I am Dr Mo Moulton and I work in the History department here in the University of Birmingham
and I guess in the broadest sense my research is about the creation and constitution of
marginalised communities and the way that people who are excluded in various ways from
the kind of mainstream of British society and culture have founded communities and have
ended up changing British culture overall.
So, my area of focus really is the 1920s and the 1930s. That's my main zone of focus. My
first book which was on Irish communities in Britain and I got interested in that as
a PhD student actually because I was reading and studying about the 1920s and the 1930s
and I really got interested in these narratives about stability and the ways in which Britain
was more stable than continental Europe and narratives about cosy interwar Britain that
was insular and inward-focused and it suddenly struck me that this was leaving Ireland completely
out of the story and that something like a quarter of the landmass of the UK became independent
during the 1920s and how did that actually fit in? What happens if we zoom out and include
Ireland in our story of the 1920s and the 1930s? So I ended up writing this project
that looked at the lives of people who were crossing the boundary between Ireland and
England. People who saw themselves as being linked to both Irish culture and to British
culture in various ways. People who were from Britain who identified with Irish culture
and also marginalised communities within Britain who were committed to Irish politics in some
ways so I was curious about women who might have been working for the London County Council
as schoolteachers during the week and then running guns to the IRA at the weekend, putting
them in their suitcases and taking the ferry over. What motivated them? How did they understand
themselves both as British schoolteachers and also as Irish radical nationalists.
I guess two things growing out of that project that have come to inform my subsequent work.
One is that I'm just interested in general ways in the way that we create binaries that
don't ultimately account for actual lived experience. And in that first project I was
thinking a lot about how being Irish or being English, being Irish or being British, come
to be imagined in the 1920s as mutually exclusive in some ways and that leaves out actual lived
experiences in all sorts of dimensions.
And I think that that is a pattern in early 20th century British culture and western culture
more broadly - this kind of development of ideas around identity and around identities
that need to be fixed within a certain category.
So some of my current research is thinking about how those boundaries come in to existence
around gender and sexuality in the 1920s and 30s as well.
So that's something that is kind of a broad long-term interest for me and something I'm
continuing to develop, looking ahead. It also informs my work within the College of Arts
and Law as the LGBTQ liaison officer.
That is sort of non-research focused, but is something that informs my teaching and
my work with students here.
Then, writing about these kind of marginalised communities of Irish people in Britain, I
found myself more and more fascinated with individual lives. Becoming really curious
about following somebody through the various organisations that they joined and the kinds
of things that they wrote and the people they met and the places that they went and I knew
for my second book that I wanted to write something that was more biographical. And
so my current book is called 'Mutual Admiration Society' and it's about a group of women who
in some respects are really different from my Irish nationalist schoolteachers. It was
a group of friends who all went to Somerville College Oxford and they formed this friendship
group, this writing group - they called themselves the Mutual Admiration Society, jokingly and
also not jokingly. And the group actually endured throughout their whole lives and so
the book follows their friendship, their collaborations and their careers.
The most famous of them is Dorothy L. Sayers, the detective novelist - she's somebody that
even folks who don't study the 1920s and the 1930s might have heard of through, you know,
radio adaptations of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories and so on. In some respects these
women are really different from the people I studied in my first book because they went
to Oxford University, they became famous authors in some respects, they became well-known advocates
on birth control, on how to raise your children so they are prominent within mainstream British
culture in a different way, but they are also excluded on the basis of gender in all sorts
of ways in this time period, so they attended Oxford between 1912 and roughly 1917, which
is before women could actually get degrees from Oxford, so they all got these little
certificates that said they had completed a course of studies that was equivalent to
a degree and so in studying their lives I had this moment of realising that they all
could have been really boring men. They might have gone on to die in the trenches of World
War One, but if they hadn't, they could have been staid professors or lecturers or administrators
and so on but they were barred from all of that in all sorts of ways so what they had
to do was in order to have a public voice they had to speak to a broader public and
so what I argue in the book is that that process of partial exclusion almost served as a kind
of sand in an oyster that allowed them to intervene in debates about democracy, debates
about mass culture, that allowed them to speak to a broader audience and to shape modern
culture in a more direct way than they might have done otherwise. And it's something that
I tried to think through in the book. This sort of dual quality of exclusion that on
the one hand is limiting, it is a source of suffering, it is a source of loss and waste
and all of those sorts of things, and yet it can also be generative, it can also be
productive, it can also lead people to produce really unique and particular things.