About our staff

Twitter: @_Megan_Hunt_

Director of Honours Teaching (History)

I studied American Studies at King’s College, London, before completing my MA at the University of Manchester. Continuing my journey north, I completed my PhD at Northumbria University, where I also taught modules in American history, British culture, and academic skills. I then taught American and Transatlantic history at Teesside University, before joining Edinburgh in January 2017.

Conference Secretary: HOTCUS, Historians of the Twentieth Century United States

Co-founder: The Precarity Project, funded by a British Association for American Studies/US Embassy Grant

Summary of research interests

• North America

• Religion

• Twentieth Century & After

I teach late 19th and 20th century American history, with a focus on issues of race, class, gender, and religion.

My research mostly focuses on the African American civil rights movement and its intersections with cinema, both through representation of the movement onscreen and the physical space of the segregated cinema before 1964. My PhD research examined the representation of southern religion in civil rights cinema, and the implications this has for public memory of the movement and national understanding of the South. This research led to published chapters on Selma, The Help, and Mississippi Burning and a forthcoming monograph. 

Beyond my immediate research areas, I have published an article exploring how Martin Luther King, Jr. is taught in British schools. This research contributes to a growing body of work about King as a global figure, and hopes to encourage a more detailed examination of Transatlantic exchange and solidarity during the long freedom struggle. A collaboration with colleagues from Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, this project has led to the publication of a free teaching resource pack. I have also developed school assembly plans for Black History Month 2019, that encourage teachers and students to reflect on links between American and British anti-racism movements. They can be accessed here.

More recent research explores segregated cinema-going in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights campaigns of April 1963. In particular, I have examined intersecting events from April 1963, most notably, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s ‘Project C’ and the Alabama premiere of To Kill a Mockingbird. An article will be published in the Alabama Review in 2023.

Martin Luther King in the UK: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/martinlutherking/activities/mlkinuk/

2022-2023

History of the United States

Atticus Finch's America: White Liberals and Race in the United States, 1930-2008

History Dissertation

Previously: 

The American Civil Rights Movement

The American South since the Civil War

Modern United States History

The Rights Revolution: The Supreme Court and American Society

Black Nationalism in the United States

The United States in the 1960s

Introduction to Historiography

Historian's Toolkit

Historical Skills and Methods I & II

2022 -2023 

Themes in the Historiography of the Americas 

Race, Religion, and Ridicule: The American South from Reconstruction to World War II 

MSc Dissertation (History; American History; Contemporary History)

Previously: The Civil Rights Movement

The Sixties in the United States

Historical Research: Skills and Sources 

Historical Methodology: Approaches to the Past 

I currently supervise three PhD students working across US history, from the Civil War era to the 1990s.

US history from the late 19th century to the present