About our staff

Born and raised in Burnley, Lancashire, I was educated at Towneley Comprehensive School, and Burnley Grammar School, before going on Trinity College, Oxford, from which I graduated with a First Class Honours degree in Modern History. I returned to Trinity for my postgraduate studies, the resulting doctoral  thesis providing the basis for my Oxford Historical Monograph on The Lancashire Working Classes, 1880-1930, a work selected by one discerning critic as one of the History Books of the Year in the BBC History Magazine in 2002.

While completing my doctorate, I became a research associate with Professor P.K. O’Brien, then Director of the Institute of Historical Research, on a project investigating the origins of technological progress in Britain over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Appointed Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh in 1994, on a one-year contract, and subsequently proved so difficult to get rid of that the appointment was made permanent in 2000. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004. For longer than I care to remember, I was Quality Assurance Officer for Economic and Social History, and then for the School of History and Classics, before becoming in 2010 the Head of the Economic and Social History section within the School of History, Classics and Archaeology.  

In  recent years, I have turned a long-standing passion for old, black and white films into a research interest, enabling me to justify long hours spent watching the films of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy, among others.

Summary of research interests

• Britain & Ireland
• Scotland

• Culture
• Economic History
• Gender
• Society

• Eighteenth Century
• Nineteenth Century
• Twentieth Century & After

• http://bit.ly/2sHIQdoHistory of leisure in Britain since the Industrial Revolution.
• History of working-class culture.
• History of cinema.
• History of sport.

Currently engaged in writing a monograph on cinema and cinema-going in Scotland in the years to 1950. Also engaged on research into the practices accompanying film exhibition in the silent era of cinema (to 1929).

• Cinema and cinema-going in Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century.
• The Sounds of Early Cinema: Scotland, 1896-1929

Watch a short video of Dr Griffiths speaking about this research interests - Media Hopper 

• British Society in the Twentieth Century (Social History 1.2).
• British Economic and Environmental History since 1900.
• Leisure and the Rise of Industrial Society in Britain, c.1780-1880.
• Society in an Age of ‘Mass’ Leisure, c.1880-1939.

• Cinema and Society in Britain from 1896.