This part-time PhD, an M4C collaborative doctoral award between Warwick University and Parliament, uses approaches and insights developed in histories of gender and sexuality to focus on individuals’ interactions with the institution of Parliament in the long Nineteenth Century. With a particular focus on the construction of gender and sexuality, the project examines how ‘affect’ existed in and influenced the spatial and temporal aspects of Parliament. What was the nature of intimacy’s entanglement with elite politics and a heteronormative masculinised political institution?

A multi-disciplinary PhD, the analysis interweaves theoretical and empirical insights from history of emotion and intimacy, histories of sexuality, and gender and queer studies, providing an innovative institutional history of Parliament and its effect on the politics and social history of the long Nineteenth Century.

My supervisors are Professor Mathew Thomson and Dr Laura Schwartz.

Email: chloe.challender@warwick.ac.uk

Publications

Essay awarded proxime accessit in Parliamentary History prize competition (Feb 2025): Chloe Challender, 'Ringside Seat? Women's modes of entry to the early 19th century parliament', Parliamentary History (forthcoming)

'Women in the House of Commons', co-authored chapter with Sarah Childs, Rosie Campbell & Jessica Smith in Cristina Leston-Bandiera, Alexandra Meakin and Louise Thompson, Exploring Parliament (OUP, March 2025)

Chloe Challender, 'The smallest room in the House?', blog for History of Parliament Trust, 16 January 2023

Chloe Challender and Harriet Deane, ‘The construction of the Good Parliamentarian within the House of Commons’ (Study of Parliament Group 2021)

Adam Mellows-Facer, Chloe Challender & Paul Evans, ‘Select Committees: Agents of Change’ (Parliamentary Affairs 72(4), 903-922 (October 2019)

Sarah Childs and Chloe Challender, ‘Re-gendering the UK House of Commons: The Academic Critical Actor and Her ‘Feminist in Residence’ (Political Studies Review 17(4), 428-435 (August 2019)

Conferences

Co-convenor, Lived experiences of the Westminster Parliament in history: People, Communities, Sociability & Space, University of Warwick, March 2025

Panellist, The Public-Private Divide in the History of Political Thought, University of Nottingham, October 2024

Panellist, Gender and Sexuality in Modern British History, University of Birmingham, June 2024

Co-presenter, M4C Research Festival, 4 October 2023

Co-convenor, 'Maternal Bodies' Symposium, 15 June 2023, University of Birmingham (M4C/AHRC-funded event)

Panellist, Gender and Political Groups in Britain c.1650-1950, May 2023, University of Northampton