Rebecca Searle is a contemporary historian whose work focuses on the ways in which the study of the past can be used to make critical interventions in the politics of the present.

Her current research is focussed on the housing crisis and she has recently published A Histoty of the Housing Crisis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). She established and co-ordinates the Housing Forum, an initiative to bring together academics, community organisations and policy makers to develop local solutions to the housing crisis. She is currently contributing towards the Brighton and Hove Common Ambition project, which brings together people with lived experience of homelessness, frontline providers, and commissioners through co-production within homeless health services to improve health services and outcomes for people experiencing homelessness in Brighton & Hove. She is also working with the Brighton and Hove Land Trust on a project funded by the Civic Power Fund, that empowers local communities to interrogate recent and forthcoming developments.

Central to Rebecca's academic practice is the belief that scholars must work in partnership with their communities to tackle the many global challenges our world faces. She pursues this at the University of Brighton as Deputy Director for the Centre for Applied Politics, Philosophy and Ethics, where she supports other scholars to understand the real world practical impacts of their researach. She designed the pioneering suite of Global Challenges modules that encourages students to pursue their own research projects and find solutions to Global Challenges. In 2023, she was awarded a One Brighton Award in 2023 for research-linked teaching, in recognition of these modules. She is the Course Leader for BA Politics and Social Change and the Employability, Placements and Partnership lead for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Rebecca's other research and teaching interests include the history of gender and sexuality; the global history of contemporary capitalism; war and conflict; and the history and politics of twentieth and twenty-first century Britain.

Rebecca completed her BA and MA in Contemporary History at the University of Sussex. In 2006, she was awarded an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award and worked in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum and the University of Sussex in preparation of her DPhil entitled “Art, Propaganda and the Experience of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1939-1945”. In 2013 she was awarded a Paul Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship with Yale University to develop her thesis into a monograph, Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare  (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Subsequently Rebecca worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Economic History at the University of Sussex. She was first employed on the ESRC project The Living Standards of Working Households in Britain, 1904-1960. She was then part of a team who were awarded a £1.15m ESRC Grant for The Global Income Inequality Project.

Since working at the University of Brighton, Rebecca has focussed her research on The History of the Housing Crisis. This book has been well recieved:

"Enlightening, inspiring and revealing in equal measure. From the plotting of Conservatives to the failures of New Labour and the rearising of radicalism in Scotland, Rebecca Searle’s brilliant account of the housing history of Britain not only details where we have come from, but also where we need to move to next." Danny Dorling, professor of geography, University of Oxford, UK

"This engaging and important new book shows exactly why understanding the past matters. In Searle's hands the history of housing sheds new light on the development of modern Britain. History of the Housing Crisis both explains the current housing crisis and suggests how it might be resolved. Everyone should read it." Claire Langhamer, PhD, Director of the Institute of Historical Research

She is closely involved with efforts to tackle the housing crisis in Brighton and Hove. She established and co-ordinates the Housing Forum, an initiative to bring together academics, community organisations and policy makers to develop local solutions to the housing crisis. She is currently contributing towards the Brighton and Hove Common Ambition project, which brings together people with lived experience of homelessness, frontline providers, and commissioners through co-production within homeless health services to improve health services and outcomes for people experiencing homelessness in Brighton & Hove. She is also working with the Brighton and Hove Land Trust on a project funded by the Civic Power Fund, that empowers local communities to interrogate recent and forthcoming developments. 

Studying history at Sussex, Rebecca was influenced by the pedagogy of the History Workshop Movement, who understood students as highly competent and original thinkers who benefitted most by being supported to pursue their own research projects rather than being didactically lectured to. Her experience of teaching over 15 years taught her that students needed not only to be able to understand the global challenges we face, but be able to propose solutions and advocate for change. And from her own experience as a researcher, she learnt that the most powerful ideas arise when we take our ideas out of the classroom and engage with our communities and the wider world.

The development of the BA Politics and Social Change presented an opportunity to put these ideas into practice. The suite of Global Challenges Modules facilitate students to conduct their own research projects, supervised and supported by an expert in the field. They learn a range of digital and communication skills including making films, podcasts and data visualisations, designing political and social media campaigns, and writing policy papers and political speeches. Students undertake live briefs for external policy and campaigning organisations, enabling their work to be circulated and helping them build a professional portfolio. This equips students with a range of skills and experiences to prepare them for their lives after graduation, whether in work and employment or as acitivsts and change makers of the future.

Rebecca recieved a One Brighton award for research linked teaching in recognition of these modules.

Rebecca supervises students researching contemporary British History. She has particular expertise in the history of housing, the politics of twentieth and twenty first century Britain, the history of sexuality and gender, and the impact of war on society. She works with students across social, political, cultural and economic history and with students specialising in politics, sociology or philosophy who want to incorporate historical analysis into their research. 

Knowledge exchange and community engagement are central to Rebecca's practice. Her PhD was an AHRC funded collaborative award and she worked with the Imperial War Museum. During her ESRC postdoc, she worked in collaboration with the National Archives to develop a Teacher Scholar Programme, where we worked with a group of secondary school teachers to develop teaching resources to enable pupils to engage with the datasets we produced. 

Community collaboration is now central to her research on the housing crisis. She established and co-ordinates the Housing Forum, an initiative to bring together academics, community organisations and policy makers to develop local solutions to the housing crisis.

She works in partnership with the Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust, supported by the award of funding from the Ignite scheme. This partnership has recently recieved a grant from the Civic Power Fund to empower communities to interrogate recent developments in their area. This project will act as a pilot for a larger project that works to engender greater finacial and democratic literacy about development and planning in the community and collectively develop a bottom up empirical picture of property development in 21st century Britain.

Rebecca is also contributing towards the Brighton and Hove Common Ambition project, which brings together people with lived experience of homelessness, frontline providers, and commissioners through co-production within homeless health services to improve health services and outcomes for people experiencing homelessness in Brighton & Hove. 

She acts to disseminate her research in forms that are genuinely accessible. She has given public talks across Brighton and Sussex on the housing crisis, contributed to exhibitions and appeared on podcasts.