Dr Philip Gardner was elected to the Fellowship of St Edmund’s in 1993.  Following a ten-year teaching career in West Country comprehensive schools, he was appointed to a Lectureship at the Faculty of Education in 1990 and latterly to a Senior Lectureship, specialising in the History of Education. He took his first and second degrees at the University of East Anglia, followed by a doctorate at the University of Sussex. His early research work focused on currents of informal working-class education in the nineteenth century and was the foundation for his prize-winning first book, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England. His subsequent research interests, on which he has written extensively, include the history of the teaching profession, education and the British Empire in the early twentieth century, oral history, history and memory, and hermeneutical aspects of historical methodology. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2010.

Within College Philip has undertaken a number of roles over the years, successively serving as Tutor, Director of Studies in History, Director of Studies in Education and, from 2008 to 2015, Secretary of the Governing Body. Between 1994 and 2018 he also served as College Archivist and latterly Fellow Archivist.