After retiring from a 30-year career as a chartered accountant, Alistair was a student in the department from 2010 to 2017 studying for a Postgraduate Certificate in Historical Studies, an MSc in English Local History (Kellogg) and a DPhil in English Local History (Harris Manchester). Following completion of his studies, Alistair joined the part-time tutor panel and became a Departmental Lecturer in November 2019. His role is now primarily focused on co-directing the Graduate School and on the design and delivery of a broad research skills training and development programme for postgraduate students across the university and externally. Alongside these responsibilities, he also teaches various history courses and supervises masters and doctoral theses on historical topics in his fields of interest. Alistair’s undergraduate degree was in Accounting & Statistics from the University of Southampton, and he is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales.
Dr Alistair Beecher
Co-Director of the Graduate School
Departmental Lecturer
Alistair’s teaching approach is interactive, participative and engaging and draws on both practical academic research and extensive previous professional and business experience. With a focus on inclusivity and accessibility, most of his skills sessions are taught through a hybrid model to audiences from mixed academic disciplines, as he does not come from a traditional specialist academic background himself. His belief is that there is richness in diversity of perspective in teaching, and he seeks to draw out both common principles and points of disciplinary difference to encourage a deeper level of scholarship. As a lifelong learner with the department himself for many years, Alistair understands the student perspective and seek to use this to inform both planning and delivery of teaching.
As an historian, Alistair’s research and teaching interests are in religious and social history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in secularisation and local history.
- Ezzamel, Mahmoud., Mar-Molinero, Cecilio. and Beecher, Alistair., ‘On the distributional properties of financial ratios’, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting 14/4 (1987), pp. 463-481
- Beecher, Alistair ‘Review of Mary Hardy and her World, Volume 3: Spiritual and Social Forces by Margaret Bird’, Journal of the British Association for Local History 50/4 (2020), pp. 329-331
- Beecher, Alistair ‘Alresford: The Collapse of Anglican Hegemony in Rural Hampshire, c. 1914 – 1939’ in Christianity in Britain since 1914, eds. David Goodhew and Mark Smith (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), pp. 19-43
- Beecher, Alistair ‘Review of Different Drums: One Family, Two Wars by Victoria Manthorpe’, Journal of the British Association for Local History 55/2 (2025), pp. 179-80
- Beecher, Alistair ‘Review of Basingstoke Reinvented 1800 – 1925: from Agricultural Town to Manufacturing Centre edited by Jean Morrin, Journal of the British Association of Local History 56/1 (2026), pp. 68-9
- Beecher, Alistair ‘Review of Bath between the Wars, 1919-1939 by David G. Williamson, Journal of the British Association of Local History 56/2 (2026). Available [Online] at https://www.balh.org.uk/publication-review-february-2026-reviews
