https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-matthew-kidd/Dr Matthew Kidd is a Departmental Tutor at the University of Oxford, where he has taught since 2019. He received his doctorate in History from the University of Nottingham in 2016. His work spans modern British history, local and social history, digital humanities, and AI. At Oxford, he has served as Director of Studies and Course Director, and has led major externally funded historical projects, including Their Finest Hour. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has contributed widely to public engagement with history, including appearances on Sky News, BBC Radio 4, and BBC Radio 5.
Dr Matthew Kidd
Departmental Tutor
Matthew’s teaching is approachable and discussion-based. He creates space for students to test different interpretations, question assumptions, and develop confidence in expressing their own ideas. He places particular emphasis on close reading, asking students to explore the different ways that sources can be understood and to pay attention to how people expressed ideas and experiences. Matthew’s teaching also connects local evidence to wider historical questions, encouraging students to move between detailed source analysis and broader debates about politics, society, culture, and identity.
Matthew’s research focuses on the political, social, and intellectual history of England, c. 1840-1945, particularly radicalism, political ideology, identity, language, and local political culture. He is especially interested in how political ideas were understood, expressed, and reshaped by individuals and communities at the local level. His first book, The Renewal of Radicalism: Politics, Identity and Ideology in England, 1867-1924 (Manchester University Press), examined the persistence and adaptation of radical traditions within the early Labour Party. He has also published on socialism, nationalism, class, popular politics, and the relationship between political language and identity.
His more recent research extends these interests into memory, oral history, digital humanities, archives, and AI. Through projects at Oxford and with research partners elsewhere, he has explored how natural language processing, interactive mapping, image recognition, and other AI methods can help historians interpret large and complex collections, uncover patterns in political language and identity, and improve access to government and other historical records. His recent publications, including ‘Should sensitive archival images be shown?’ (Archival Science, 2026), examine how AI can be used responsibly to analyse historical collections and improve access to digitised and born-digital archives.
- Jaillant, L., Kidd, M. & Zhao, L. ‘Should sensitive archival images be shown? The case for applying AI to colonial archives’. Archival Science 26, 36 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-026-09552-x
- Jaillant, L., Kidd, M., & Zhao, L. Sifting the Digital Heap: A scoping study of AI for government archives – access, backlogs, and responsible practice. Zenodo report (2026). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18935870
- Kidd, M. The Renewal of Radicalism: Politics, Identity and Ideology in England, 1867-1924. Manchester University Press (2020). https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526140739
- Kidd, M. ‘‘Us and them’: exploring social difference in an English spa town’. Oral History 48(2) (2020). https://www.jstor.org/stable/48615292
- Kidd, M. ‘Class without Conflict: Popular Political Continuity in Late Victorian Bristol, 1867–1900’. Labour History Review 82 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3828/lhr.2017.5
