Gareth Stedman Jones (born 17 December 1942) is an English academic and historian. As Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London, he deals particularly with working-class history and Marxism.

Career

Educated at St Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated in history in 1964, Stedman Jones went on to Nuffield College, Oxford to take a DPhil in 1970. He moved to Cambridge in 1974, becoming a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and in 1979, a lecturer in history. He was a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1967 to 1970, a senior associate member of St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1971–1972, and an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Goethe University, Frankfurt in 1973–1974, before becoming a lecturer in history at Cambridge in 1979–1986 and a reader in history of social thought there in 1986–1997. He has served as co-director of the Centre for History and Economics at King's since 1991 and held the post of professor of political science from 1997 to 2010. In 2010 Stedman Jones became Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London. From 1964 to 1981 Stedman Jones served on the editorial board of the New Left Review. He was a joint founder of the History Workshop Journal in 1976. In 2018, reviewing Stedman Jones's intellectual evolution, historian Terence Renaud described a "journey from the New Left, through French structuralism, to a contextualist practice of intellectual history that leaves Marxism behind."

Publications