The house was a miracle of miniature technology, from the pair of Purdy shotguns that actually broke even if they didn’t fire, to the electric lift and working plumbing. It was also packed with beautiful and very tiny works of art and literature that represented a major shift from their creators’ wartime output. C.R.W. Nevinson’s “Paths of Glory” had been banned in 1918 because of its shockingly unpatriotic content of faceless British corpses lying in the trench mud, but his contribution to the dolls’ house was a pretty watercolour of a mountain town.

Dr Victoria Kelley, University for the Creative Arts vkelley@uca.ac.uk   Cheap Street tells the story of London’s street markets: Petticoat Lane, Berwick Street, Lambeth Walk and many others. From the 1850s, anything that could be bought in a shop could also be bought in the street markets – they were the butcher, baker, greengrocer, provision … Continued

Dr Henry Irving, Leeds Beckett University @drhenryirving One of the most important things I learned during my undergraduate degree was that academics read differently. Critical analysis, the lecturers’ said, was as important as comprehension. I still remember feeling shocked when one explained that they would begin marking an essay by looking at the bibliography. “But, … Continued

Dr Duncan Stone, University of Huddersfield @StoneDunk Writing of the thirteen elite public schools of England in 1891, the educationalist M. J. Rendell unashamedly pointed out that ‘of the “thicks”; “intermediates” and “clever” boys, it is the intermediates: a group of “honest workers with sound headpieces and average wits, who will soon be playing a … Continued

Katrina-Louise Moseley, University of Cambridge @trina_moseley As an avid viewer of cookery television programmes (I grew up watching Ready Steady Cook with my Grandad in the late 1990s, and continued to watch intently as the genre swallowed Ainsley Harriot’s gags to make way for the more haughty Masterchef Goes Large in the 2000s), I’ve long … Continued

Dr Daphna Oren-Magidor @DaphnaOrenM “Don’t you ask a lot of questions?” says Matthew Clairmont irritably to historian Diana Bishop in the recent TV adaptation of Deborah Harkness’ A Discovery of Witches. “Hmm…” answers Bishop, with a barely-apologetic shrug. “It’s the historian in me.” For historians – as for most scholars – questions are a fundamental … Continued

James Stark and Catherine Stones, University of Leeds J.F.Stark@leeds.ac.uk C.M.Stones@leeds.ac.uk Germs have always been hidden. Impossible to see with the naked eye, microorganisms inhabit a world of their own. Invisible miniature organisms had long been theorised but were first revealed by the microscopy of Anton van Leeuwenhoek in the seventeenth century. With the increasing popularity … Continued

Dr Allan Kennedy is Lecturer in History at the University of Dundee. He is the author of Governing Gaeldom: The Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State, 1660-1688 (Leiden, 2014) and numerous articles on the treatment of Scottish outsiders or ‘others’ in the early modern world.

In his contribution to the Research Exchange, he reflects on the challenges of researching Scottish migration and identity in early modern England, which he wrote about with Professor Keith Brown in their recent article ‘Becoming English: The Monro Family and Scottish Assimilation in Early-Modern England’ published online with Cultural & Social History on 27 March 2019.

Dr Laura Mair is REF Impact Officer for the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Alongside completing her doctoral research on the ragged school movement, in 2015-16 she acted as research consultant to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Museum of Childhood for their ‘On Their Own’ exhibition on British child migrants.

In her contribution to the Research, she reflects on her experience of researching the intimate history of children’s and adult’s lives in the Victorian ragged schools, which is the subject of her new book ‘Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844-1870’, which is published by Routledge.

Dr Janet Weston is a social historian based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, with particular interests in health and law. Her first book, Medicine, the Penal System and Sexual Crimes in England, 1919-1960s, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018, and she has also written about HIV/AIDS policy, public engagement, and dementia.

In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she reflects on the limits of thinking about HIV/AIDs as a matter of human rights in the 1990s, something she wrote about in her recent article for Cultural & Social History, ‘Sites of Sickness, sites of rights? HIV/AIDS and the limits of human rights in British prisons’ was published online on 11 March 2019.