PhD Candidate Tom Sojka Wins Shotwell Fellowship
Congratulations to Tom Sojka for winning the Shotwell Fellowship, an award that assists History PhD students in their final year of dissertation writing. This award has been generously funded by an alum of the History PhD program.
His dissertation, “Moving Beyond Mayfair: Rethinking Social Life in Interwar Britain,” shows how Britons in the 1920s and 1930s understood the contemporary leisure landscape of London, its rural environs, and beyond. By focusing on the Bright Young People—an informal group of aristocratic and upper-class individuals active during the period—this project de-centers London’s West End as the premier site of elite sociability. In their pursuit of pleasure, the Bright Young People moved from Mayfair townhouse to Soho nightclub and from Scottish country house to Riviera villa, and these movements, in turn, were dutifully reported by gossip columnists. He also argues that the interwar gossip column served as a discursive space, that allowed for cross-class participation in an otherwise inaccessible elite social world.
