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Frank Trentmann - SCI Professorial Research Fellow
Frank Trentmann is an SCI Professorial Research Fellow, Professor of History and Social Sciences at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, and Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He was educated at Hamburg University, the London School of Economics (BA), and at Harvard University (MA, PhD). He returned to Britain in 2000, after teaching as Assistant Professor at Princeton University.
During 2002-07 he was Director of the £ 5 million Cultures of Consumption research programme, the first collaboration between the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Professor Trentmann’s research interests have covered the history and politics of consumption in the modern world. His current work sits at the interface between history and the social sciences and is interested in what history can teach us about sustainability today. In particular, his research at SCI will investigate the history of energy transitions and the impact of lifestyle change on the environment, material use and policy.
He has been Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute, as well as Visiting Professor at Bielefeld University (Germany), the British Academy, and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris.
His publications include:
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, editor (Oxford University Press, 2012 in press); ‘Liquid Politics: Water and the Politics of Everyday Life in the Modern City’ (with Vanessa Taylor), Past & Present, no. 211 (May 2011), pp. 199-241; Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, which was awarded the Whitfield Prize by the Royal Historical Society); Time, Consumption, and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2009), edited with Elizabeth Shove and Richard Wilk; ‘The Long History of Contemporary Consumer Society: Chronologies, Practices, and Politics in Modern Europe’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 49 (2009), pp. 107-28; ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics’ Journal of British Studies, 48/2 (April 2009), pp. 283-307; ‘Crossing Divides: Consumption and Globalization in History’ Journal of Consumer Culture 9/2 (2009), pp. 187-220; Food and Globalization, edited with Alexander Nützenadel, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008); Governance, Citizens, and Consumers: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, edited with Mark Bevir); Citizenship and Consumption, edited with Kate Soper, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006, edited with John Brewer).
He is currently completing a book for Penguin/Allen Lane: The Consuming Passion: How Things Came to Seduce, Enrich, and Define our Lives: Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First.
Related Projects
The following projects are related to this contact:
Understanding the historical dynamics of sustainable consumption
Contact Details
Phone: 0161 275 0470
Email: frank.trentmann@manchester.ac.uk