Glen O'Hara

Glen O’Hara (b. 1974) is an academic historian at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. He gained a Double First at Oxford University as an undergraduate between 1993 and 1996, and then a Distinction as an M.Sc. student in Economic and Social History in the 1996-97 academic year. He was a Scholar, and then a Graduate Scholar, of Jesus College, Oxford, where he also won the Eubule Thelwall Prize for History and the Gladstone Prize for History and Politics.

After a period as a schoolteacher, and as a journalist at The Independent, he moved back into academia at University College London. He took his PhD there in 2002 under the supervision of Professor Kathleen Burk, UCL's Professor of Modern History. In 2001 he was appointed Lecturer in Economic History at the University of Bristol, where he spent a year before moving to New College, Oxford, as Lecturer in Modern History. He took up his present post as a Lecturer at Oxford Brookes in January 2005, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in January 2006. He is also a Senior Lecturer at New York University in London, and during November 2006 he was a Visiting Fellow of the University of Oslo.

Dr. O’Hara is primarily interested in British central governments’ economic and social policies since 1918, focusing especially on the post-Second World War era. He has recently released a book about British economic and social planning in the 1960s; an edited collection about the Wilson governments of those years has also just been published by Routledge.

His work is chiefly notable for its use of economic theory to explain the actions of post-war British governments, utilising in particular the concepts of complexity, bounded rationality, problem solving and organizational learning.

Principal publications

*"From Dreams to Disillusionment: Economic and Social Planning in 1960s Britain" (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

*(With Dr. Helen Parr, Keele University), "The Modernisation of Britain? Harold Wilson and the British Labour Governments of 1964-1970" (London: Routledge, 2006).

*‘Towards a New Bradshaw: Economic Statistics and the British State in the 1950s and 1960s’, "Economic History Review" 60, 1 (2007), pp. 1-34.

*‘“Dynamic, Exciting, Thrilling Change”: The Wilson Government’s Economic Policy 1964-1970’, "Contemporary British History" 20, 3 (2006), pp. 383-402.

*‘“We Are Faced Everywhere With a Growing Population”: Demographic Change and the British State, 1955-64’, "Twentieth Century British History" 15, 3 (2004), pp. 243-66.

*‘“Intractable, Obscure and Baffling”: The Incomes Policy of the Conservative Government, 1957-64’, "Contemporary British History" 18, 1 (2004), pp. 25-53.