Susan D. Pennybacker is a Visiting Professor in History at King's. She is a modern British historian, and the Chalmers W. Poston Distinguished Professor of European History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds degrees in history from Columbia University (BA, 1976), the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1977), and the University of Cambridge (Girton College, PhD., 1984).

Research interests

• The political culture of modern Britain and London
• The history of the former British empire: South Africa, India, and Trinidad and Tobago
• Modern transnational and global history
• Modern European history

Teaching

Britain from 1688, Modern London, the former British empire, Global and transnational 

Selected publications

“Cambridge Beginnings, Oxford Departures: ‘Liberal Education’ and Imperial Legacies, 1945-70,” in Paul Readman and Geraint Thomas, eds., Culture, Thought and Belief in British Political Life since 1800, Essays in Honour of Jonathan Parry, (Boydell Press, 2024).

"Fire By Night, Cloud By Day: refuge and exile in postwar London," Presidential address, North American Conference on British Studies, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 50, 1, January 2020.

“A Cold War Geography: South African Anti-Apartheid Refuge and Exile in London, 1945-1994", in, Nathan Riley Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrence, eds., Africans in Exile: mobility, law and identity (Indiana University Press, 2018), 185-99.

“Anti-apartheid testimony: unmaking the histories of South African Jewish communists” in Carol S. Gould, Simone Gigliotti and Jacob Golomb, eds., Ethics, Art, and Representations of the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Berel Lang (Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)

From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton University Press, 2009)

A Vision for London, 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the London County Council Experiment (Routledge, 1995, paperback edition, 2013)