Professor Joanne Begiato is a historian of early modern, Georgian and Victorian Britain, with particular interests in marriage, marriage breakdown, family relationships, the domestic economy, parenting, masculinities, and identities. She is fascinated by the ways in which people encountered their material and emotional worlds and draws on a range of different types of primary sources to investigate them, from the printed word, to visual images, to objects and spaces.
She recently completed Manliness in Britain 1760-1900: Bodies, Emotions, and Material Culture, which will be published by Manchester University Press in 2020. This book uses the concept of emotionalised bodies and material culture to explain how ideas about manliness and unmanliness were constructed, disseminated, sustained, and fixed in individuals and society.
Her book Sex and the Church in England 1688-1832, co-authored with Professor William Gibson was published by I B Tauris early in 2017. It reassesses the role of the Anglican Church in ideas about sex, its discipline, and its practice.
Joanne published Parenting in England c.1760-1830: emotions, self-identity and generation in 2012. See a review here. This study traces parenting both as a concept and a mode of being in an era marked by the cultures of Sensibility and Romanticism. The golden thread connecting these movements was the expression of emotion and this research therefore analyses the interplay between practices, feelings and ideas during a period of change in ideas about childhood, family, gender and self.
Her first monograph was Unquiet Lives: marriage and marriage breakdown in England 1660-1800 (CUP, 2003, re-issued in paperback in January 2009). See a review of this book.
In addition Joanne has published numerous articles on topics as diverse as nostalgia and the family, changes in embodied manliness through the long nineteenth century, depictions of the Jack Tar, representations and experiences of fatherhood and masculinity, the role of space and material culture in constructing domestic violence, pauper parenting, the relationship between memories of parents and the formation of personal identity, married women's experience of coverture and an analysis of the use of church court records as an historical source. She has also published chapters in edited collections on the emotions of pregnancy, the links betweeen unmanliness and bodily and mental decline, dysfunctional family life, and many other aspects of family, gender, and material culture.