Dr Sophie Scott-Brown

Dr Sophie Scott-Brown is a Visiting Fellow at Magdalene.

Dr Sophie Scott-Brown is a historian of activists and anarchists, rebels and radicals, critics and heretics. Her research explores the histories of political experimentation and their significance today. This is the focus of her forthcoming book, The Radical Fifties: Activist Politics in Cold War Britain (OUP, July 2025). She is currently examining 'social science satire' in mid-century Britain and America.

Alongside her visiting fellowship at Magdalene College, Dr Skott-Brown is a fellow at the Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St Andrews and a Research Associate for the Global Governance, Public Trust, and Democratic Engagement: Past, Present, and Future project at Northumbria University.

Selected Publications

Books

Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchism (Routledge, 2022).

The Histories of Raphael Samuel: A Portrait of a People’s Historian (ANU Press, 2017).

Articles
‘Utopian Anti Utopianism: Rethinking Cold War Liberalism Through British Anarchism’, Intellectual History Review (accepted 28 October 2024).

‘A Real WEA Tutor: GDH Cole and the Politics of Persona’, Journal of the History of Ideas (accepted May 2024).
An Artful Science: Activism, Non-Violence, and Radical Democracy in Cold War Britain’, The Journal of Contemporary History (published online August 2024).

‘Inventing Ordinary Anarchy in Cold War Britain’, Modern Intellectual History, 20: 4 (2023), 1251-1272.

‘Rethinking the Socialist Intellectual in the British First New Left’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 70:5 (2023), 591–608.

‘Act Local, Think Global: The Post-War British Anarchists and the International Imagination’, Global Intellectual History, 9:4 (2022), 370–388.

‘An Activist Stagecraft? Performative Politics and the First British New Left (1956-1959), The History of European Ideas, 48:1 (2022), 129–143.

Related websites

University of St Andrews: Dr Sophie Scott-Brown