As a historian, time preoccupies Professor Peter Mandler. 

“Now, in retrospect, I wish I’d had longer here,” says Peter, a Gonville & Caius College Fellow since 2001.

“Twenty-four years may seem like a long time, but it feels like it’s gone by very quickly. I have loved my time here and it's not over. I'm just starting in some ways.”

Peter is reflecting on his career as Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey College Lecturer in History at Caius, now he has retired from his university post. His prolific work output is continuing apace, with books in preparation and a busy career schedule.

It is the personal relationships which have shaped his time at Caius and Cambridge.

“A large proportion of my colleagues either arrive at the beginning of their career for their first job and stay, or come in with a special appointment in late career,” Peter adds. “Somewhat unusually, I was 43 and had 20 years of teaching behind me at different institutions.

“Some of the things that I liked most about this place are undoubtedly enhanced by longer tenures because it's the relationships you have with your students when they’re here and continuing after they leave.”

Peter believes the strengths of those relationships can be attributed to the small group teaching from the supervision system, but also due to College and University life in a small city.

“It's a very small place physically and you constantly bump into people,” Peter adds.

“Something which is distinctive and very important to me is the intellectual density. For history, we have around 600 undergraduates, 300 to 400 postgraduates and 100 to 150 academic staff – practically no other university in the world has that many historians in one place and yet it’s a very small city, with all those people within a few hundred yards’ radius.

“I think people don't realise how unusual it is. I think of the University as being the centre of intellectual life, but a lot of the universities are community universities. People come in, they do their thing and they leave. Cambridge is unlike them. And that's really unusual and valuable.”

Peter works in an interdisciplinary way, but has especially enjoyed his collaborations with Caius Historians, past and present, particularly Dr Melissa Calaresu, Professor Sujit Sivasundaram and Professor Emma Hunter, who is now at Edinburgh, over the years.

He adds: “I didn’t know anything about Cambridge and I had no basis on which to choose a college. One of the few people I did know here said to me ‘Choose any college as long as you don’t choose Caius’ and I asked why, and they said ‘They’ve already got too many historians – spread the wealth’. I’m afraid I didn’t regard that piece of advice!”

Caius historians teach together and Peter collaborated with Melissa to launch the ‘Collecting and Collections’ paper for first-year undergraduates, making use of the wealth of opportunities at the University of Cambridge museums, including the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, as well as the Caius Old Library, to name just a few.

Another paper, devised with Sujit and Dr Michael Joseph, the University’s Assistant Professor of Black British History, is called ‘British Worlds, 1750-1919’, exploring not just empire, but migration and transmission of knowledge, ideas about race and civilisation and more.

Collaborations are continuing in written form, with Peter producing forthcoming books on post-war British cities (The Modern British City 1945-2000), spawned from the Society for the Promotion of Urban Discussion (Spud), and Secondary education and social change in the United Kingdom since 1945.

Peter is also delivering the Ford Lectures in Oxford in spring 2026 on a topic which is  poised to become a book exploring how the language of social science enters everyday life across the 20th century.

“I'm interested in seeing how people become aware through the mass media – newspapers, books, radio, television and education – develop a vocabulary that helps to understand a complicated and rapidly changing world which we can't grasp simply through direct experience,” Peter adds.

“Having more time does not necessarily mean that I've got more leisure or that I will be doing something different because I expect most of my time will be continue to be filled up by the things it's always filled up by: going to seminars and conferences and lectures and all those other things.

“And just keeping an eye on like the whole of my discipline, which I will continue to do, because I've always been interested in representing my discipline, history, and my profession, as an academic, to the wider world.”

Time that will be filled.

Two events are taking place in September: A book launch for Democratising History: Modern British History Inside and Out, a festschrift in honour of Prof. Peter Mandler, and a conference in honour of Prof. Peter Mandler. Both events are sold out.