Dr Catherine Baker

Dr Catherine Baker

Reader in 20th Century History

Faculty and Department

  • Faculty of Arts Cultures and Education
  • School of Humanities

Summary

Catherine Baker is a specialist in post-Cold War history, international relations and cultural studies. Her initial research explored the politics of national identity and popular music during and after the Yugoslav Wars, and she has researched the cultural politics of the Eurovision Song Contest and other international competitive events for more than fifteen years, including what they reveal about changing relationships between LGBTQ+ and national identities in Europe since the 1990s. In 2023-4, when the BBC and Liverpool had hosted Eurovision on Ukraine's behalf, she led a study of Eurovision's cultural relations and soft power impact commissioned by the British Council in partnership with Liverpool City Council and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Her next book project will investigate the 'performance' of national identity through Eurovision since the end of the Cold War.

Her research is also committed to situating the post-Yugoslav region in a transnational and global context, including its complex position in the global politics of race and the legacies of multiple forms of imperialism and colonialism for the region. She combines her work on the post-Yugoslav region with attention to struggles over how to narrate national identity and its relationship with other collective identities within the UK, as the multinational country where she lives and works, and she also researches the politics of militarism in popular culture and everyday life in both settings. Her interests in narratives of identity extend to how individuals narrate their own relationships to nationhood, war and conflict through oral history, and she has interviewed former interpreters/translators and foreign peacekeepers in studying UN and NATO peace operations in former Yugoslavia.

She is a former co-convenor of the British International Studies Association's South-East Europe working group (2015-19), and served as awards and nominations officer for the International Studies Association's LGBTQA+ Caucus in 2018-20. Since 2015 she has been a member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's Peer Review College. She has worked in partnership with organisations including the Imperial War Museum and Team GB.

She has recently edited The Routledge Handbook on Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans and co-edited Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race.

In 2024-25 I am teaching on the following modules:

A History of Freedom (BA)

Capstone Project supervision (BA)

Practising History (MA)

Other modules in our current programmes I have taught on include:

Fear and Terror (BA)

Revolutions (BA)

Insiders and Outsiders (BA)

The Past in the Present (BA)

History Group Project supervision (BA)

Memory, Public History and Heritage (MA)

Recent outputs

View more outputs

Book Chapter

Crni Srbi and Ron Holsey

Baker, C. (2025). Crni Srbi and Ron Holsey. In T. Beasley-Murray, W. Bracewell, & M. Murawski (Eds.), Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West (213-218). UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800087811

Croatian Veteran Masculinities and Exclusive Narratives: Points of Identification With the "Myth of the Homeland War" in the 2010s

Baker, C., & Touquet, H. (2025). Croatian Veteran Masculinities and Exclusive Narratives: Points of Identification With the “Myth of the Homeland War” in the 2010s. In P. Schulz, B. Hamber, & H. Touquet (Eds.), Masculinities and Queer Perspectives in Transitional Justice (208-227). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003519522

Introduction: Thinking Politically with Popular Music of the Balkans

Baker, C. (2024). Introduction: Thinking Politically with Popular Music of the Balkans. In C. Baker (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans (1-27). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003328162-1

What is this 'Balkan' in Balkan Popular Culture?: Stuart Hall's Sociology of Popular Culture, Identity and Race through Analogy and Connection

Baker, C. (2024). What is this ‘Balkan’ in Balkan Popular Culture?: Stuart Hall’s Sociology of Popular Culture, Identity and Race through Analogy and Connection. In C. Baker (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans (500-512). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003328162-39

Through the Balkans to Christchurch: Southeast Europe and global white nationalist historical mythology

Baker, C. (2024). Through the Balkans to Christchurch: Southeast Europe and global white nationalist historical mythology. In C. Baker, B. C. Iacob, A. Imre, & J. Mark (Eds.), Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the Global History of Race (328-347). Manchester University Press. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526172211.00023

Lead investigator

Project

Funder

Grant

Started

Status

Project

United Nations Television in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Funder

AHRC Arts & Humanities Research Council

Grant

£17,527.00

Started

22 July 2019

Status

Complete

Co-investigator

Project

Funder

Grant

Started

Status

Project

Mariupol State University – Study of the Mariupol Communities in Great Britain

Funder

British Council

Grant

£4,980.00

Started

12 September 2024

Status

Ongoing

Project

HIKE: Team GB / Paris 1924 & 2024

Funder

AHRC Arts & Humanities Research Council

Grant

£1,892.00

Started

12 May 2023

Status

Complete

Postgraduate supervision

Dr Baker welcomes applications for postgraduate supervision (MA, MRes, PhD) in in any of her specialist research areas.

She has supervised the following completed PhDs:

Shaun Allan, An Historical Consideration of Past Territorial Army Training and Operations in Relation to the Proposed Re-Organisation Regarding Future Reserves 2020

Tony Chapman-Wilson, To What Extent Can Drama, and Especially Verbatim Theatre Techniques, Be Used to (Re)Present Intergenerational Transgender Identities in the North of England?

Frank Grombir, Second-Generation “Poles” and “Ukrainians” in the North of England

Nicola Guy, Art, Activism or Advertising?: the Role of Exhibition-Making in Unified Berlin

Victoria Taylor, ‘“Its Spirit Lives On!”: the Nazification of the Luftwaffe

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