David Beckingham

Research Fellow, Sidney Sussex College

My research examines the regulation of drunkenness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the impact of local policies on policing and licensing, and the uneven provision of institutional care of inebriates.

Biography

Qualifications

PhD, 2009, University of Cambridge, 'The regulation of drunkenness in nineteenth-century Liverpool'
MPhil, 2005, University of Cambridge
BA, 2004, University of Cambridge

Research

I am currently working on a monograph for Liverpool University Press that examines Liverpool's staus as one of the most drunken cities in Victorian Britain.

More broadly my research explores the relationship between liberal government and the regulation of alcohol and intemperance in a variety of different home and colonial contexts:

How licensing policy influenced the management of British licensed premises and the control of particular types of drinkers.
The drafting and implementation of legislation to deal with inebriates and inebriety.
How criticisms of the taxation of alcohol in colonial settings informed temperance and nationalist campaigns abroad and at home.

Publications

Papers

Beckingham, D., Gender, space and drunkenness: Liverpool's licensed premises, 1860-1914, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (accepted for publication December 2010).
Beckingham, D., 2010, An historical geography of liberty: Lancashire and the Inebriates Acts, Journal of Historical Geography, 36(4), 388-401. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.03.001.
Beckingham, D., 2009, The Irish Question and the question of drunkenness: Catholic loyalty in nineteenth-century Liverpool, Irish Geography, 42(2), 125-144. doi:10.1080/00750770903112779.
Howell, P., Beckingham, D., and Moore, F., 2008, Managed Zones for Sex Workers in Liverpool: Contemporary Proposals, Victorian Parallels, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33(2), 233-250. doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2008.00292.x.
Beckingham, D., 2008, Geographies of drink culture in Liverpool: Lessons from the drink capital of nineteenth-century England, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 15(3), 305-31. doi:10.1080/09687630801920740.

Other

Toole, S. (ed.), 2010, Consumption controversies: alcohol policies in the UK (London: Royal Geographical Society).

Conference and seminar papers

Towards a genealogy of care: The treatment of Scotland's inebriates, Seminars in Cultural and Historical Geography, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, November 2011
Child protection and the legal geographies of the Victorian home, Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Seattle, April 2011
Gender, space and drunkenness, Intoxicants and intoxication in cultural and historical perspective, Cambridge, July 2010, http://www.intoxesrc.org/
Liberalism, liberty and the geography of the Inebriates Acts, 1879-1914, London Group of Historical Geographers, January 2010
The 'fetish of personal liberty': drunkenness, liberal government, and the geography of the Inebriates Acts, 1879-1914, Departmental Research Seminar, Queen Mary, London, November 2009
Crime, cartography and the geo-coding of dangerous behaviours, Mapping Dangerous Spaces, British Library, London, June 2009
Father Theobald Mathew's temperance geographies, Conference of Irish Geographers, Cork, May 2009
The moral geography of drunkenness, Modern British and European Roundtable Seminar, Faculty of History, Oxford, February 2009
Liverpool - 'capital of the binge culture', Conference of Liverpool and Merseyside Studies, Liverpool, November 2008
Loyalty, temperance and the Liverpool Irish, 1847 - c.1900, Conference of Irish Geographers, Liverpool, May 2008
Imperial liberalism and temperance: from Liverpool to India, Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Boston, April 2008
Drinking and drunkenness, temperance, and cultures of resistance in nineteenth-century Liverpool, European Social Science History Conference, Lisbon, February 2008
Cartography as a tool of social reform: drink maps of nineteenth-century Liverpool, Cambridge Seminars in the History of Cartography, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, October 2007
'The massacre of the innocents': the problem of maternal drunkenness, c.1860-WWI', Parenting: An Interdisciplinary Workshop, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge, July 2007
Discounting drunkenness: regulating 'demon-drink' in nineteenth-century Liverpool, Seminars in Cultural and Historical Geography, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, May 2007
Drinking race: governmentality, policing, and Irish drunkenness, Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, San Francisco, April 2007
Geographies of drink culture in Liverpool: lessons from the drink capital of nineteenth-century England, Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference, London, August 2006
Regulating the spaces of sexual and parasexual citizenship in turn of the century Liverpool, European Social Science History Conference, Amsterdam, March 2006

Teaching

Geographical Tripos Part IA, Supervisor, Human geography
Geographical Tripos Part IB, Supervisor, Cities
Geographical Tripos Part II, Supervisor and lecturer, Geographies of Discipline and Social Regulation and The Social Engagement with Nature
Co-ordinator for 1A Documentary and archival data project

External activities

Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
Member of the Association of American Geographers