Research projects

Cultures of disability

The Cultures of Disability group explores the experiences of disability throughout history. We work with disabled people and academics to share the history of disability people over a 3000-year period, from ancient Greece to the modern day. We explore the cultures of disability, foregrounding the contributions of disabled people and addressing prejudice.  By making disabled people more visible, we question contemporary ideas of ‘normal’ and challenge barriers to inclusion in all walks of life.

We want to explore new ways of doing the history of disability and to promote it in the heritage sector.  This website is where we make the results of academic research into disability history available for everyone. It is also a way for anyone to get in touch with us, and one of the ways in which we can share co-produced history and collaborations with disabled people’s organisations. We provide links to online events and events in Manchester on this website too. We welcome enquiries from anyone (including potential PhD students) who want to work with us.

We study the long history of disability to promote the inclusion and integration of disabled people into society.   Here are some of the staff and students based at Manchester Metropolitan University who research into the experiences and cultures of disability, past and present.

Britain’s Colour Bar: Imposing & Contesting Racial Exclusion, 1900-65

Dr Shirin Hirsch has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for two years to write a monograph entitled Britain’s Colour Bar: Imposing and contesting racial exclusion 1900-1965. The project offers the first history of the colour bar in modern Britain. Documented cases across Britain are collated and mapped out, tracing its informal and formal operations and covering varied spaces from buses to the boxing-ring.

In-depth research is undertaken on local cases, and the uneven, contradictory and often opaque web through which the colour bar rose and fell is analysed nationally. The project moves beyond legislation and instead tells a history from below, attentive to the strategic silences of the past and situating those who experienced and resisted the colour bar as central to Britain’s past.

Photo: collection of books relating to this research project

A Queer History of Human Rights

Craig Griffiths has recently won a two-year fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which runs from 2025 to 2027. His project A Queer History of Human Rights analyses how and why queer and trans people have turned to the language of human rights and self-determination to frame and understand their struggle in the German-speaking world since the late ninteenth century. At key political moments in diverse constitutional orders, ranging from imperial to liberal democratic, to fascist and state socialist, this language has been central to the politics of queer subjecthood. The project therefore rethinks human rights history by focusing on the complex but productive role of human rights language in the development of modern sexual identities.

The project, which will result in a monograph, is based on archival research in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, including at Qwien (Centre for Queer History, Vienna), the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum, Berlin), Schwulenarchiv Schweiz (Swiss Gay Archives, Zurich), the archives of Amnesty International in Amsterdam, and at the German Federal Archives in Koblenz and in Berlin.

Image: ‘Lichtgebet’ (Light Prayer) – Painting by Fidus (Hugo Höppener) displaying a young man standing on a rock stretching his arms toward the sky. The painting appeared in the queer magazine ‘Die Insel’ (The Island) in 1926 with a poem heralding the triumph of human rights.