Sarah Richardson (Dean of Learning, Teaching and Student Experience at the Colleage of Arts and Professor of British History, University of Glasgow)
I am a political historian specialising in the role of women in the political culture of Britain in the long nineteenth century. My recent book, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain demonstrated the many and diverse ways in which women contributed to the political life of the nation. As a former Director of the Higher Education Academy’s History Subject Centre, I have influenced the development of policy towards History teaching and learning at schools and HE level. I won a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship in 2010 and am a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In 2019 I was made an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association in recognition of my outstanding contribution to history. I am currently a member of the panel reviewing the QAA History Subject Benchmark Statement. I am committed to disseminating my research to the wider public and am a regular speaker at local history groups and societies as well as media interviews and articles. In 2018 I contributed to the Voice and Vote: Women’s Place in Parliament exhibition at Westminster Hall which attracted over 100,000 visitors. I co-edit the Modern History Review, a history magazine aimed at sixth formers and distributed to over 900 schools. I am currently working with Tara Morton (and in conjunction with independent researchers and local history groups) on the Mapping Women’s Suffrage project (https://www.mappingwomenssuffrage.org.uk/) developing an interactive resource which seeks to map as many known women’s suffrage activists as possible.
Samantha Hughes-Johnson is an art historian and confraternity scholar whose main area of expertise involves fifteenth-century Florentine art, architecture, material culture, lay religiosity and social history. Her past research focussed on groups marginalised during the Renaissance and she has published and lectured extensively on the clandestine operations of the Archconfraternity of the Buonomini di San Martino, the fresco decoration of this company’s oratory, the ashamed poor (who benefitted from this secret society’s charity) and several high-profile historic individuals connected with the sodality. Samantha is also particularly interested in the language of women’s clothing and gesture in quattrocento Florentine art and has published and lectured on this subject.
More recently however, Samantha has re-focussed her attention on Tudor England, rather than Medicean Florence. Her new project is an investigation into the critical roles that ordinary people played within guilds, confraternities and other lay charitable institutions. Entitled, ’O Death Rock Me to Sleep’: Plague, Confraternity, Piety and Charity in Tudor England, this interdisciplinary study will focus equally on the lay women and men who, while plague and religious turmoil swept the country, struggled to remain united for shared purposes and mutual benefit. Simultaneously, Samantha is proposing an edited collection of essays entitled, Reconsidering Female Agency in Early Modern England 1350-1750. The volume seeks to reassess women’s interventions in an holistic manner: by exploring the range of diverse locations in which women played out their performative roles in the theatre of everyday life and investigating the various innovative ways in which they asserted and exercised their personal influence.
When Samantha is not researching or writing, she is committed to the various duties that she undertakes for the Italian Art Society, the Society for Confraternity Studies and Women’s History Today. In her spare time, she is a staunch advocate for sexual, social and racial equality and actively supports several local community projects.
Susan Cohen was awarded her PhD by the University of Southampton in 2005 for a thesis on Eleanor Rathbone and her work for Refugees. The monograph from this was published by Vallentine Mitchell in 2010. She has written numerous books on social and nursing history for Shire, and has a new book out for Pen and Sword. In 2015 she co-founded the Remembering Eleanor Rathbone group, which organised a range of events from talks to conferences and art displays, in London and Liverpool during 2016, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Eleanor Rathbone’s death in 1946. She undertook oral history interviews for the Holocaust Survivor Centre in London. She is currently writing a history of nurses and nursing for Amberley.
Alexandra Hughes-Johnson is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain with a particular interest in women and political activism. She is a Knowledge Exchange Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and the Research Coordinator for the Women in the Humanities Research Programme. Alexandra’s PhD, ‘Rose Lamartine Yates and the Wimbledon WSPU: Reconfiguring Suffragette History from the Local to the National’, was awarded by Royal Holloway University in 2018. Alexandra has been a member of WHN since 2013 and presented her research at a number of WHN conferences. She is currently working on a book chapter that explores the establishment of new suffrage organisations during the First World War and an article that focuses on the establishment of the Women’s Record House and the memorialisation of the suffrage campaign during the interwar period. Her next research project will build on her interest in women’s politics at a local level, and analyse womens’ election to local county councils after 1918.
Norena Shopland is an author and historian specialising in the history of sexual orientation and gender identity, particularly in reference to Wales. She is responsible for several ground-breaking projects; for example, she secured an NHLF grant for Welsh Pride, the first project in Wales to highlight the country’s LGBTQ+ people, allies and events; and managed Gender Fluidity, the first funded trans project in Wales. Her book Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales (Seren Books, 2017) is the first completely historical work on Welsh sexual orientation and gender identity and remains very popular. A Practical Guide to Searching LGBTQIA Historical Records(Routledge, 2020) is being used internationally as a toolkit to aid people doing original research. She is one of the founders of the network forum Hanes LHDT+ Cymru / LGBTQ+ Research Group Wales, which supports and encourages those doing original research.
Norena also writes on women’s history, and her book A History of Women in Men’s Clothes: from cross-dressing to empowerment (Pen and Sword Books, 2021) looks at the thousands of individuals who defied social convention by dressing as men. In 2022, she co-curated, with the Big Pit Museum, the first exhibition of Welsh women coal workers taken from her book Women in Welsh Coal Mining: Tip Girls at work in a men’s world (Pen and Sword Books, 2023).
Other works include: Race Council Cymru on their Windrush Cymru NHLF project (2020). Her book The Curious Case of the Eisteddfod Baton (Wordcatcher Publishing, 2019) celebrates choral singing and the mining of Welsh gold; and The Welsh Gold King: a biography of William Pritchard Morgan, MP (Pen and Sword Books, 2022) examines the extraordinary life of the man behind the Welsh gold rush.
Norena lectures extensively and appears regularly in the press, radio, and TV; and is one of Wales Online’s most influential gay women (2021); on the Pinc List: Wales’ most influential LGBT+ people (2019-2025); On Wales Arts Review: 100 Women of Wales on Twitter (2020); Wen Wales 100+ Welsh Women (2020).
In 2023, Norena was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Open University in recognition of her work on raising awareness of diversity.
Kate Murphy is a Principal Academic at Bournemouth University, where she has worked since 2012. Prior to her academic career, she worked at the BBC for 24 years, primarily as a producer of Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, which has heavily informed her research. While at the BBC, she completed a part-time PhD which looked into BBC women’s experiences of employment in the interwar years. This formed the basis for her monograph Behind the Wireless: An Early History of Women at the BBC which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. She established the BA (Hons) History degree at Bournemouth and was Programme Leader for several years.
Maria Georgouli Loupi is a PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Their thesis working title is: “The Social Reproduction of the Greek Middle Class in the 20th century” and is using social reproduction theory to research domestic workers in late 20th century Greece and their role in the (re)production of the middle class – physical, social and cultural; the existence of paid and unpaid care workers in it; and the cultural representation of care work and the gendered division of labour. Maria studied an MRes in Economic & Social History at the University of Exeter and Economic Theory at the Athens University of Economics and Business. She is part of the Rethinking Economics and D-Econ networks, the International Association for Feminist Economics and a founding member of Critique Athens.
Vicky Iglikowski-Broad is Principal Records Specialist in Diverse Histories at The National Archives, in this role she strives to highlight traditionally margionalised histories within a state archive. In 2020, she completed a fellowship with the Wellcome Collection on the theme of ethics and collaboration in the heritage sector, with a focus on the history of sex work. Vicky specialises in communicating her research through public engagement activities, working with community groups and artistic practitioners to reach wider audiences. In 2020, she was lead curator of The National Archives ‘With Love’ exhibition. In 2018, she led The National Archives Suffrage 100 actives, resulting in a number of exciting, research-led projects, including: 100neHundred, a community and youth archival inspired dance project; Suffragette City, an immersive experience in collaboration with the National Trust, and Suffragettes vs. the State, an on-site exhibition focusing on the militant side of the 20th-century women’s suffrage movement. In 2017, she worked with the National Trust to re-open the gay-friendly Caravan Club based on surviving archival records.
Archival specialisms include the Black British Civil Rights movement, queer history and spaces in the early 20th century and the women’s suffrage movement. Vicky has promoted her research through various platforms, including TV, radio and podcasts (BBC Radio 3, Sky News and BBC Women’s Hour). Vicky holds an MA in Women and Gender History from Royal Holloway University, where her dissertation focused on feminism and the movement for rational dress in the late 19th-century.
Lisa Berry-Waite is a historian of women and politics in modern Britain. She is the Research and Engagement Assistant Manager for the UK Parliament’s Heritage Collections. Before joining Parliament, Lisa worked as a Records Specialist at The National Archives. She is particularly interested in engaging public audiences with history, diversifying historical narratives, and collections research. In 2024, she was listed as one of BBC HistoryExtra’s 30 historians under 30.
Lisa holds a PhD from the University of Exeter which focused on the parliamentary election campaigns of women candidates from 1918 to 1931, and was part of a wider Leverhulme Trust funded project called ‘The age of promises: manifestos, election addresses and political representation’. She has published articles in Gender & History, Parliamentary History, and the Open Library of Humanities Journal. Lisa is currently working on her monograph provisionally titled A Woman MP?: From Parliamentary Candidates to Westminster Representatives, 1918-1939, which will be published by Routledge.
As well as academic outputs, Lisa has communicated her research through various platforms, such as podcasts, radio, blog posts, exhibitions, talks, YouTube and TikTok videos. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Joint Blog Editor for the Women’s History Network.
Amy Swainston is a Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD student and a museums and heritage professional with an MA in Public History. She is a Joint Blog Editor for the Women’s History Network.
Amy’s PhD project, Commemorating the Equal Franchise Act 1928, hosted by Royal Holloway, University of London, is in partnership with UK Parliamentary Archives and The National Archives. She is preparing engagement work around the Act’s centenary in 2028, which first granted equal voting rights to women and men. Combining archival research with public programming, Amy’s work explores the diverse experiences and ideas of the women and organizations that campaigned for equal suffrage, while examining how national anniversaries are commemorated and what lessons can be drawn for the future.
Amy is also currently the Exhibitions & Access Coordinator at Eton College Collections, having worked in exhibitions and interpretation in local museums prior to that. Specialising in adult engagement, exhibition project management, and accessibility, she has a passion for creating exhibitions that make historic collections relevant to today’s communities.
Emily Rhodes recently completed her PhD in Early Modern British History at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis examined petitions submitted by English and Welsh mothers to the crown and courts from 1660 to 1720. More broadly she is interested in histories of petitioning, family, poverty and the Old Poor Law, and crime. Rhodes’ research into the hidden experiences of seventeenth-century foster mothers recently received media coverage by the Guardian and BBC Cambridgeshire. She completed her MPhil on female petitions and crime at the University of Cambridge in 2020 and was awarded the Women’s History Network’s MA Dissertation Prize. She received her undergraduate degree in History and French from Grinnell College in 2019.
Gillian Murphy is Curator for Equality, Rights and Citizenship at LSE Library and works with The Women’s Library and Hall-Carpenter Archives. She curates public exhibitions, managing events, running workshops using archives, and working to connect researchers, students, teachers and activists with the library’s collections.
Abbie Winfield is a history graduate from the University of Warwick, today working in finance in London. She manages the WHN monthly newsletter alongside her day job, and thinks it’s a great way to stay involved in the world of history she loves. She loves history, maps, and doing the New Yorker crossword when it’s easy 🙂
Anna Harrington is a final-year PhD student and Wolfson Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities at the University of Birmingham. Her thesis is, in broad terms, a long exploration of the liminal in the imperial experience. In more specific terms, it considers the lived experiences of British imperial families travelling between Britain and South Asia (primarily in the service of the East India Company) from 1757-1835. The project asks questions as to the multivalent nature of experience in the diverse locations they engaged with (including the maritime world and the “stop-off” points they encountered on their maritime voyage) as part of the imperial experience, and explores how they pulled upon a range of ideas (from comfort to order to cleanliness to seasoning) and practices (such as letterwriting and imagining) to understand such experiences. It also investigates the labour behind these ideas and practices, who performed them, and at what cost. Anna also has an emerging interest in the digital humanities, particularly thinking about how augmented and virtual realities can be used to recreate and better understand the experience of embodied practices (such as letterwriting and maritime travel) in the eighteenth century. Anna teaches on undergraduate survey modules such as the ‘Making of the Modern World, c. 1500-1800’ at the University of Birmingham and sits on the steering committee for the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre (BECC). Before returning to academia to complete her PhD, Anna qualified as a solicitor at a national law firm in Birmingham.
Jill Kirby is a historian specialising in twentieth-century British history, with a particular focus on everyday life, well-being, and emotion. She serves as an Associate Professor of History in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, where she also acts as Director of Teaching and Learning for the Central Foundation Year.
Before becoming an academic, she spent twenty years working in public and private sector organisations in various Public Relations and Internal Communications roles. She studied for her PhD at Sussex University and her 2019 book, Feeling the Strain: A Cultural History of Stress in 20th Century Britain, based on that research, provides a historical account of how ordinary Britons comprehended and managed the pressures of daily life throughout the twentieth century. It explores the popular, vernacular discourse of stress, and employs a cultural approach, revealing enduring ideas about work, mental health, status, gender, and individual weakness, alongside the evolving socio-economic factors that made stress a widespread condition by the century’s end.
Her ongoing research delves into the cultural history of menopause in 20th and 21st-century Britain. She has recently published an article in the Journal of Women’s History, “Silent women sufferers: experiences of menopause in 1970s Britain” which analyses letters from women who volunteered for menopause research in response to a 1975 Nova magazine feature. These letters provide rare insights into the lived experiences of women grappling with menopause, highlighting the difficulties they faced in seeking help, the dismissive and gendered attitudes of doctors, and the pervasive silence and taboo surrounding the topic at the time. The article underscores the lack of understanding within the medical profession and the societal pressures that equated loss of fertility with loss of femininity, leading to shame and a cultural norm of stoicism. She is currently under contract with MUP for a book on the cultural history of menopause in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She currently hosts the weekly online WHN writing retreats to which all are welcome.