Vic Gatrell
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Vic Gatrell is Professor of British History at the University of Essex, a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and a member of the Cambridge history faculty. Born in South Africa, he completed his Ph.D. in Cambridge, where he taught as Lecturer and then as Reader in History until offered his Chair at Essex in 2003.
His "City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century London" (Atlantic Books, 2006) has been awarded the Wolfson History Prize (the premier award for history in Britain) and the International PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize (for the most 'accessible' scholarly history published that year), and was listed for the BBC's Samuel Johnson Prize for all non-fiction. A study of satirical caricature and manners 1780-1830, it has been described by one critic as the most important study in English cultural history so far published this century, by another as "the most sumptuous and beautiful history book in years", and by several others as a "masterpiece".
His earlier book, "The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868' (Oxford, 1994)was awarded the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society.
Vic Gatrell has appeared in numerous television and radio programmes, is helping prepare an exhibition on Thomas Rowlandson for Tate Britain, and is writing a cultural history provisionally entitled "The English in War-time: 1789-1815".
