Dr Marc Collinson teaches contemporary history and politics. A political historian of twentieth century Britain, his research focuses on elections, place, and governance. His study of Smethwick and the 1964 General Election, Migration on the Ballot? has been published by Routledge (2026).

Dr Collinson currently acts as Civic Mission Lead in the School of History, Law, and Social Sciences and is involved in the provision of short courses. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Dr Collinson was appointed Teaching Associate in 2020 after several years as a part-time Tutor in the School. He teaches modern history and contemporary politics, and was previously Programme Lead of the BA Politics Degree.

Current modules:

• HPH-4007: 'Documents and Sources for Modern Historians' [Convenor; contributor]
• HGH-2138/3138: 'Europe, 1945-1992' [Convenor; Lecturer]
• HGH-2142/3141: 'Twentieth Century Dictatorships' [Convenor; Lecturer]
• HPS-2004: 'Twentieth Century Ideas and Movements' [Convenor; Lecturer]
• HPS-1002: 'Principles of Politics' [Convenor; Lecturer]
• HXH-1012: 'Britain: Blitz to Brexit' [Convenor; Lecturer]

Past modules include:

• HPS-1006: 'Essential Skills for Academic Success' [Co-convenor; Lecturer]
• HPH-4005: 'Themes and Issues in History' [Contributor]
• HPS-4004: 'Research Skills' [Contributor]
• HPS-1001: 'From Cradle to Grave' [Convenor; Lecturer]
• HCH-1050: 'Past Unwrapped' [Convenor; Lecturer]
• HWH-2133/3133: 'Global Wales' [Contributor; Seminar convenor]
• HXH-1012: Modern Politics in Action [Convenor; Lecturer]
• HCH-2050: 'Debating History' [Contributor; Seminar convenor]

A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Dr Collinson is a published practioner-researcher (Innovative Practice in Higher Education, 2021; Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, 2024) with an interest in civic mission, community engagement, and employability, and has graded on the University's internal PGCertHE. 

Building on his PhD research, Dr Collinson's scholarly interests focus on how post-war socio-economic change interacted with perceptions of locality to affect political parties and Government. He is also interested in political leadership and policy history, together with the significance of agency, ideas, and myth in electoral politics and policymaking. These interests are divided into three main themes:

Locality, change, and representative politics

This examines how political parties and political actors interpreted and interacted with local processes, such as deindustrialisation and social change, in how they constructed and articulated their appeals to voters. The role of the Member of Parliament as an actor within this context remains a particular focus. Initial outputs have been published in several journals, and in the monograph, Migration on the Ballot? Smethwick and the 1964 General Election (2026).

Power and agency in institutional policymaking

The second focuses on understanding the role of political parties within the policymaking process within their historical contexts. This examines how the policymaking process developed within political parties, the relationship between parties and government through the agency of party leaders, ministers, and policy networks, and the role of ideas and their champions within a dissaggregated party structure. His PhD examined this process with regard to post war Commonwealth Immigration. Recent collaborations with Dr Anna Olsson-Rost (MMU) have applied this approach to Labour party debates over the comprehensivisation of secondary education in the 1960s, and Conservative deliberations over reforming school inspectorates in the 1990s.

National Government policy and local responses

This research theme considers how various communities and groups active at the local level understand, conceptualise, and react to national policy decisions and plans. So far, this project has focused on the UK Government's post-war construction of nuclear power stations in north Wales. It consideres the reponse of local actors, campaign groups (like the CPRW), and resident communities to these major, state-backed interventions into local societies. 

He has contributed entries to the Dictionary of Labour Biography and the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.

Postwar local government reform and Manchester politics

This builds on unarchived material collected in an earlier project in the School, seeking to publish an edition of these documents which evidence political change in post-war Manchester. Dr Collinson's team secured a research assistant through a University-funded, paid internship program to aid project development. 

Collaborators: Prof. Peter Shapely; Dr Bertie Dockerill

Partner: Bangor University Employability and Skills Service