About the authors

PENELOPE J. CORFIELD is Professor Emeritus of History at Royal Holloway, University of London; Visiting Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne; Member of the Academia Europaea/Academy of Europe; and President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2019–). She has lectured in many countries around the world and welcomes the growth of an ‘international sphere’ of shared scholarship, intersecting with the already interlocking ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres. Her publications address British social, cultural and urban history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as theories of time and history. Penelope Corfield studied at the universities of Oxford and London (LSE); she has enjoyed supervising many MA and doctoral students; and she continues to learn from family, friends, colleagues, students and correspondents worldwide.

TIM HITCHCOCK is Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex and, until 2021, was Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab. He has published a dozen books on the histories of poverty, sexuality, gender and crime. With Robert Shoemaker, and others, he has also been responsible for creating a series of web resources, including the Old Bailey Online, London Lives and Locating London’s Past, designed to give free public access to the records of the British past and lay the foundation for a ‘new history from below’. Following degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University, Hitchcock was unemployed for four years before securing a position as a Lecturer in Humanities Computing and Eighteenth-Century Economic History at the Polytechnic of North London in 1989. He moved to the University of Hertfordshire in 1997 and to the University of Sussex in 2013.

CORFIELD and HITCHCOCK are the longest-serving convenors of the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century seminar at University of London’s Institute of Historical Research. Between them, they have seventy years (ouch!) of experience watching colleagues and friends navigate an ever-changing professional landscape. This Guide is a shared reflection on that experience.