Dr Nicola Phillips is the Director of the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and founding editor of the Bedford Centre Blog. Her first book was on Women in Business, 1700 to 1850 (Boydell, 2006) and her research focuses on gender, work, family conflict, and criminal and civil law, 1660-1830. Her second book, The Profligate Son: Or, A True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice and Financial Ruin in Regency England (Oxford University Press, and Basic Books, New York 2013) was listed in the Washington Post top 10 Books of the year. She is researching masculinity, advocacy and emotion in Britain and America c. 1780-1830, and currently writing about leading Common Law advocate Thomas Erskine and freedom of the press in both countries. Nicola runs undergraduate courses on ‘Sex, Society and Identity, 1660-1800’ and ‘The Georgians: Society Culture and Crime’ as well as an MA core module ‘The Historians Toolkit’. She is also the Director of Royal Holloway's MA in in History. She has acted as a historical consultant for various institutions and contributed to radio and television programmes on women's and gender history.
Professor Sarah Ansari, expert in the history of South Asia in the twentieth century and women's lives in India and Pakistan.
Professor Kate Cooper, is an expert on the world of the Mediterranean in the Roman period, with a special interest in daily life, religion, and the family, and the inter-connected problems of martyrdom, resistance movements, and religious violence.
Dr Dawn-Marie Gibson, Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American History, is working on a co-authored book titled, ‘Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Orthodox Islam’ which is due to be published by New York University Press in late 2013. She co-convenes the Gender and History in the Americas Seminar Series at the Institute of Historical Research.
Professor Jane Hamlett, Reader in Modern British History. Her research interests lie in society and culture in modern Britain, women and gender, the family, intimacy and material and visual culture. In particular she is interested in the relationship between ideas of gender and material culture. Her first book Material Relations: Middle-Class Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 1850-1910 (Manchester, 2010) explored the middle-class home, while her second monograph At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Palgrave, 2014) looks at the institutional material world.
Dr Victoria Leonard, Postdoctoral Research Associate in late ancient history, works as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Connected Clerics. Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380-604 CE’, at RHUL and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH-ÖAW), Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften). She is a founding member and steering committee member for the Women's Classical Committee (UK).
Dr Emily Manktelow, is Senior Lecturer in Global and Colonial History. Her research explores the social, cultural and familial history of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, as well as colonial and postcolonial history. She is a founding member of the Christian Mission in Global History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research and her most recent book presents a microhistorical investigation of sexual abuse in the South Seas Mission of the London Missionary Society: Gender, Power and Sexual Abuse in the Pacific: Rev Simpson’s ‘Improper Liberties’ .
Dr Stella Moss, Lecturer is currently working on a monograph, about women’s drinking in the English public house, 1914-39. To date, her publications have considered themes including women’s drinking in the Great War, music and emotional expression within the interwar public house, and masculinity and material culture in the 1930s pub. Stella convenes the undergraduate course ‘Modern Girls: Women in Britain, c.1914-90’, and an MA module on Modern Feminism.
Dr Anna Whitelock, Professor in Early Modern History, is an expert on Tudor Queenship and has published extensively on Mary Tudor and her latest book on Elizabeth’s Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen’s Court, was published by Bloomsbury in 2013.
Dr Alex Windscheffel, Senior Lecturer, is working on bankruptcy in Victorian Britain, including the challenge this posed to contemporary ideals of masculinity.
PhD Students
Katie Broomfield - women lawyers in England in the first half of the twentieth century (Nicola Phillips)
Florence Pinard Nelson - gardening in schools in England in the first half of the twentieth century (Jane Hamlett)
Pam Mansell - grammar schools in early twentieth century England (Jane Hamlett)
Cathie Mulcair - male to female crossdressing in Early Modern England (Nicola Phillips, Anna Whitelock)
Dilara Scholz - the material culture of mourning and gendered expression of grief in Victorian England (Jane Hamlett)
Rebecca Matthews - Women, Football and Public History in twentieth-century Britain (Alex Windscheffel)
Markus Mindrebo - women, gender and power in early medieval Scandinavia (Kate Cooper)
Angela Platts - love and religion in early nineteenth century England (Alex Windscheffel)
Holly Nielsen - board games in England in the first half of the twentieth century (Jane Hamlett)
Jill Southart – working class girls and education in nineteenth century England (Jane Hamlett)
Jeannette Holt - 'Social mobility through marriage in South East England 1743 to 1763' (Nicola Phillips)
Completed 2020
Johanna Holmes - professional women in the Victorian art world (Alex Windscheffel)
Adam McKie - capitalist utopian villages in interwar England & women's sport (Stella Moss)
