Dr Susannah Wright in Senior Lecturer in Educational Studies at Oxford Brookes University. She works on the history of education and childhood, with a focus on themes of secularism, and war and peace. She is the author of Morality and Citizenship in English Schools: Secular Approaches, 1897-1944 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she reflects on her recent article ‘Educating the Secular Citizen in English Schools, 1897–1938’, Cultural & Social History, vol. 12, no. 2 (2018), pp. 215-232.

Dr James Fisher recently completed his thesis at King’s College London, which offered a reinterpretation of the relationship between books, knowledge and labour in the development of agrarian capitalism in eighteenth-century Britain. He currently teaches history at King’s College London and the University of East London.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he explains the tension between scholarly learning and practical experience he explores in his recent article ‘The Master Should Know More: Book-Farming and the Conflict Over Agricultural Knowledge’, Cultural & Social History, vol. 15, no. 3 (2018), pp. 315-331.

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire and a leading authority on the belief in witchcraft, magic, ghosts, and popular medicine from the ancient world to the modern era. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (OUP, 2009) and America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft after Salem (OUP, 2013).

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he reflects on how he came to write his new book, ‘A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War’, which was published by Oxford University Press in October 2018.

Dr Anna Field is Lecturer in Early Modern British History at King’s College London, having recently completed her PhD at Cardiff University. She specialises in the early modern history of crime, emotion, and intimacy and has a keen interest in community outreach.

In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she discusses the importance of the gendered morality of early modern work in shaping the narratives of coin clipping and counterfeiting crimes she rethinks in her recent article ‘Coining Offences in England and Wales, c. 1675–1750: The Practical and the Personal’, Cultural & Social History, vol. 15, no. 2 (2018), pp. 177-196

Joe Chick is a PhD student at the University of Warwick, funded by the ESRC, working on a thesis entitled ‘Conflict, Compromise, and Change: Lay–Church Relations and the Dissolution in the Monastic Town of Reading, 1350-1600’.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he reflects on his experience of presenting at the 2018 Social History Society conference, where he was joint runner-up in the best postgraduate paper prize for ‘Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Pursuit of Identity: Town–Abbey Relations in Late Medieval Reading’.

Christer Petley is Professor in History at the University of Southampton. His work focuses on the histories and legacies of slavery in the Americas, in particular slave societies and colonial settlers in the British Caribbean.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he reflects on his new book ‘White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution’, which was published by Oxford University Press in October 2018.

Dr Robert James is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Popular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain 1930-39: A Round of Cheap Diversions? (Manchester University Press, 2010) and numerous articles on the history of leisure, cinema-going and reading.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange for Libraries Week, he reflects on the tension between education and entertainment discussed in his recent article ‘‘Read for Victory’: Public Libraries and Book Reading in a British Naval Port City during the Second World War’, Cultural & Social History, vol. 15, no. 2 (2018), pp. 233-253.

Esben Bøgh Sørensen is a PhD student at Aarhus University in Denmark. His research uses the work of agricultural writers to explore the role of ideology, ideas and thought in the early emergence of capitalism in England.

Esben was joint runner-up in the prize for the best postgraduate paper at the 2018 Social History Society conference. In his contribution for the Research Exchange, he discusses the new ways an intellectual historian can read early modern farming manuals as an historical source.

Dr Jennifer Evans is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire. She is the author of Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Boydell & Brewer, 2014) and numerous articles on the early modern history of gender and body. In 2014 she co-founded the Perceptions of Pregnancy research network with Dr Ciara Meehan.

In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she reflects on her new collection, co-edited with Dr Alun Withey, New Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair: Framing the Face, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

Alyson Brown is Professor of History at Edgehill University. She is the author of English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850-1920 (Boydell & Brewer, 2003) and numerous articles on prison history.

In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she discusses the debate around flogging prompted by a prison suicide mentioned in her recent article in the Social History Society’s journal, ‘The Sad Demise of z.D.H.38 Ernest Collins: Suicide, Informers and the Debate on the Abolition of Flogging’, Cultural & Social History, vol. 15, no.1 (2018), pp. 99-114.