Malcolm Dick lectures at the School of Education and Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Birmingham where he teaches on history and professional development programmes. He is also manager of the Joseph Priestley and Birmingham Project 2004-2005 (Heritage Lottery Fund) and helped to create and deliver the Skills in the Community Outreach Resource Project 2004-2005 to promote educational participation and skills development amongst adults in minority communities (European Social Fund). Malcolm also serves on the Advisory Board for the Centre for Birmingham and Midlands History at the University of Birmingham. He is a consultant to two HLF projects, a Hindu Oral History Project and the Lok Virsa Project on the Muslim Heritage in the Midlands and a national expert advisor for the Heritage Lottery Fund. He has contributed training activities on ethnic minority and refugee issues to Refugee Action, Connexions, Birmingham City Council and Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council.

Between 1999 and 2004 Malcolm managed The Black Country Widening Participation Project (researching and promoting educational opportunities for adults in the boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton; Learning and Skills Council), the Millennibrum Project (creating a multi-media archive of post-war Birmingham history for Birmingham City Council museums and libraries services; Millennium Commission) and the Revolutionary Players Project, creating a bank of digitised resources and a website on the history of the West Midlands; New Opportunities Fund). He has taught widely in schools colleges and universities and was Director of Lifelong Learning at a Midlands FE College between 1997 and 1999. He studied History and Political Studies at Hull University and completed a PhD: “English Conservatives and Schools for the Poor 1780-1833” at Leicester University under Don Jones, David Reeder and Brian Simon.

Malcolm has published material on the history of education, local and regional history, minority communities and Englishness. His most recent books are Birmingham: a history of the city and its people (2005) and Joseph Priestley and Birmingham (2005). He jointly organised an international conference: “Ethnicity and Culture in the Global City” at the University of Birmingham in 2005 and is editing a book of contributions with Tahir Abbas and Rajinder Dudrah.

Malcolm’s current research interests include:

• The nature and impact of the Enlightenment ideas, religious thought and political and social ideology and their transmission to adults and children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
• The experiences, reception and transmission of ideas about minority communities since the eighteenth century
• Local, regional, environmental and public history since the eighteenth century