Julian M. Simpson

Julian Simpson was born in the North East of England in December 1970,^[2] with his ancestry having roots in Ireland, Germany and the Indian subcontinent. His early education was in France, following which he attended high school at the Lycée National Léon Mba in Gabon, with intermittent summer holidays back in Howdon, North Tyneside, where he first witnessed South Asian migrant doctors in general practice in an industrial working-class region.^[3]

Upon return to France, he completed his secondary education^[3] and gained admission to the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (IEP) de Paris and then trained as a journalist at École supérieure de journalisme de Lille.^[2] Subsequently, as a French citizen, working for the French Foreign Office, he went to Romania to do his national service.^[3]

In addition to being French, he is also a British citizen,^[3] and he returned to the UK where he worked with the BBC World Service, broadcasting to French speaking Africa and contributing to other programmes and the BBC website.^[3][4] He later worked as a spokesman for the Scottish Refugee Council in the early 2000s.^[3][5]

He illustrated how his background, upbringing and experiences of hostilities to migrants led him to believe that a "lack of historical awareness was at least partially at the root of such attitudes"^[3] and this directed him to pursue a "critical engagement with the past".^[3]

He completed an MA in history at Northumbria University, and received his PhD from Manchester University in 2012 for a thesis by the title of "South Asian doctors and the development of general practice in Great Britain (c.1948-c.1983)".^[2]

Between 2012 and 2014 he worked with historian Stephanie Snow on the recent history of Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals in London.^[2][6] He was subsequently appointed lead researcher on a CLAHRC (Collaboration for Applied Health Research and Care) Greater Manchester project, where he worked on access to general practice in the NHS and its connectedness to past official policies.^[2][7]

Simpson specialises in the history of the National Health Service, migration history, oral history, and history and policy, and is a member of the board of the UK Oral History Society.^[1]

In 2018 he published his research in the book Migrant Architects of the NHS: South Asian doctors and the reinvention of British general practice (1940s–1980s), published by Manchester University Press (2018), and which formed the basis of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP's) exhibition commemorating the 70th anniversary of the NHS.^[8][9]

He is also the co-editor (with Eureka Henrich of the University of Hertfordshire) of History, Historians and the Immigration Debate: Going Back to Where We Came From. This volume, published by Palgrave Macmillan (2018) is a series of essays by immigration historians who relate their work to contemporary policy controversies around migration. It includes contributions by leading historians of immigration, Donna Gabaccia, Leo Lucassen and Gérard Noiriel.^[10]