Academic Profile

• 2024 onwards Director of the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre (EMECC)
• 2023 onwards: Associate Professor in Early Modern British History, University of Warwick
• 2022 onwards: Member of the University of Warwick Gender Taskforce
• 2018-2023: Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History, University of Warwick
• 2017-2021: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Cambridge
• 2015-2017: Teaching Fellow in Early Modern British History, University of Warwick
• 2014-2018: Deputy Editor of Women's History, the journal of the Women's History Network.
• 2015-2016: Project Co-ordinator University of Oxford on Women in the Humanities, TORCH and Centre for Gender, Identity and Subjectivity
• 2014: PhD History, University of Warwick
• 2010: MA Religious and Social History 1500-1750, University of Warwick
• 2009: BA History, University of Warwick

Fellowships

• Fellow of the Higher Education Teaching Academy
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship held at University of Cambridge and University of Warwick, with match funding from the Isaac Newton Trust
• Research Associate, St John’s 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)

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 English Civil Wars and American Revolution;
• notions of privacy and intimacy;
• identity, subjectivity and the emotions.

Current PhD students:

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

Rebecca Capel (2024-2028) (M4C co-supervision with Prof. Karen Harvey): Young Women's Experiences of Sex and Romance in Britain, 1650-1750.

Lynn Marriott (2024-2028) (M4C co-supervision with Prof. Mark Knights): Nonconformity within established Protestantism in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

Angus Crawford (2023-2027) (M4C Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Lord Leycester Hospital, Warwick, co-supervision with Prof. Peter Marshall 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) (M4C co-supervision with Prof. Mark Knights and Dr Kate Loveman): Emotional Sincerity, Social Identity, and Performance in England, c.1642-1800.

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

Completed and past PhD projects:

Imogen Knox (2020-2024) (M4C co-supervision 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'.

Impact and public engagement

• May 2024 Interviewed for a Podcast 'Born From Conflict: Quakers in the UK and North America'Link opens in a new window, 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 'The History of Loneliness: What We Know So Far'Link opens in a new window.
• 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 hereLink opens in a new window.
• I was interviewed for the AHRC-BBC New Thinking podcast on 'Religion and ordinary lives'Link opens in a new window, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 7 April.
• See my video on The History of Solitude in the Home ‘Faculty of Arts at Home’ 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. A link to the recording is available here.Link opens in a new window

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 Women's History Review.

Publications

Books

Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750Link opens in a new window (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)

Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1560-1800, Link opens in a new windowco-edited with Kathryn Woods (Routledge, 2021).

Articles and book chapters

'The Quaker Reception of John Locke and the Eighteenth-Century Debate over Women’s Preaching', English Historical Review (2024), advance access: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceae081 

'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: https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10079Link opens in a new window 

‘Friends without Friends: Exile and Excommunication from Early Quakerism’, in Adrianna Bakos and Linda Levy Peck (eds), Women in Exile in Early Modern Europe and the Americas (Manchester University Press, 2024),

Failed Friendship and the Negotiation of Exclusion in Eighteenth-Century Polite Society' in Naomi Pullin and Kathryn Woods (eds), Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1560-1800Link opens in a new window (Routledge, 2021), 88-114.

'Introduction: Approaching Early Modern Exclusion and Inclusion', in Naomi Pullin and Kathryn Woods (eds), Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1560-1800Link opens in a new window (Routledge, 2021), 1-24.

‘‘Children of the Light’: Childhood, Youth, and Dissent in Early Quakerism', in Tali Berner and Lucy Underwood (eds), Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 99-126.

‘Sustaining “the Household of Faith”: Female Hospitality in the Early Transatlantic Quaker Community’, Journal of Early Modern History 22, no. 1 (January 2018): 96-119: doi: 10.1163/15700658-17-00012Link opens in a new window

‘‘She Suffered for My Sake’: Female Martyrs and Lay Activists in Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1710’, in New Critical Studies on Quaker Women: 1650-1750, ed. by Catie Gill and Michele Lise Tarter (Oxford University Press, 2018).

‘Providence, Punishment and Identity Formation in the Late-Stuart Quaker Community, c.1650-1700’, The Seventeenth Century 31, no. 4 (2016): 471–494: doi: 10.1080/0268117X.2016.1246261Link opens in a new window.

‘In Pursuit of Heavenly Guidance: The Religious Context of Catherine Exley’s Life and Writings’, in Rebecca Probert (ed.), Catherine Exley's Diary: The Life and Times of a Camp-follower in the Peninsular War' (Kenilworth: Brandram, 2014), 79-95.

Reference work

‘Joan Whitrow’ in Suzanne Trill (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 1-3, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_229-1.

‘Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers’ in Suzanne Trill (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 1-6, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_169-1.

Web-based Publications

‘Solitude and Sociability in Early Modern Protestant Dissent’, for special colloquium collection of essays on Solitudes: Past and Present Project (October, 2022).

‘False Friends and Enemies’ for the DIGIT.EN.S Encylopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century (July 2022).

‘Solitude’ for the DIGIT.EN.S Encylopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century (August 2021).

Domestic solitude in early modern Britain for ‘Solitude in the Time of COVID-19’ blog series, May 2020.

‘Was Scotland’s Darien disaster the first great Panama financial scandal?’ Link opens in a new windowThe Conversation (11 April 2016)

‘‘The Lord hath joined us together’: Spiritual Friendship and Quaker women's alliances’, Link opens in a new windowBBC Radio 4 Blog '500 Years of Friendship' (April 2014).

‘Mary Weston: Quaker Preacher and Missionary (1712–1766)’Link opens in a new window, biography and podcast for the ‘Brief Lives’ Project with the Warwick Early Modern Forum (May 2013).