Professor of Modern History, University of Glasgow

Lynn was elected Chair of the Social History Society in 2025.

In 1990 Lynn was appointed to her first permanent academic position at Lancaster University where she stayed for five years. The History Department’s long association with the Social History Society and the presence of the Centre for Women’s Studies were formative in Lynn’s research career, helping to shape her engagement with social and gender relations in a wide range of contexts, from nineteenth century Germany to post-war Britain. She moved to the University of Glasgow in 1995, becoming Professor of Gender History in 2003 and was appointed to the Chair of Modern History in 2013. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Lynn’s research is characterised by an interest in individual experience as it relates to social relations and social change. Her most recent book, Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings and the Self in Post-War Britain (Oxford University Press, 2023) was the culmination of thinking and writing about how to insert women’s own interpretation of their lives into broader social and economic narratives. Feminist Lives adopts a woman-centred approach that privileges feelings as a way of understanding how women in Britain charted a new way of living their lives in the decades before women’s liberation. Personal testimony and especially oral history was at the heart of this project, a methodology that Lynn has both practiced and theorised, most notably in Oral History Theory (Routledge, 2016).

Lynn has a diverse range of research interests encompassing social housing, child welfare, masculinities, and most recently, knitted textiles. From 2019-2023 she led the AHRC-funded ‘Fleece to Fashion: Knitted Textiles in Scotland’, investigating a key industry and craft practice through material culture, oral history, archival sources and public engagement. Knitting in Scotland: Craft, Culture, Industry will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.

Key Publications

• Building Modern Scotland: A Social and Architectural History of the New Towns, 1947-1997 (London: Bloomsbury) [with A.Fair, K.Breen, M.Glendinning, D.Watters, V.Wright] (2024)
• Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings and the Self in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press) (2023)
• Glasgow: High Rise Housing, Estates and Communities (London: Routledge) [with A.Kearns, B.Hazley, V.Wright] (2022)
• Oral History Theory (Routledge: London) (2016)
• Myth and Materiality in a Woman’s World: Shetland 1800-2000 (Manchester; Manchester University Press) (2005)
• The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918 (London: Longman) (2002)
• The Orphan Country: Children of Scotland’s Broken Homes, 1845 to the Present Day (Edinburgh: John Donald) (1998)