William Garbett

I am a PhD candidate in the History department at Lancaster University, in England. My research looks at the radio and television comedy produced by Chris Morris between about 1990 and 2010, and I am particularly interested in how historians can write about immediate and intense responses to media, like laughter, disgust and anger. I have started to build a picture of Britain in the 1990s where attacks on established non-fiction forms, and debates around the boundaries of decency and the purpose of broadcasters, eroded trust in media institutions.

Between 2022-2024, I was the Modern History Editor at EPOCH History Magazine. This gave me a taste for wide-ranging, expansive histories of ideas. Polina Ignatova’s ‘Eating Your Enemies in the Middle Ages and Today’, compared medieval and contemporary attitudes to exocannibalism through Undertale, The Umbrella Academy and the fourteenth-century chivalric romance, Perceforest; it is the best article I ever edited.

I began to build a writing portfolio with EPOCH, feeling my way towards pieces where I could take an element of contemporary popular culture and play with the ideas I could see in it. My best work was my latest, ‘Dune and the History of the Future’, where I took the image of the Heighliner from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) and used it to explore how Frank Herbert’s novel had combined contemporary ideas about space travel and psychoactive chemicals in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘electric age’.

Other pieces examined Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front as a prism through which to look at German attitudes to working through the past, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as a way into examining attitudes to modernity and the American West in the mid-twentieth century, and British prank radio phone-ins in the 1990s as a way to shed light on attitudes to criminal justice. I blog here: https://contemporaryhistory.substack.com/