Following the WHN AGM on Friday 2nd September, we are delighted to announce four new WHN Early Career Fellow for the 2022/2023 academic year. The Fellowships provide scholars with a bursary of £1,500 and are designed to support exciting and innovative research into women’s history being undertaken by those not in full-time academic employment. The ECR Fellows for 2022/23 are:
Dr Victoria Golding
Victoria’s project will draw on the papers of the London Fields Housing Co-operative which were recently deposited at the Bishopsgate Institute. This was a feminist and lesbian separatist squat started in the 1970s and turned into a co-operative with the support of the Greater London Council (GLC) in the 1980s. Drawing on these records, GLC minutes, and oral histories Victoria conducted as part of her PhD, Victoria will explore how the effect of the GLC on lesbian organising continued long after its abolition in 1986, centring the radical, complicated potential of lesbian feminism.
Dr Claire Phillips
Claire’s research focuses on the experiences of girls and young women in workhouses in Wales, 1880—1920. Her project will examine Welsh workhouses, and the manner in which girls were set up to live a moral life following their exit from these institution. She will be working with archival records of workhouses and cottage homes across Wales, shining a light on the treatment of women and girls in the country. As she notes, this is particularly important as previous research on the workhouse has predominantly focused on the experiences of adults, and on institutions in England.
Dr Sasha Rasmussen
Sasha research, which focuses on women in Paris and St Petersburg c. 1900—1913, is situated at the intersection of gender and sensory histories, asking how women felt in their bodies, what their daily encounters with the material environment of the city were like, and how sensation informed their understanding of the modern world and their place in it. Sasha aims to map out the changing sensory landscape of the early twentieth century, in so doing transforming our understanding of how women experienced the modern world.
Dr Elizabeth Schlappa
Elizabeth is writing the first history of female masturbation in eighteenth-century England. Her project explores the gender history of female masturbation through textual analysis of printed medical literature published 1700—1800. By illuminating the medical and cultural logics behind commentary on female masturbation, her research generates new insight into the gender and intellectual history of women’s pleasure, and its significance for the development of modern femininities.
Congratulations to all! We look forward to seeing the outcomes of their projects, and will be sharing research in progress from all four of our Fellows through the WHN blog during the course of the year.
