Lynn Abrams
I am an historian of women and gender relations in Europe (including Britain) in the period since around 1750. My current research projects focus on the 20th century. 'Liberating the Female Self: Narratives of Women's Emancipation in Post-war Britain c.1950-1975' addresses a pivotal moment in the lives of modern women: the moment when the transition generation embraced personal autonomy. 'Living the Modern Everyday: gender and home in post-war Scotland' addresses the relationship between public housing provision and design and the gendered practices of everyday life in the context of the self-consciously 'modern' homes of the post-war era - the high rise and the new town. Both of these projects privilege oral history and personal testimony.
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Maud Bracke
My research is focused the history of women’s political agency in post-war Europe. I am currently working on a monograph on the feminist movement in Italy during the ‘long 1970s’, based on oral history interviews as well as archival material. It situates this movement in its specific local contexts, while at the same time pointing at the importance of international connections and networks. I have written articles and delivered papers on women’s roles in homes’ occupations in 1970s Turin, trade union feminism, and the Wages for Housework campaign. I have previously worked on French and Italian communism, the political radicalisation of ‘1968’ in Europe, and the Prague Spring. I am involved also in projects dealing with memories of World War Two in French cinema, and with critical approaches to the notion of ‘transnationalism’ in social movements research.
Marilyn Dunn
My research covers religion and belief, especially about death and the dead; and monasticism.
Marguerite Dupree
I am currently is completing a major project (with Anne Crowther) on the development of the medical profession and spread of medical ideas. Recently she embarked on a new project on the history of the National Health Service in the West of Scotland. She has published widely in the social history of medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, and she has long-established interests in family, demographic, urban and business history.
Rose Elliot
I currently holds a Wellcome Trust University Award for her research project 'Smoking and Health in Germany from Occupation and Re-unification (1945 - 1995)'.
Eleanor Gordon
My research is on gender and class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the focus on how these are played out in the context of Scottish society. However, I am not primarily an historian of Scotland as I am interested in class, gender and family in a national and international context with my geographical area of research being Scotland. My previous research has looked at women and the labour movement 1850-1914 and the role of middle –class women in the formation of class society. My most recent publication, Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain, used a notorious nineteenth -century murder trial to examine issues of class, gender and nationality and to chart the many public versions of the trial over the next 150 years in order to illustrate the ways in which writing history is itself a part of history. My latest research project with two other member of the Centre is on the history of working –class marriage and the family in Scotland 1855-1976. We are interested in how dominant discourses of marriage and family life were produced and reproduced and how people negotiated expectations and understandings of marriage in practice.
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Annmarie Hughes
My research interests are in Scottish gender history between the wars, focusing on gender, violence and popular culture. I have published on domestic violence in Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries, on Scottish women’s political experiences and on popular protests. My current research is on family and family breakdown in 19th and 20th century Scotland with particular reference to domestic violence, desertion and social service provision. I am also interested in gender and popular culture and the ways in which civic, geographical and inter-generational conflicts mediate women’s access to inter-war commercial leisure activities.
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Jeff Meek
I am an historian and social scientist whose research interests focus on the construction of sexuality, particularly homo- and bi-sexuality and the intersections of faith, social class and masculinity. My previous research has examined the construction of the homosexual in Scottish society from the late nineteenth century through to the 1980s, homosexual law reform, sexual ‘spaces’ and queer subcultures.
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Penny Morris
Penny works primarily on women in mid-20th Century Italy. She has edited an interdisciplinary study of women in Italy in the years 1945-1960 and is currently completing a project on the role of advice columns in 1950s Italy. She has published a book and various articles on the writer and Resistance activist Giovanna Zangrandi and has a particular interest in the writer Alba de Céspedes. She co-organised the conference 'Women and the Mass Media in 20th Century Italy', held at the IGRS, London, in October 2006.
Juliette Pattinson
I am a social and cultural historian of Twentieth Century Britain and Europe, with particular interests in gender, personal testimonies and war.
Lydia Plath
My research focuses on ideas of race, gender, and class, with a particular focus on racially-motivated violence in the United States from the colonial period to the present. My current research regards white conceptions of masculinity and race in the American South, and the ways in which these notions could lead to violence. My PhD thesis and forthcoming book focus on white men’s fears about potential slave rebels in Mississippi in the summer of 1835, arguing that the execution of white men, including slaveholders, in this case, demonstrates the fluidity and complexity of racial and gender identity in the antebellum South. I am also interested in the socio-cultural significance of the various methods used to punish African American men for perceived racial transgressions—in particular ‘burning alive,’ or execution by fire—and the ways in which attitudes towards death, punishment, and ‘the body’, could be both gendered and racialised.
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Alex Shepard
My research broadly addresses the social, cultural and economic history of early modern Britain (1500-1750). My work to date has focused principally on gender relations, with particular emphasis on the history of masculinity in England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, and I am currently expanding this to include work on Scottish masculinity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am also completing a book for Oxford University Press on perceptions of worth and social status in early modern England, using the responses of witnesses appearing in the church courts to the frequently asked question of what they were worth. Supported by a Research Grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, this book will explore concepts of wealth; its distribution (in relation to social status, gender, and the life course); and the language of self-description in early modern England.
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Julia Smith
I have wide-ranging research interests in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, c400-1000CE. I am especially interested in gender orders and in religion, notably saints' cults and hagiography, and have supervised many PhD students in these and other areas of early medieval history.
My current research project, Roman Martyrs in the Medieval Imagination, offers a fundamental, interdisciplinary reappraisal of the cult of saints from its origins to the high Middle Ages, grounded in the premise that gender and sanctity were two complementary, but fundamentally different ways of organising, expressing and debating power relations. Using the development and reception of the cults of the martyrs of the city of Rome as its leitmotif, it will pay particular attention to the comparative development of selected cults in Anglo-Saxon, Merovingian, Carolingian and Ottonian contexts. Exploiting art historical, liturgical, literary and archaeological as well as historical and hagiographical sources, it will assert the importance of martyr cults as the matrix out of which the cults of other saints was moulded, and will emphasise their significance as carriers of such central cultural values as virginity, the criticism of tyranny and a Rome-centred view of Christian history.
I am a member of the Glasgow Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
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