Robert Colls is Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, Leicester. Before that he was Professor of English History at Leicester University. He is married with two adult children. Personal History He was born in 1949 in South Shields, where he attended Laygate Lane Junior School and the Grammar Technical School for Boys. His father worked as a driller at the Tyne Dock Engineering Company, a ship repair yard. His mother worked at Harton Hospital as a ward assistant - a job she loved. Colls says that the Westoe Methodist Young People's Fellowship (Sundays) taught him how to reflect, and Talbot Road Methodist Youth Club (Fridays) taught him how to dance. After studying at the University of Sussex and undertaking Voluntary Service Overseas in Blue Nile Province, Sudan, he worked for a PhD at the University of York under Professor G. A. Williams. Jobs followed at Loughton College (1975–79) and the University of Leicester (1979-2012) before joining the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort in October 2012. Main interests Colls's main interests are cultural and intellectual history. In recent years this has taken him into the study of regional and national identities. He also has a longstanding interest in the history of the English working class. His long essay ‘When We Lived in Communities’ (Cities of Ideas 2004) explains the intelligence that sustained industrial communities and, along with ‘English Journeys’ (Prospect July 2007) is the nearest he has come to memoir. Written work Colls's first book The Collier's Rant (1977) explored popular song and image as expressed in 19th-century broadsheets and music hall. The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield 1790-1850 (1987) tried to bring the miners into the orbit of E P Thompson's path-breaking The Making of the English Working Class. Geordies. Roots of Regionalism (1992) is a collection of regionalist essays edited with Bill Lancaster to which Colls contributed a hefty piece. Newcastle upon Tyne: A Modern History (2001), and Northumbria. History and Identity 547-2000 (2007) completed his northern trilogy. Englishness: Politics and Letters 1880-1920 (1986), co-edited with Philip Dodd, was first of a new wave of studies on English national identity and was published in a second edition by Bloomsbury in 2014 with a new Introduction by the editors and an Afterword by Will Self. Colls' book Identity of England (2002) received significant critical acclaim. George Orwell: English Rebel, was published by Oxford