Manning’s PhD thesis assessed cinemas and cinema-going in the UK from the end of the Second World War to the early 1960s. It provided a regional analysis of Belfast and Sheffield, arguing that place was as great a determinant of leisure practices as other factors such as age, class and gender. It used forty-eight oral history interviews alongside a range of quantitative and qualitative sources such as local newspapers, trade journals, box-office statistics and cinema records. Manning is now adapting this thesis into a monograph for the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives series. In 2016, Manning published an article in Cultural and Social History on post-war cinema-going in a working-class Belfast community. A further article on television and the decline of cinema-going in Northern Ireland is due for publication in Media History in early 2018. Manning recently received an AHRC Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship to explore Northern Ireland’s cinema heritage.
