Dr Thomas Cryer is a historian of the twentieth-century United States specialising in the intersecting histories of education, ideas, memory, and race. Taken as a whole, his research interrogates how historical narratives have been strategically appropriated, distorted, and mobilised to serve contemporary political agendas. Before arriving in Oxford, he completed a BA (Hons) in History and an MPhil in American History at Cambridge and a PhD in American History at University College London’s Institute of the Americas.
Thomas’s research investigates how activist-intellectuals reshaped twentieth-century American universities, reconfiguring academic disciplines (including history) to demand social change, both within and beyond campus spaces. He is particularly interested in how African American intellectuals negotiated both overt and covert forms of racialisation to reassert Black humanity and intellectual presence, all too often within academic institutions and disciplines that rarely recognised their capacities for thought and critique.
At Oxford, Tom teaches across U.S. history since 1863, including co-leading the Further Subject “America’s Hidden Empire” and leading his new MSt Options Module “Built to Exclude? Race, Resistance, and the American University, 1636–Present.” Tom’s research is deeply informed by his commitment to understanding the role of history in public life, on both sides of the Atlantic. He is keenly interested in educational policy and politics, and recently worked as a UKRI Policy Intern within the Royal Society’s Educational and Skills Policy Team. He is also proud to contribute to several international academic networks, including History Lab Plus, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, the Teaching American Studies Network, the Southern Historical Association, and the New Books Network.
Thomas’s research has been published in journals including Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of American Studies, where his first article won both the 2025 Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States Early Career Article Prize and the 2025 Arthur Miller Institute Article Prize.
Featured Publications
2025 “John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom (1947), Mid-Twentieth-Century Racial Liberalism, and the Dilemmas of African American History in Print” Modern Intellectual History, 21(4), 921–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000544.
2024 “‘A False Picture of Negro Progress’: John Hope Franklin, Freedom to the Free, and the Political (Mis)uses of Black History during the 1963 Emancipation Centennial”, Journal of American Studies. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875824000379 [Winner of the Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States 2025 ECR Article Prize and the British Association for American Studies’ 2025 Arthur Miller Institute Article Prize].
