In my book, Measuring Difference, numbering normal: setting the standards for disability in the interwar period, I show how specific conceptions of normalcy and disability emerged in the interwar period. The First World War necessitated new ways of thinking about…
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Their Doris/my Doris: Personal Connections While Exploring WW2 seafarers’ masculinity by Dr Jo Stanley
I especially like doing history when serendipity bring personal connections with the women whose pasts I’m looking at. Re-knowing these ‘names’ as emotional embodied subjects helps me better understand both them and me, but also women I know – in…
Online seminar series: Womandla! Feminism and Social Movements in the Global South
We are pleased to share the first installments of the schedule the schedule for the Womandla! Online Seminar Series, beginning with Panel 1 on Friday 9 April 2021. Keep up to date with the developing schedule here. Please note that…
Old Round Court and Gold Lace: Ann Renney’s Shop on the Strand by Dr Sarah Birt
What was the occupational structure of the Strand? How many businesses were run by women and what was the nature of their trade? Having studied women in business in seventeenth and eighteenth-century London before, my new project focuses on the…
Monsters, mothers and mistresses: The varying faces of women in Crusades literature by Dr Jennifer Markey
We who were Occidentals have now become Orientals. He who was […] a Frank has […] been made into a Galilean […] Some have taken wives not only of their own people but Syrians or Armenians or even Saracens who…
21st April: Beauty, Ugliness, and Ideas of Racial Difference: black women in 19th century
Wednesday 21st April 2021, 4pm (UK) Beauty, Ugliness, and Ideas of Racial Difference: black women in 19th century Dr Rochelle Rowe This talk will explore the ways in which black women have been used as subjects of beauty, ugliness, and…
Spring/Summer Seminar Series
Please join us in engaging with historians from all over world as they present their latest research on a diverse array of topics within women’s and gender history. The seminars will also provide the opportunity to ask questions of the…
‘Are you a witch or are you a fairy? Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?’ The Consequences of Belief and Superstition in Nineteenth Century Ireland by Melissa Kane.
In the mid-1890s, a small village in County Tipperary caught the attention of not only the Irish and English newspapers, but even The New York Times. Known as the ‘Tipperary Witchcraft’ case, English newspapers argued that, during a time when…
Sharing Stories of Women in War: Bettie’s Story by Judith Hewitt, Manager of The Devil’s Porridge Museum
“To be honest, it is one of the most inspirational things I’ve ever done” said 17 year old Josie of her experience meeting and interviewing 94 year old Bettie Baird. Bettie and Josie both come from Carlisle and the former…
24th March: ‘Finding Lydia Harvey: narrative, polyvocality, and historical justice’
Wednesday, 24th March at 4pm (UK)* Finding Lydia Harvey: narrative, polyvocality, and historical justice Dr Julia Laite, Birkbeck, University of London Julia Laite will speak about her forthcoming book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A true story of sex, crime…