Profile Books scoops Hannah Rose Woods' 'hopeful' history of British universities

Profile Books has snapped up a new history of British universities by historian Hannah Rose Woods, the author of Rule, Nostalgia (W H Allen).

Publishing director Cecily Gayford acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Charlotte Merritt at Andrew Nurnberg Associates, and the book is scheduled for publication in March 2026.

"Billed as an imaginative social history of students in Britain, Bright Young Things will tell the story of Britain’s universities, and investigate the changing perception of students in British life since the Victorians. Where going to university – once the preserve of a tiny elite – is now an experience nearly half of us share, no one can agree on students: are they too political or too apathetic, too wild or too boring, too elitist or too ‘woke’?"

The synopsis adds: "Putting students firmly at the heart of this story, Bright Young Things takes readers from the rise of the redbrick universities under the Victorians, through to the fight for women’s places at universities and up to the tuition-fee protests of the 2010s, painting an entirely new portrait of how higher education has made modern Britain."

Gayford said: "Having admired Hannah’s brilliant writing and scholarship from afar, I am beyond thrilled she is joining Profile. Bright Young Things is social history as it should be: original, clever and shining a new light on our own world and how it came to be. And Hannah is a spectacular talent – I couldn’t be prouder to be publishing her."

Woods added: "Today, it can feel as though universities are in crisis – from the problem of student funding to perma-controversies over supposedly ’low-value’ degree subjects and the ideas students are exposed to on campus. But I want to tell a much more hopeful story. In Bright Young Things, I want to take a students’-eye-view of how going to university has changed, and how it changed Britain."