Christopher Ferguson

Associate Professor of History, Auburn University
Christopher Ferguson is a historian of Modern Britain, with special interests in the period c. 1780-c. 1870, urban history, autobiography and other ego documents, and material culture. He joined the Auburn University faculty in 2008, after completing his PhD in British and cultural history at Indiana University, where he also received an interdisciplinary minor in Victorian studies.

At Auburn, Ferguson teaches survey courses in modern British, European, and world history, as well as topics and graduate courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European history, and the histories of gender and material culture.

Ferguson’s first book, An Artisan Intellectual, examines the life and ideas of the English tailor and writer James Carter (1792-1853), one of the countless and largely anonymous individuals whose lives dramatically transformed during Britain’s long march to modernity. Born in Colchester, Carter began working as a tailor at age thirteen, and later migrated to London. As the Industrial Revolution brought innovations in every aspect of British life, Carter took advantage of opportunities to push against the boundaries of his working-class background, supplementing his income by writing, publishing books, articles, and poetry on subjects as diverse as religion, death, nature, aesthetics, and theories of civilization. The history of Carter’s life and writings, therefore, offers a particularly rich entry point for understanding the larger history of how ordinary Britons were swept up in - but also swam against - the waves of revolutionary change transforming their society during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Ferguson’s current research project, Making Sense of the City, analyzes British responses to rapid urbanization during the first half of the “long” nineteenth century, arguing that for ordinary Britons the transition to a society of city-dwellers represented a transformation as revolutionary as the economic and political changes occurring during the same years.