The Social History is home to a thriving community of postgraduate researchers.

We want to provide an online space that showcases the work of PGRs in the field of social history. If you are interested in their research topics and you’d like to get in touch, you’ll find their contact details in their profiles.

If you are a postgraduate researcher and you would like to become a member of the Social History Society, membership is just £15 per year. If you are already a member and you’d like to have a profile space here, please get in touch with one of our PGR Reps Louise Bell (hylbe@leeds.ac.uk) or Amy Stanning (a.l.stanning@lancaster.ac.uk).

Louise Bell, University of Leeds

Email: hylbe@leeds.ac.uk

Twitter: @LouBell

Louise is undertaking a AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the University of Leeds and The National Archives. The PhD is focusing on British state provision of prosthetic limbs in the two world wars and will explore the relationship between the British government, prosthetics manufacturers and the men whose limbs were amputated as a result of service during the two world wars.

Amy Stanning, Lancaster University

Email: a.l.stanning@lancaster.ac.uk

Amy Stanning is an ESRC funded Postgraduate Research student working on the project ‘Was there a Taxation Revolution in late Eighteenth Century Britain?’. Before coming back to academic, Amy had a career in Banking and Finance, becoming an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and an Affiliate of the Securities Institute.

She took her MA at Lancaster in International and Military History in 2021, gaining a distinction and being awarded University prizes for her dissertation on the ‘fiscal-military state’ and for her outstanding academic achievement. She began her postgraduate research in autumn 2021 and has taught as an Associate Lecturer on undergraduate modules on Early-Modern Britain, British Culture and Society, 1500-1750 and Twentieth-Century Britain. Recognition as an Associate Fellow of Advance HE, will be formally ratified shortly.

Joshua Dight, Edge Hill University

Email: Dightj@edgehill.ac.uk

Twitter @DightJoshua

I am a history PhD student at Edge Hill University. My project makes use of the digital humanities and memory theory to explore Britain’s late eighteenth-century radicals through the perspective of the Chartist press.

My project explores the different portrayals of late 18th century radicals within the Chartist press. It seeks to highlight the role of newspapers in capturing, producing, and circulating these memories amongst readers. By taking a more interdisciplinary approach to Chartism’s rich commemoration culture, I hope to amplify the social and flexible qualities of memory, and the different ways it was put to use.

Will Garbett, Lancaster University

Email: w.garbett@lancaster.ac.uk

Will Garbett is PhD student in the History Department at Lancaster University.

His research asks why people found the comedy of British satirist Chris Morris funny, and what this can tell us about Britain at the turn of the millennium.

Will is also Coordinating Editor at EPOCH History Magazine.

Jude Rowley, Lancaster University 

Email: j.d.rowley@lancaster.ac.uk

Jude Rowley is an NWSSDTP-funded PhD candidate based in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion (PPR) at Lancaster University. His work focusses principally on the disciplinary history of International Relations and seeks to address some of the defining historical silences that have shaped the discipline. He has a particular interest in unravelling IR’s historical ties to colonial race science and eugenics, along with the hidden histories of anti-colonial resistance that have influenced the development of the field in complex and emergent ways. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he has also taught as both a seminar tutor and guest lecturer on a range of postgraduate and undergraduate level courses at Lancaster across the Departments of History, PPR, and the School of Computing and Communications.

Patricia Silver-Warner, Winchester Unviersity

Email: P.Silver-Warner.00@unimail.winchester.ac.uk

Tricia’s research uses surviving pre-1650 vernacular cottages in the village of King’s Somborne, Hampshire to better understand quality of life for rural workers, over the Longue Duree of 1590 to 1926. Her project treats the cottages as material cultural objects in their own right, and argues the spaces therefore within and around them are a facet of that material culture – like negative space in art.  Consideration of those qualities, the cottages and their related spaces, in relation to quality of life of the occupants enables an improved understanding of rural workers’ lives over the Modern period.

In 2023 Trica was awarded her History Department’s PGR students’ ‘three-minute thesis’ competition.

Emily Sharp, Northumbria University

Email: emily4.sharp@northumbria.ac.uk

Twitter: @mlyshrp

My PhD seeks to assess the contribution of British student activists to international solidarity campaigns across the second half of the twentieth century. Examining the anti-apartheid movement, and the Chile and Palestine solidarity campaigns, I hope to track the changing sentiments, principles, patterns and priorities in British student activism across this period and to demonstrate the interconnected nature of local, national and international activism.

Anna Fielding, Manchester Metropolitan University and the National Trust

Email: Anna.fielding@stu.mmu.ac.uk

I look at early modern gentry commensality in the northwest of England and my work mainly concerns the properties Little Moreton, Speke and Rufford Old Hall. In my work I consider commensality as a dining assemblage and use a combination of affect, sensory history, emotional history, archival sources, and material culture to build up the experiential layers of the early modern dinner table. I aim to examine how commensality was used by gentry families to influence and maintain social status against a backdrop of reformation and conflict in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Lena Ferriday, University of Bristol

Email: lena.ferriday@bristol.ac.uk

Twitter: @lenaferriday

My doctoral research considers the complex relationship between the human body, the material world and textual representations, in an historical context, focused through the case study of life-writing sources on the landscapes of Devon and Cornwall in the nineteenth century.

Andrew Barnes, University of Sheffield

Email: AABarnes1@sheffield.ac.uk

My research examines the political culture of the East Riding County Council between its inception in 1889 and its dissolution in 1974.  The main question addresses how the county’s exclusive reliance on agriculture, coupled with its relative isolation, shaped the political culture of the county council resulting in the landed classes and the agricultural community maintaining power until the 1960s.  In the majority of counties this type of local governance had been displaced with a far more eclectic membership earlier in the century.

Stephanie Brown, University of Cambridge

Email: seb208@cam.ac.uk

Twitter: @StephEmmaBrown

Stephanie’s PhD assesses the role of identity in the prosecution of interpersonal violence in late medieval Yorkshire, c.1340-85. Her interests lie in socio-legal history and the history of crime and punishment (c.1300-c.1900).

Nicola Edwards, University of Wolverhampton

Email: n.j.edwards2@wlv.ac.uk

Twitter: @nic_jim_ed

Nicola Edwards began her PhD study in early 2024 at the University of Wolverhampton. She is researching the lives of working-class women in the West Midlands in the 1960s, and the provisional title of her thesis is ‘For Whom the Sixties Swung: The Lives of Working-Class Women in Walsall, Wolverhampton and Dudley in the Period c. 1958-1974’. She intends to conduct interviews with women who were in their teens/ early twenties during the period and compare their oral histories to the popular narrative of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, as well as the revised assertion that the period was far more conservative in terms of attitude and behaviour. Nicola took her first degree at Wolverhampton as a mature student and was awarded the History Prize for best overall achievement in her cohort.

Megan Schlanker, University of Lincoln

Email: mschlanker@lincoln.ac.uk

Twitter: @meg_sch

Megan Schlanker is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Lincoln, researching the development of museum education and the experiences of children in museums in the twentieth century. She has a background in archaeology and ancient history, and has previously undertaken research on intimate partner violence in Romano-British populations. In 2022, she was awarded Highly Commended Early Career Archaeologist at the Archaeological Achievement Awards in Dublin.

Marlo Avidon, University of Cambridge

Email: mea47@cam.ac.uk

Twitter: @MarloAvdon

Marlo Avidon is a PhD Candidate in history at Christ’s College, Cambridge researching female dress and society in late seventeenth-century England. Her research fuses disparate manuscript, printed and visual material in an attempt to understand how and why fashions circulate, and its impact on women’s individual and group identities. More broadly, Marlo is interested in the material and court cultures of early modern England, with a particular passion for portraiture, dress, and beauty standards. When she’s not researching, Marlo is the Communications Officer for the Northern Early Modern Network, Convenor of the Cambridge Workshop for the Early Modern Period, and a regular contributor to the Doing History in Public Blog.

Sydni Zastre, University of Birmingham

Email: sxz283@student.bham.ac.uk

Twitter: @SydniZastre

Sydni Zastre (pronounced SYD-knee ZAS-tree) is an M4C-funded PhD student in History at the University of Birmingham, where her thesis is provisionally entitled ‘Writing the pregnant body in Britain, 1918-1945.’ She is interested in the complex interactions between discursive and embodied experiences of pregnancy, as expressed in didactic literature, medical texts, fiction, and women’s life-writing.