Notes on contributors
Christina de Bellaigue is Associate Professor in History at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her research and publications focus on the history of education, childhood and social mobility in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and France. She co-edited a special issue of Cultural and Social History with Eve Worth and Helena Mills on ‘“Rags to riches”? New histories of social mobility in modern Britain’ (2019).
Laura Carter is Lecturer in British History at the Université de Paris and a member of the CNRS research unit LARCA. She has published articles on popular history, education and social change in twentieth-century Britain in the journals Cultural and Social History, History Workshop Journal and Twentieth Century British History. Her first book, Histories of Everyday Life: the Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979, was published by Oxford University Press in the Past & Present book series in 2021.
Benjamin Dabby is an independent historian whose monograph, Women as Public Moralists: From the Bluestockings to Virginia Woolf (2017), was published in the Royal Historical Society’s Studies in History series. His short biography of the Tudor lawyer Sir Roger Cholmeley was published in 2015 as Loyal to the Crown: the Extraordinary Life of Sir Roger Cholmeley. He is the author of articles and book reviews in the Historical Journal, Journal of Victorian Culture, Victoriographies and the British Association for Victorian Studies. He holds a PhD from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and he is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society.
Heidi Egginton is Curator of Political Collections at the National Library of Scotland, with responsibility for the archives of Scottish politicians and campaign groups, political parties and the labour movement, as well as artists’ manuscripts. She has published articles on women bibliophiles and interwar antiques collecting in the Journal of Victorian Culture and Twentieth Century British History. In 2016–17 she was a Special Supervisor in History at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she completed her PhD. From 2015 to 2019 she was an Archives Assistant at the Churchill Archives Centre.
Leslie Howsam, FRSC, is Emerita Distinguished University Professor at the University of Windsor (Canada). She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book and the author of Old Books and New Histories: an Orientation to Studies in Book & Print Culture. Her most recent article is ‘What the Victorian empire learned: a perspective on history, reading and print in nineteenth-century textbooks’ in Journal of Victorian Culture (2020).
Claire G. Jones is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests focus on the cultural and social history of science, from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, with special emphasis on femininity, masculinity, inclusion and representation. She has published widely in these areas and is currently co-editing The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Science, due to be published in 2021.
Helen McCarthy is Reader in Modern and Contemporary British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. She is a historian of modern Britain and the author of three books: The British People and the League of Nations (Manchester University Press, 2011); Women of the World: the Rise of the Female Diplomat (Bloomsbury, 2014); and Double Lives: a History of Working Motherhood (Bloomsbury, 2020). Between 2015 and 2020 she was Managing Editor of the journal Twentieth Century British History.
Susan Pedersen is Gouverneur Morris Professor of British History at Columbia University, where she teaches British and international history. Her most recent book is The Guardians: the League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is now writing a book about marriage and politics in the Balfour family. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books.
Ren Pepitone is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. Their research interests include the intersections of gender, cultural and urban history in modern Britain and its empire. They are currently revising their first monograph, Brotherhood of Barristers: Gender, Space, and the Legal Profession, 1840–1940.
Laura Quinton received her PhD in history from New York University in 2021. Her current research focuses on British dance and politics in the twentieth century. Her writing has appeared in the Historical Journal, Twentieth Century British History and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
Ellen Ross is Professor Emerita of History and Women’s Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her book Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (1993) and several journal articles deal with poverty, family and neighbourhood life before 1918. The privileged women whose philanthropy, curiosity or research brought them into London’s slums are the subjects of Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (University of California Press, 2007). She next turned to life among the deaconess-like Sisters of the People connected with the West London Mission, some of whom, like Emmeline Pethick and Mary Neal, later became suffrage activists. Her work in women’s and gender history is situated in the 1920s and 1930s, and focuses on women graduates’ search for vocations, including humanitarian aid.
James Southern is a Historical Advisor at the Home Office. Previously, he worked as a historian at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. His first book, Diplomatic Identity in Postwar Britain: the Deconstruction of the Foreign Office ‘Type’, 1945–1997, was published by Routledge in 2021.
Zoë Thomas is Associate Professor in Modern History at the University of Birmingham. Her first monograph, Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement, was published in 2020 by Manchester University Press. She has published on the history of suffrage, historical pageants, global feminisms, and women’s artistic, entrepreneurial and professional cultures in journals such as Past & Present, Women’s History Review and Twentieth Century British History. A firm believer in working collaboratively, she also co-edited Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics, and Enterprise with Miranda Garrett (Bloomsbury, 2018).