Paul Corthorn studied at the universities of Cambridge and Durham. Before coming to Queen’s in 2006, he held lectureships at Anglia Ruskin, Liverpool and Oxford universities. In 2009 he won a QUB ‘Rising Stars’ Teaching Award. In 2012 he was an Archives By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. In 2015 he organised an international conference at Queen's on 'Socialism and the Cold War in Western Europe'. In 2017 he hosted a Royal Historical Society international symposium at Queen's on 'Researching and Teaching Controversial History'.

Paul Corthorn was invited to sit on the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) History Subject Review Panel in 2014. More recently, he has served on the Steering Committee of History UK, the body representing all History departments, and was co-opted to the Royal Historical Society Education Policy Committee. 

At Queen's, Paul Corthorn was Director of Education in the former School of History and Anthropology and is currently Director of Graduate Studies in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics (HAPP).

Paul Corthorn’s research is concerned with twentieth-century British history, especially its political and international dimensions. He has worked extensively on the politics of the Left and on various aspects of the Cold War in Britain. His first book, In the Shadow of the Dictators: The British Left in the 1930s, was published in 2006. He has been joint editor of the Labour History Review since 2012. 

His book about Enoch Powell, the Conservative and Ulster Unionist MP, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. He is Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project on 'Conservatism and Unionism in the UK, 1968-1997', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and running from 2023 to 2026. 

Paul Corthorn was previously Co-Investigator (CI) of the Leverhulme-funded project 'The Politics of Consumer Credit in the UK, 1938-1992', which resulted in a co-authored monograph published by Oxford University Press in 2018. 

Paul Corthorn teaches on the following programmes / modules:

Undergraduate

 
Postgraduate