Oliver Cox is Heritage Engagement Fellow at the University of Oxford. He works at the intersection between academic research and its application in cultural and commercial contexts
He creates authentic, accurate and accessible content to engage and inspire.
Oliver leads the University’s partnership work with the UK and international heritage community, and is co-lead of the Oxford University Heritage Network. He is part of the team delivering Oxford’s flagship research partnership with the National Trust.
Oliver is a historian with particular interest in the social and cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World, and received his undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. His research in heritage focusses on the social, cultural and political position of the British country house in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is particularly interested in broadening the range of academic disciplines and approaches that use the country house both as a source of archival material and as a site for knowledge exchange and public history.
He teaches architectural and cultural history with a focus on the eighteenth century and is a Faculty Member for both the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme and Oxford Cultural Leaders at the Said Business School. He co-supervises two PhD projects: a Collaborative Doctoral Award with Historic Houses which explores the political and cultural role of privately-owned country houses in Britain since 1950; and a doctoral project exploring the National Trust’s approach to curation, presentation and visitor engagement from the 1930s to the present day.
Outside of Oxford, Oliver chairs the Heritage Alliance's Digital, Learning and Skills Advisory Group and the Campaigns and Advocacy Sub-Committee for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. He is a Council Member of the Oxfordshire Record Society, Heritage Officer for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) and a Governor of Compton Verney House Trust. He also sits on the Heritage 2020 'Helping Things To Happen' Working Group, the Education and Publications Committee of The Gardens Trust, and Arts Council England's Designation Panel.