Joe Moran

Who is Joe Moran?

Joe Moran is a social and cultural historian who has written about everyday life, especially British everyday life from the mid-twentieth century until the present day.

Moran studied international history and politics at Leeds University before doing an MA in English literature and a DPhil in American studies at Sussex University. The Mass-Observation Archive at Sussex was what aroused his interest in studying the everyday; Moran credits his own interest in taking note of what normally goes unnoticed to the I-Spy booklets he consumed as a young boy.

Quoting Doreen Massey, Moran says that despite every generation's emphasis on change, "much of life for many people 'still consists of waiting in a bus shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes'"; he describes himself as "trying to find a critical language to talk about these empty, purposeless moments of daily life, filled with activities such as commuting and office routines, that we generally take for granted but that take up so much of our lives." Moran describes himself as influenced by Mass-Observation and a new French ethnography of the quotidian or infraordinary, exemplified by works by Georges Perec, Marc Augé and François Bon.