Edward Bujak, PhD (University of East Anglia)
Associate Professor in British Studies and History
ebujak@harlaxton.ac.uk

Dr Bujak is a graduate of the University of East Anglia (BA, MA, PhD) and joined Harlaxton College as an Assistant Professor 2001. In addition to teaching on the British Studies programme, a programme he led from 2004-2009, he teaches courses on British, European and international history and the two world wars. In 2006, he received the Outstanding Teacher Award of the University of Evansville. In 2007 he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. His book, England’s Rural Realms: Landownership and the Agricultural Revolution was also published in 2007 by I. B. Tauris. In May 2008, Dr Bujak was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2010 Dr Bujak was invited to become a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is currently writing a book on landownership in the Edwardian countryside.

Research Interests

Geographically, because England is on an island, the land area is finite. In these circumstances, the question that will always be asked is – who owns the land? My research has focused on the great landowners in Victorian England, specifically Victorian Suffolk, a county at the cutting-edge of mixed-arable and livestock husbandry, so-called ‘high’ farming. The near-collapse of this form of agriculture in the 1880s did not however, precipitate the wholesale collapse of the great estate model and by extension the social model associated with the great estate in the English countryside. Based as I now am in Lincolnshire, another county renowned for its agriculture, the question I am currently researching is – how did Edwardian landowners adjust to life in modern Britain? Agriculture ‘bottomed-out’ in 1894, thereafter a slight recovery is identifiable, but it was too small to assist the fortunes of the rentier landowner (hence the gloom reported by Rider Haggard), on the other hand, large country house estates did not disappear. History has viewed this period as the lull before the storm, but were landowners at that time, in a variety of different ways, looking to justify the continued existence of the great estate in modern Britain?