Tom Cryer, MPhil

Tom Cryer (he/him) is an Arts and Humanities Council-funded PhD student of U.S. History at University College London’s Institute of the Americas. His doctoral project investigates memory, race, and nationhood in the twentieth-century United States through the lens of the life, scholarship, and advocacy of the leading African American Historian John Hope Franklin. Before arriving at UCL, he received a BA(Hons) in History and an MPhil in U.S. History from the University of Cambridge, where he worked on foreign policy construction and American civil religion in the 1970s. In the first year of his PhD he has presented his research across the UK, USA, and Australia, in addition to writing for LSE’s American Politics and Policy Blog, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, U.S. Studies Online, and Doing History in Public.

Tom is also keenly interested in public history, human rights and the policy sector, having written for several think tanks on topics ranging from the rights of the unborn in the U.K. to the COVID-19 resilience capacities of Pacific Island countries. He was an archival intern at the Ditchley Foundation in 2021, writing papers on the Cold War and the Anglo-American relationship as discussed at the Foundation. The latter paper was made a recommend reading for 2021’s Ditchley-Greentree Conference “The United States: Headed for Renewal or Bound for Division?” He has also been an Essays & Opinions Editor for Stillpoint London, a speakers’ coordinator for events at the Cambridge Union and a TedX conference, and will shortly contribute to April 2022’s Twenty-First Century Trust and Salzburg Global Seminar, “Who Owns the Past?”