My teaching is all concerned with experiences of everyday life, from the huge social and economic changes brought about by the industrial revolution, to long-term processes of development and cultural change surrounding marriage, childhood, demography and family life. I believe that to understand the decision-making and experiences of individuals we must appreciate the wider contexts they lived in. In my modules students are encouraged to explore these wider contexts and through them, analyse and challenge common perceptions of how individuals at all levels of society related to those around them.
Modules taught
Undergraduate
- Everyday Life in Britain (first year)
- History Work Based Learning (second year)
- Advanced Study in Social and Cultural History: Childhood and Adolescence in the West, 1750-1950 (third-year double Honours module)
Supervision
PhD supervision
I have supervised PhD students in a range of areas in economic, social and medical history, and am happy to hear from prospective students working in these areas. At the moment I am supervising projects on child domestic servants, and the implementation of the New Poor Law in Hertfordshire. Previous students have successfully submitted theses on religion and the workhouse in eighteenth-century Westminster, the history of smallpox in eighteenth-century Oxfordshire, and the Making and remaking of the ‘Normal Child’ in England, c. 1880-1914