Charles R. Perry
Professor of History
A.B. Davidson College: A.M. and Ph.D, Harvard University
Phone: (931) 598-1355
Office Location: Breslin B
Email: cperry@sewanee.edu
Areas of specialization
modern British political, economic and cultural history; the history of communications
Courses taught
Survey of British history; upper-level seminars in modern Britain; historiography
Biography
CHARLES R. PERRY was educated at Davidson College and Harvard University, where he earned his A.M. and Ph.D. Professor Perry has taught British and European history at Sewanee since 1974. His main field of research is modern British history, especially its economic and cultural history. 
His book The Victorian Post Office: The Growth of a Bureaucracy, which explored the role of that department in the nineteenth-century revolution in government and the evolution of a mixed economy in Britain, was published by the Royal Historical Society in 1992. He has also published numerous articles and reviews in American, French and British journals, including an article on the rise and fall of the nationalized telegraph industry in Britain for Business and Economic History. A related interest in the history of technology led him to contribute chapters to The Social Impact of the Telephone, The Dictionary of Business Biography, and The Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era. He has six articles in press for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is now at work on a book project, “Present and Past: History and the Public in England, 1890-1950.” As part of that study he published an essay on the travel writer H.V. Morton and issues of national identity in Twentieth Century British History (Oxford University Press). In July 2002 Perry gave a paper on Morton at the fifth international Robert Graves Society Conference in Rome. Perry has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Whiting Foundation, and the Mellon Fund of the university. In 2002 he held a John B. Stephenson Fellowship from the Appalachian College Association, which supported six months of research at Cambridge University.
Perry was President of the Carolinas Symposium on British Studies in 1985. Having served as Vice President and a member of its Executive Board, in 2003 Perry will begin a two-year term as President of the Southern Conference on British Studies. Perry served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Science from 1988 to 1993, and he was Chair of the History Department from 1998 to 2003. He has been a tutor on the British Studies at Oxford program, St. John’s College, Oxford five times. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1990.
