Notes on contributors

David Bates is emeritus professor in medieval history at the University of East Anglia. He was director of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) from 2003 to 2008. He first visited the IHR as a postgraduate student in the late 1960s and has remained in regular contact ever since.

Kelly Boyd is senior fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. Author of Manliness and the British Story Paper: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (2003), she also edited the two-volume Encyclopaedia of Historians and Historical Writing (1999) and co-edited, with Rohan McWilliam, The Victorian Studies Reader (2007). She is reviews editor and a member of the editorial board of Cultural and Social History. She is a longtime member and co-convenor of the IHR’s Women’s History Seminar.

Rachel Bynoth is lecturer in design (historical and critical studies) at Bath Spa University. She is an historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social, political and cultural studies, specializing in emotions. She was co-convenor of the IHR’s History Lab Seminar for two years, until August 2022.

Penelope J. Corfield is emeritus professor of history at Royal Holloway, University of London, and research fellow at Newcastle University. She was president of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2008–12), and president of the International Society of the same name (2019–23). An enthusiast for research debates, she has long been active in London’s seminar culture, and has, at different times, helped to organize the IHR’s seminars in economic history, women’s history, and the ‘long’ eighteenth century, defined broadly to embrace big themes.

Trevor Dean is emeritus professor of medieval history at the University of Roehampton. His expertise lies in the history of crime and criminal justice in late medieval Italy. He co-convened the Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy Seminar between 1996 and 2019.

Tim Hitchcock is professor emeritus of in digital history at the University of Sussex. He works on eighteenth-century London and digital history. He has co-convened the British History in the Long Eighteenth Century Seminar since 1993, and also helped establish the Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method and the Digital History Seminar.

Claire Langhamer is director of the IHR and professor of modern history at the University of London. She is particularly interested in feeling, experience and ordinariness in twentieth-century Britain. She has published on children’s writing, love and courtship, happiness, domesticity, emotional politics, emotion in the workplace, and women’s leisure. She has a long-term commitment to using and developing the Mass Observation Archive and is a Mass Observation Trustee.

Kate Lowe is associate fellow of the Warburg Institute, University of London. She is an Italian Renaissance historian, and has worked on cardinals, nuns, conspiracies, links with Portugal, and sub-Saharan Africans in Renaissance Italy. She co-convened the Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy seminar at the IHR between 1996 and 2019.

David Manning is honorary fellow in history at the University of Leicester. His expertise pertains to the history of Christian thought and culture in Britain and the wider English-speaking world, c.1600–c.1800, and the history of historiography. He is an occasional member of the IHR’s Religious History of Britain 1500–1800 Seminar.

Rohan McWilliam is professor of modern history at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and a former president of the British Association for Victorian Studies. He is an historian of British popular politics and popular culture. He founded the IHR’s Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method in 1986 and ran it for its first year.

David Ormrod is emeritus professor of economic and cultural history at the University of Kent, research associate at the Centre for Financial History, Cambridge, and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He has written in the fields of early modern commercial and agrarian history and the history of art markets. He worked with museum curators and art historians while guest curator at the Museum of London and visiting fellow at the Institute of Historical Research.

Jason Peacey is professor of early modern British history at University College, London. His work focuses upon political culture, print and popular politics, in both domestic and wider European settings. He has been a regular attender of the Seventeenth Century British History seminar at the IHR since the early 1990s and has been one of its convenors since 2006.

Pamela Pilbeam is professor emeritus of French history at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has been a member of the IHR’s Modern French History Seminar since 1962, first as a PhD student to 1965, and as main convenor, 1974 to 2006. She held an IHR doctoral research fellowship (1964–5) and represented RHUL on the governing body of the IHR from the 1980s to 2006, serving on the IHR subcommittees which awarded postgraduate and research awards. Her past roles also include president of the Society for the Study of French History, Leverhulme emeritus fellow, Fulbright fellow, and founding editor of the Studies in Modern French History book series at Manchester University Press.

Alice Prochaska is a modern historian and archivist whose career has been spent mainly in administration. She worked as secretary and librarian at the IHR from 1984 to 1992, then subsequently as director of special collections at the British Library, university librarian at Yale University, and principal of Somerville College, Oxford. She has written on labour history in Britain, compiled guides to sources on US and Irish history, and these days is especially interested in the connections between identity and heritage. She also served on the government-appointed committee on the first National Curriculum in History (1989–90) and later joined two of the official Research Excellence Framework committees.

Ellen Smith is an early career researcher and currently teaching fellow in British social history at the University of Leicester. She is a historian of modern Britain and its empire, particularly colonial South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published on widowhood and commemoration in imperial contexts, and everyday life in India. She was coconvenor of the IHR’s History Lab Seminar between 2020 and 2022 and, at time of writing, was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Midlands4Cities-funded PhD student at the University of Leicester.

Sarah Stockwell is professor of the history of empire and decolonisation at King’s College, London. She has been a member of the Imperial and World History (formerly Imperial History) Seminar at the IHR since 1992, and a convenor of it for more than twenty years.

Natalie Thomlinson is associate professor of modern British cultural history at the University of Reading. She is an historian of feminism and gender in modern Britain, and her books include Race and Ethnicity in the Women’s Movement in England, 1968–93 (2016) and, with Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984–5 (2023). She is one of the convenors for the IHR’s Britain at Home and Abroad Seminar.

Ulrich Tiedau is professor of European history at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS) of University College London. Since 2006 he is also coordinating editor of Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies and since 2011 co-convenor of the IHR’s Low Countries History Seminar.

Kate Wilcox is library services manager at the Institute of Historical Research Library. She has worked at the IHR library since 2004.