Ross McKibbin

Ross Ian McKibbin, (born January 1942) is an Australian academic historian whose career, spent almost entirely at the University of Oxford, has been devoted to studying the social, political and cultural history of modern Britain, especially focusing on Labour politics and class cultures.

Early life Ross Ian McKibbin was born in Sydney, Australia, in January 1942, the son of Arnold Walter McKibbin, a teacher, and his wife, Nance Lilian, daughter of Clarence Spence, a bank manager from Bega. McKibbin's father's family emigrated from Northern Ireland in the 1860s. His paternal grandfather was the secretary to the vice-chancellor of Sydney University and the family were staunchly Protestant. When Arnold McKibbin was demobilised from the RAAF after World War II, he took up teaching at North Sydney Boys' High School until 1951, when the family relocated to Forbes, a rural township in New South Wales; five years later, they moved to Orange, where McKibbin completed his schooling.

Career and works In 1972, McKibbin became a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at St John's College, Oxford, and remained there for the rest of his career. Between 2006 and 2015, he was an Emeritus Research Fellow there and in 2015 he became Emeritus Fellow. In 1999, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2009, he was elected an honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. McKibbin's work has focused on working-class life and the politics of the Labour party and the labour movement more generally. In the words of Peter Ghosh, McKibbin's work "embraces an unprecedented range of the life and activities of the ‘ordinary man’; it combines the most generous human sympathies with a stringent intellectual discipline; and it embodies a radical and novel conceptualization of the recent past".