Matt Cook (historian)

Matthew "Matt" Cook FRHistS (born 1969) is a social and cultural historian specializing in LGBTQ and queer history. Since October 2023, he has served as the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality at Mansfield College, Oxford University. The appointment makes him the UK's first professor of LGBTQ+ history.

Cook was educated at a state secondary school in Staffordshire and received his BA from the University of Sheffield and his MA and PhD from Queen Mary University of London. He then served as a lecturer at Keele University from 2002 to 2005. He went on to teach for 18 years at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he ultimately was named professor of modern history and head of the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. While at Birkbeck he also directed the Raphael Samuel History Centre.

Cook worked with the National Trust in 2017 on their Prejudice and Pride programme and co-authored its associated guidebook. He has also advised on archival projects related to the history of gender and sexuality, including English Heritage's Pride of Place and the Pitt Rivers Museum's Beyond the Binary. He is a series editor of the Queer and Trans Histories series at Manchester University Press and an editor of History Workshop Journal.