Professor Matt Cook

Matt Cook is Jonathan Cooper Professor in the History of Sexuality at Oxford University. He is a cultural historian specializing in British queer history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His books include London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 – 1914 (2003), Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (2014), and Queer Beyond London (2022) and he has co-edited four collections - A Gay History of Britain (2007); Queer 1950s (2013); Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945 (2014), Queering the Interior (2017), and Locating Queer Histories: places and traces across the UK (2023).

He has worked extensively with the museums, archives and heritage sectors on issues of LGBTQ representation, including co-authoring the National Trust’s Prejudice and Pride guidebook (2017). He is an editor of History Workshop Journal and was previously Professor of Modern History and Director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre at Birkbeck, University of London.