Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Sally contributes to the Foundation Year in Humanities ('Being Human: Love, Sex & Death') as well as the following undergraduate modules:

• A People's History of Britain [Year 1]
  • Brings to life the changing social and cultural worlds of the late seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries and how modern Britons were formed.

• The Making of Modern Britain: Culture, Community and Family in Britain 1660-1918 [Year 2]
  
  • Explores how individuals, families and communities experienced gender, class, age and sexuality between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.

Postgraduate

• Theories, Methods, and Practices in History
  
  • Introduces students to key methods and theories essential to the study of history at postgraduate level, as well as the advanced study skills needed for independent research.

 

 

Supervision

Sally is second supervisor for:

Chris Holden, 'Loneliness in Rural England in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780-1914'

Deborah McGuire, 'Emotional Journeys: The British Quilt in Space & Time 1770-1920'

Sally's research interests include:

• Emotions (particularly love and heartbreak)
• Romantic relationships (courtship, matrimony, adultery)
• The emotional meanings of material culture
• Letters & letter-writing
• Foods & foodways
• Everyday life, ephemera & the ritual year
• Visual & material culture

Research grants and awards

2020 Awarded Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS)

2019 Awarded Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

2018 Awarded £310 by the Royal Historical Society to co-organise the conference 'Eighteenth Century Now: The Current State of British History' at the Institute of Historical Research with Esther Brot, Dr Joseph Cozens, and Miranda Reading

2018 Awarded £600 by the AHRC Language Acts and Worldmaking project to co-organise the workshop 'Language and Emotion: From Research to Practice' with Dr Ingrid Medby

2018 Awarded a Scouloudi Publication Award of £650 for The Game of Love in Georgian England (Oxford, 2019)

2015-17 Awarded £1,700 by the Queen Mary Centre for Public Engagement to establish the 'Reading Emotions' community book group with Dr Jane Mackelworth (QMUL)

2016 Early Career International Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

2016 Awarded £2,000 by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Adelaide for the conference 'Romantic Rituals: "Making Love" in Europe 1600-Present' co-organised with Dr Katie Barclay (Adelaide)

2014 Visiting Research Fellow at Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton

2013 Awarded £8,500 by the European Research Council project 'Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel 1400-1800' for the conference 'Emotional Objects: Touching Emotions in Europe 1600-1900' co-organised with Dr Alice Dolan (Herts)

2013-17 Associate Researcher at Historic Royal Palaces

2011-12 Awarded £3,700 by the Friendly Hand Trust to visit the Lewis Walpole Library, Winterthur Museum, and Bard Graduate Centre

2009-12 Full-time three-year PhD studentship from the Arts & Humanities Research Council

Research impact

Sally has been interviewed about her research in the Observer Magazine, The Sun, and the Boston Globe. She has appeared on BBC Radio London, BBC Radio 5 Live, and podcasts including The Thing About Austen (Ep. 34: "The Thing About Edward's Hair Ring") and Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness ("What Was it Like to Get Loved Up in Georgian England?").

She has extensive experience as a researcher and consultant to factual history programmes on BBC 2 and BBC Radio 4, including series presented by Professor Faramerz Dabhoiwala (The Invention of Free Speech), Professor Thomas Dixon (Five Hundred Years of Friendship), Professor Amanda Vickery (Voices from the Old Bailey; Amanda Vickery on Men; At Home with the Georgians; The Story of Women & Art) and Dr Lucy Worsley (Fit to Rule: How Royal Illness Changed History; A Very British Romance).

In 2015, Sally was the consultant on A Very British Romance with Lucy Worsley (BBC Four), and was interviewed about eighteenth-century love letters.

From 2015 to 2018, Sally co-organised the Emotions Book Club with Dr Jane Mackelworth (QMUL), funded by Oxford Brookes University and the Queen Mary Centre for Public Engagement. You can read more about the group here.

Sally has also contributed to a number of events in the local community, including a "Craft Activism" day with Professor Joanne Begiato and Dr Richard Huggins at the Oxford Visual Arts Development Agency, an "Our Food: Our History" event on inherited recipes with Professor Joanne Begiato at Flo's - The Place in the Park, and a poetry slam on heartbreak at the Old Fire Station with Hammer & Tongue. In 2022 she will be speaking to the award-winning comedian Rosie Wilby about heartbreak as part of the Oxford Science + Ideas Festival.

Books

• Barclay K, Holloway S, Ed., A Cultural History of Love in the Age of Enlightenment, Bloomsbury (2022)
  
• Holloway, S, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions & Material Culture, Oxford University Press (2019)
  ISBN: 9780198823070
  Abstract

  Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and a perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This volume brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era - most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine's card - revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts.

  The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.

  Website 
• Downes S, Holloway S, Randles S, Ed., Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, Oxford University Press (2018)
  ISBN: 9780198802648
  Abstract This interdisciplinary essay collection investigates the various interactions of people, feelings, and things throughout premodern Europe. It focuses on the period before mass production, when limited literacy often prioritised material methods of communication. The subject of materiality has been of increasing significance in recent historical inquiry, alongside growing emphasis on the relationships between objects, emotions, and affect in archaeological and sociological research. The historical intersections between materiality and emotions, however, have remained under-theorised, particularly with respect to artefacts that have continuing resonance over extended periods of time or across cultural and geographical space. Feeling Things addresses the need to develop an appropriate cross-disciplinary theoretical framework for the analysis of objects and emotions in European history, with special attention to the need to track the shifting emotional valencies of objects from the past to the present, and from one place and cultural context to another.
  
  The collection draws together an international group of historians, art historians, curators, and literary scholars working on a variety of cultural, literary, visual, and material sources. Objects considered include books, letters, prosthetics, religious relics, shoes, stone, and textiles. Many of these have been preserved in international galleries, museums, and archives, while others have remained in their original locations, even as their contexts have changed over time. The chapters consider the ways in which emotions such as despair, fear, grief, hope, love, and wonder become inscribed in and ascribed to these items, producing 'emotional objects' of significance and agency. Such objects can be harnessed to create, affirm, or express individual relationships, as, for example, in religious devotion and practice, or in the construction of cultural, communal, and national identities.

Journal articles

• Holloway S, 'Love, Custom & Consumption: Valentine’s Day in England c. 1660–1830'
  Cultural and Social History 17 (3) (2020) pp.295-314
  ISSN: 1478-0038 eISSN: 1478-0046
  Abstract

  This article represents the first dedicated study of Valentine’s Day in England over the long eighteenth century. It argues that the years from c. 1660 to 1830 were central to the refashioning of the celebration as a modern ritual. During this shift, older customs such as lotteries were superseded by new traditions such as the exchange of valentine cards, with the commercialisation of festivities fuelling a consequent boom in homemade cards. By charting how a folk tradition evolved with the rise of consumer society, the article illuminates how commercial culture can augment, challenge – and ultimately change – material practices of love.
  

  Website 
• Barclay K, Holloway S, 'Interrogating Romantic Love'
  Cultural and Social History 17 (3) (2019) pp.271-277
  ISSN: 1478-0038 eISSN: 1478-0046
  Website 
• Holloway S, Worsley L, '"Everybody took Notice of the Scene of the Drawing-room": Performing Emotions at the Early Georgian Court, 1714-60'
  Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 (3) (2017) pp.443-464
  ISSN: 1754-0194 eISSN: 1754-0208
  Abstract This article interrogates the court's reputation as ‘the residence of dullness’ to reveal a multivalent emotional space with a practised grammar of emotional concealment and display. The performance of emotions by the royal family and courtiers in the State Apartments acted as a powerful draw to court events, as the display of joy or cheer acquired national significance. Under such scrutiny the king and his courtiers routinely limited displays of grief or pain to more restricted spaces such as the closet. The article analyses the court as a unique micro-community in order to recreate the emotional character of London's palaces.Website 
• Dolan A, Holloway S, 'Emotional Textiles: An Introduction'
  Textile 14 (2) (2016) pp.152-159
  ISSN: 1475-9756 eISSN: 1751-8350
  Website 
• Holloway S, '"You know I am all on fire": writing the adulterous affair in England, c. 1740-1830''
  Historical Research 89 (244) (2016) pp.317-339
  ISSN: 0950-3471 eISSN: 1468-2281
  Abstract This article analyses rare surviving adulterous love letters alongside published epistles and trial reports to reveal the practical and emotional importance of letter-writing in conducting an affair in England c.1740–1830. While attitudes to adultery have received widespread scholarly attention, illicit letters remain largely overlooked. The article is the first to outline distinguishing features of adulterous letters, and the language of infidelity. It distinguishes missives from courtship letters as a secretive genre carefully shielded by writers. By scrutinizing the letters which sustained affairs, the article rediscovers the happiness, jealousy and desire of illicit love in the words of lovers themselves.Website 

Book chapters

• Holloway S, 'Love in Art and Material Culture' in Book edited by Barclay K and Holloway S (ed.), A Cultural History of Love in the Age of Enlightenment, Bloomsbury (2022)
  
• Holloway S, 'Kiss mee: Coins, Love and Matrimony' in Lloyd S (ed.), Tokens of Love, Loss and Disrespect, 1700-1850, Paul Holberton (2021)
  ISBN: 9781911300946
  
• Holloway S, 'Materializing Maternal Emotions: Birth, Celebration, and Renunciation in England, c.1688–1830' in Downes S, Holloway S, Randles S (ed.), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, Oxford University Press (2018)
  ISBN: 9780198802648
  
• Downes, S, Holloway S, Randles S, 'A Feeling for Things, Past and Present' in Downes S, Holloway S, Randles S (ed.), Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History, Oxford University Press (2018)
  ISBN: 9780198802648
  
• Holloway S, 'Textiles' in S Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, Routledge (2017)
  ISBN: 9781138925748 eISBN: 9781315441368
  Website 

Reviews

• Holloway S, review of Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Marriage and the British Army in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014), in Social History 40 (3) (2015) pp.398-400ISSN: 0307-1022
  Website 
• Holloway, S, Review of The First Georgians: Art and Monarchy 1714-1760, ed. Desmond Shawe-Taylor (Royal Collection, 2014), in The Economic History Review (2015) ISSN: 0013-0117
  Website 
• Holloway, S, Review of Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013), in Historical Research (2014) ISSN: 0950-3471 eISSN: 1468-2281
  

Membership of professional bodies

Sally is a convenor of the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and with Professor Sarah Lloyd and Dr Joseph Cozens co-organises the seminar programme. She is also an Affiliated Research Scholar of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.

Conferences

2023 'Food, Family, and Feeling: Edible Gifts and the Making of Marriage in Georgian England', Séminaire Franco-Britannique d'Histoire, Sorbonne Université, Paris.

2022 'The Foods of Love? Food Gifts, Courtship, and Emotions in Eighteenth-Century England', Graduate Seminar in History 1680-1850, University of Oxford

2021 'Feeling Foods: Courtship, Edible Gifts, and Emotions in Eighteenth-Century England', Keynote lecture at Emotion, Embodiment and the Everyday, c. 1500-1800, University of Cambridge

2021 '"Exquisitely wretched": Losing Love in Britain c. 1720-1850', Centre for the History of Emotions Summer Colloquium, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

2021 '"Believe me, there is such a thing as a broken heart!" Heartbreak, Emotions and Embodiment in Britain c. 1720-1850', Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender Annual Lecture, Royal Holloway University of London

2019 'Dead Love: Emotions, Embodiment and the Broken Heart in England, c. 1720-1850', biennial European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (EAHMH) conference, University of Birmingham

2019 'Teaching Histories of Gender and Emotions using Eighteenth-Century Material Culture', International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) International Congress on the Enlightenment, University of Edinburgh

2019 'Love in Practice: Studying the Emotional Eighteenth Century', Eighteenth Century Now: The Current State of British History, University College London

2019 'The Progress of Love: Courtship, Emotions & Material Culture in Georgian England', Keynote lecture at Constructions of Love and the Emotions of Intimacy, 1750-1850, University of Warwick

2018 'Love: Searching for Happiness in a "Civilised" Society', British Psychological Society 'Stories of Psychology' event on the History of Emotions, London

2018 'What is love, and how do we do it?', Do We Really Know Everything About Love?, St Hilda's College, Oxford

2018 'Love & Consumerism', Emotions across Disciplines Seminar Series (co-organised with Dr Alexandra Macht), Oxford Brookes University

2018 'Textiles & Emotions in History', Think Human Festival: Craft Activism, OVADA, Oxford

2017 'Valentine's Day & Gift Exchange in Eighteenth Century England', History of Art Research Forum, Oxford Brookes University

2017 ' Sensing Love: Courtship Gifts & the Production of Emotions in Georgian England', Embodiment & Emotion Artists Residency, Central Saint Martins & THE CUBE Gallery

2017 'Objects & Intimacy: Sensing Romantic Love in Georgian England', International Society for Cultural History (ISCH) Conference, Senses, Emotions & the Affective Turn: Recent Perspectives & New Challenges in Cultural History, Umeå University, Sweden

2017 'The Emotional Heart', Two Hearts: Dissection and Desire, Barts Pathology Museum, London

2016 'Courtship, Craft & Consumerism: Rediscovering Valentine’s Day in Eighteenth-Century England', Romantic Rituals conference, University of Adelaide

2016 'The Script for Love: Romantic Lexicon in Eighteenth-Century England', Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide

2016 'Shaping the Language of Romantic Love in Georgian England', Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Western Australia

2016 'Love in Letters: "no Mortal ever felt so strong, so soft a Passion"', The Distinction between Passion and Emotion - In Search of Case Studies, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Western Australia

2016 'Manufacturing Romance: The Economy of Courtship in Georgian England', Eighteenth-Century Research Seminar (ECRS), University of Edinburgh

2015 '"My heart is in my eyes": Sensory interaction with courtship gifts in Georgian England', Centre for the Study of the Body and Material Culture (CSBMC), Royal Holloway

2014 'Romantic Things', Things: Early Modern Material Cultures, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge

2014 'An interspected letter from one of your Naughty Women: Writing the Adulterous Affair in England 1730-1830', British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London

2012 'Textile Transformations: Women's Creation of Courtship & Birth Tokens 1680-1850', Transforming Objects Conference, Northumbria University

2012 'Courtship and Birth Tokens and the Materialization of Female Identity', Social History Society Conference

2011 'Romantic Love & the Eighteenth Century Self', Cambridge Conference on Early Modern Selves, Trinity College, Cambridge

2011 'Ribbons and Rings will work most strange feats: Eighteenth-Century Love Tokens & the Material Expression of Affection', Material Networks | Networked Materials Symposium, Bard Graduate Center, New York

2010 '"I opened, I read, & I was delighted": The Emotional Experience of Love Letters in the Long Eighteenth Century', Women's History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research

Further information

Media & Blog posts

'Five Dating Tips from the Georgian Era', The Conversation (2022)

'How to Write a Love Letter, Eighteenth-Century Style' (2022)

'Courtship in the Eighteenth Century', Social History Society Research Exchange blog (2019)

'The "famous amorous Knight": Sir John Dineley', Queen Mary History of the Emotions blog (2014)

'Friendship, Love and Letter-Writing', Queen Mary History of the Emotions blog (2014)

'What is the history of emotions?', Queen Mary History of the Emotions blog(2012)

'Love Objects', Queen Mary History of the Emotions blog (2011)

'Love Darts and Broken Hearts', Queen Mary History of the Emotions blog (2011)