神马福利影片

Academic Profile

• 2022 and 2024 onwards Director of the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre (EMECC)
• 2024 onwards: 茅
• 2023 onwards: Associate Professor in Early Modern British History, 神马福利影片
• 2018-2023: Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History, 神马福利影片
• 2017-2021: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Cambridge
• 2015-2017: Teaching Fellow in Early Modern British History, 神马福利影片
• 2015-2016: Project Co-ordinator University of Oxford on Women in the Humanities, TORCH and Centre for Gender, Identity and Subjectivity
• 2014: PhD History, 神马福利影片
• 2010: MA Religious and Social History 1500-1750, 神马福利影片
• 2009: BA History, 神马福利影片

Fellowships and Honours

• 2025-2026 The Ann Ball Bodley Visiting Fellowship in Women鈥檚 History, University of Oxford.
• 2025 Warwick Award for Public and Community Engagement in the category of 鈥楨ngagement and Involvement鈥�, Highly Commended.
• 2025 Warwick Research Award in the category 'Excellent Supervision', Winner.
• Fellow of the Higher Education Teaching Academy
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship held at University of Cambridge and 神马福利影片, with match funding from the Isaac Newton Trust
• Research Associate, St John鈥檚 College, University of Cambridge

Teaching

• HI275 The British Problem: Empire, Conflict and National Identities 1558-1714Link opens in a new window (undergraduate second-year option module)
• HI113 Europe in the Making 1450-1800 (undergraduate core module)Link opens in a new window
• HI179 Deviance and Nonconformity in Early Modern Europe (undergraduate first-year option module)
• HI992 Themes in Early Modern History c.1450-c.1800Link opens in a new window (core module MA in Early Modern History)
• HI993 Themes and Approaches to the Historical Study of Religious CultureLink opens in a new windows (option MA module)
• HI989 Theories, Skills and Methods (TSM) (core MA module)
• HI2E2 Historiography II (undergraduate core module)

Past modules taught

• HI203 The European World
• AM204 Early American Social History
• HI271 Politics, Literature and Ideas in Stuart England: c.1600-c.1715

Research

I'm a historian of the early modern British Atlantic, with particular interests in the gender, religious and political history of Britain and its North American colonies. My first monograph Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750 was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018. It advances existing knowledge on the experiences and social interactions of Quaker women in England, Ireland and the American colonies over the movement's first century by placing women's roles, relationships and identities at the centre of the analysis. It shows how the movement's transition from 'sect to church' enhanced the authority and influence of women within the movement and uncovers the multifaceted ways in which female Friends at all levels were active participants in making and sustaining transatlantic Quakerism.

My current project A Social History of Solitude in Early Modern Britain, which received funding from a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, explores how time spent alone was understood, articulated, and experienced in early modern Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal diaries, correspondence, autobiographies, devotional literature, conduct books, and newspapers written between 1600 and 1800, this book reveals how men and women felt about, sought, experienced, and perceived solitude. Against the prominence accorded to sociability in the existing secondary literature, this book shows how solitude was an equally common, and often equally sought state.

I am also interested in the concept of enmity in the early modern British Atlantic and have conducted research and published on the experience of female enmity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and North America. Further details about my work on female enmities in connection with my Leverhulme project are available here.

Research supervision

I am willing to supervise a range of topics in early modern British history and colonial history, at both MA and PhD level, especially topics relating to:

• gender;
• religious and dissenting history;
• religious tolerance and intolerance;
• childhood, youth, and the family;
• hospitality, sociability and its tensions;
• transatlantic travel, exchange and connections (esp. connected to religious groups and women);
• the British Civil Wars and American Revolution;
• notions of privacy and intimacy;
• identity, subjectivity and the emotions.

Current PhD students:

Dan Meldon (2025-2029) (AHRC-funded M4C Collaborative Doctoral Award with Warwickshire County Record Office co-supervision with Prof. Beat K眉min and Amanda Webber): 鈥榃arwickshire Identities: Early Modern Archival Perspectives鈥�.

Evie Nash (2024-2028) (AHRC-funded M4C studentship co-supervision with Prof. Mark Knights): The persecution of Quakers for vagrancy in the British Atlantic World, c.1640-1750.

Rebecca Capel (2024-2028) (AHRC-funded M4C studentship co-supervision with Prof. Karen Harvey): Young Women, Denominational Identity and Christian Cultures of Courtship and Marriage in England, 1675-1800.

Lynn Marriott (2024-2030 part-time) (AHRC-funded M4C studentship co-supervision with Prof. Mark Knights): Nonconformity within established Protestantism in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

Angus Crawford (2023-2027) (AHRC-funded M4C Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Lord Leycester Hospital, Warwick, co-supervision with Prof. Beat K眉min and Dr Angela Nicholls): Almshouse, Guild and Town Community: The Lord Leycester Hospital in its Urban Setting.

Haijiao Wang (2023-2026) (China Scholarship Council co-supervision with Prof. Peter Marshall): Gendered Perceptions and Ideals of Female Beauty in England, c.1550-1700.

Anna Pravdica (2022-2026) (AHRC-funded M4C studentship Prof. Mark Knights and Prof. Kate Loveman): Emotional Sincerity, Social Identity, and Performance in England, c.1642-1800.

Completed and past PhD projects:

Dr Imogen Knox (2020-2024) (AHRC-funded M4C studentship with Prof. Peter Marshall): Suicide, Self-Harm, and the Supernatural in Britain, 1560-1735.

Ellie Sutton (M4C co-supervision with Prof. Karen Harvey): 'The Seventeenth-Century Broadside Ballad and Female Identity'.

Connor Talbot (2018-2025 part-time) (co-supervision with Prof. Mark Knights): The emotional and spatial journeys of the colonial British North Atlantic, c.1590-1640.

Impact and public engagement

• May 2024 Interviewed for a Podcast , for the History From the Old Brick Church Podcast.
• In 2024 I led and co-ordinated a series of 6 Research Workshops: The Hidden Histories of Ordinary Men and Women in Tudor and Stuart Britain with the Lord Leycester and Warwickshire Records Office to equip volunteers with skills to research the early history of the Hospital's early brethren and masters.
• In 2024, I co-authored a WHO behavioural and cultural insight policy paper on .
• Since 2023 I have led a working group at the 神马福利影片 into childcare funding for postgraduate students, supporting an unacknowledged government gap in childcare funding provision. From 2025 I will be involved in another working group on staff and student carers. These conversations are matters that feed into not just university policy, but wider political issues and debates.
• In 2021, I received funding from Coventry Creates to collaborate with a local photographer and filmmaker, Paul Daly, on the experience of solitude, linked to my current research. The result of our collaboration will be shown in a digital exhibition in November 2021. A video about the project is available .
• I was interviewed for the , broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 7 April.
• See my video on 鈥楩aculty of Arts at Home鈥� films, May 2020.
• I was interviewed for a podcast on the New Books Network about my first monograph Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750.

Other activities

• I have a long-standing interest in women's and gender history and am a member of the editorial board for the journal .
• In 2026, I was appointed Deputy Chair of the 神马福利影片 Gender Engagement Group, I have sat on the committee since 2022.
• Since 2024 I have led a university-wide working group about student carers at the 神马福利影片, with a focus on the significant funding gap that postgraduate researchers experience for government-funded childcare support.
• 2014-2018: Deputy Editor of Women's History, the journal of the Women's History Network.

Publications

Books

(Cambridge University Press, 2018). Shortlisted for the Ecclesiastical History Society 2019 Book Prize.

A Social History of Solitude in Early Modern Britain (book manuscript in progress)

co-edited with Kathryn Woods (Routledge, 2021).

Articles and book chapters

鈥楾he Hermits of Seventeenth-Century England鈥�, in Tim Reinke-Williams and Angela McShane (eds),  (Boydell Press, 2025), 20-42.

鈥楾he Quaker Reception of John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Debate Over Women鈥檚 Preaching鈥�, English Historical Review, vol 139, issue 597 (2024): 426-54:

'Motherhood and Domestic Authority in British and Colonial Quakerism, c.1650-1775', Journal of Early Modern History 28, nos 1-2 (2024): Special Issue: Global Protestantisms, 118-143: doi:  

鈥楩riends without Friends: Exile and Excommunication from Early Quakerism鈥�, in Adrianna Bakos and Linda Levy Peck (eds),  (Manchester University Press, 2024), 66-86.

Failed Friendship and the Negotiation of Exclusion in Eighteenth-Century Polite Society' in Naomi Pullin and Kathryn Woods (eds),  (Routledge, 2021), 88-114.

'Introduction: Approaching Early Modern Exclusion and Inclusion', in Naomi Pullin and Kathryn Woods (eds),  (Routledge, 2021), 1-24.

鈥樷�楥hildren of the Light鈥�: Childhood, Youth, and Dissent in Early Quakerism', in Tali Berner and Lucy Underwood (eds),  (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 99-126.

鈥楽ustaining 鈥渢he Household of Faith鈥�: Female Hospitality in the Early Transatlantic Quaker Community鈥�, Journal of Early Modern History 22, no. 1 (January 2018): 96-119:

鈥樷�楽he Suffered for My Sake鈥�: Female Martyrs and Lay Activists in Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1710鈥�, in , ed. by Catie Gill and Michele Lise Tarter (Oxford University Press, 2018).

鈥楶rovidence, Punishment and Identity Formation in the Late-Stuart Quaker Community, c.1650-1700鈥�, The Seventeenth Century 31, no. 4 (2016): 471–494: .

鈥業n Pursuit of Heavenly Guidance: The Religious Context of Catherine Exley鈥檚 Life and Writings鈥�, in Rebecca Probert (ed.), (Kenilworth: Brandram, 2014), 79-95.

Reference work

鈥楯oan Whitrow鈥� in Suzanne Trill (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women鈥檚 Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 1-3, doi: .

鈥楰atharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers鈥� in Suzanne Trill (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women鈥檚 Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 1-6, doi: .

Web-based Publications

, for special colloquium collection of essays on (October, 2022).

(July 2022).

(August 2021).

for 鈥楽olitude in the Time of COVID-19鈥� blog series, May 2020.

The Conversation (11 April 2016)

BBC Radio 4 Blog '500 Years of Friendship' (April 2014).

, biography and podcast for the 鈥楤rief Lives鈥� Project with the Warwick Early Modern Forum (May 2013).