to define British politics in the 1950s and 1960s. My first paper published in the English Historical Review summarised this argument. My book is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

I have won several awards and fellowships for my research, including both the Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize for the best paper by a first-time presenter at the Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Technology and the Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize for the best unpublished essay in the history of technology by an early-career scholar, which has since been published in Technology and Culture. I have also written for the Guardian, the Independent, and Open Democracy and appeared on a Channel 4 documentary about Concorde.

I am committed to ensuring that academic research is policy-engaged, and my career has shifted between the worlds of policy and academia. While a graduate student, I helped establish the Historians in Residence scheme at King's College, London, which placed historians in public institutions to work on projects of mutual benefit. After finishing my PhD, I worked as a Policy Advisor in the UK Civil Service, working on tech policy. I later held a postdoc at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, which examined how policymaking could be improved at the intersection of economic prosperity and national security. I have published policy reports with the Resolution Foundation, the Institute for Government, and the Blavatnik School of Government.

Contact

Email: tomkelsey@outlook.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-kelsey/