Research Cluster in Gender History

Her work also explores the ways in which black women seized upon the opportunities that freedom gave them to challenge and reshape prevailing narratives of gender, race and sexuality. In particular, she analyses how women’s testimony addressed ideas of rape and consent, and how women used their voices during Reconstruction to redefine their past abusive relationships with white men. In this way, she explores the testimony that women gave as not only stories of abuse, but central facets of Reconstruction battles over social boundaries and relations.

Contact email: e.barnes@reading.ac.uk

The second decade of the twenty-first century began as a time of reckoning with waves of questioning racial and racist thought and practices sweeping across academic and popular discourse. The Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter movements have demonstrated that it is more important than ever to account for a past driven by the primacy of white lives. Both projects aim to contribute to the current debate by examining African and white lived experiences in the British and German empires in Africa, specifically in colonial Zimbabwe and Tanzania.

Heike has published on a range of themes that have contributed to gender history. These include the gendered experience of violence and suffering in rural Zimbabwe from the nineteenth through the twentieth century, the role of female political and spiritual authorities in precolonial and colonial Zimbabwe and Tanzania, gender and ethnicity in Zimbabwe and Tanzania during the colonial period, and imperial sexualized imaginations of African landscape in Southern Rhodesia. Her studies on German East Africa have included the role of African manliness and masculinity in the Maji Maji war (1905-1907), sexual violence, in particular male same sex rape, and German manliness.

She is currently a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project, Women in the miners' strike, 1984-5: Charting changing gender roles in working-class communities in post-1945. This project examines the lives of women in coalfield communities during the strike, the activism that some of them became involved in, and their interactions with more middle-class feminists who supported the strike.

Her previous research examined debates around race and ethnicity in feminism within England in the post 1968 era, and resulted in the monograph Race and ethnicity in the women’s movement in England, 1968-1993.

Contact email: n.thomlinson@reading.ac.uk

Image credit: Copyright Martin Shakeshaft, 1984. Image reproduced with permission.

More broadly she is interested in late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas of political identity including gender and a mix of working class politics and religion.

Jacqui's previous research was constructed around notions of working class respectability and the ‘dignity of the working man’ which resulted in the book The Labour Church: religion and politics in Britain 1890-1914. While the work is centred on masculinity and male leadership, there is a strong section on Christian Socialist women which forms the basis for continued gender research in this field. After spending several years working in heritage before returning to study, Jacqui remains interested in the development and accessibility archives and collections.

Jacqui was also the national curator for Astor 100 - Celebrating 100 years of women in parliament, a programme of public, community and academic events to coincide with the centenary of the first woman to sit in the House of Commons, Nancy Astor.

Contact information: e.j.turner@reading.ac.uk

Emily's earlier research looked at affective ties between men and women under bondage, but her recent work has concentrated on the specificities of enslaved women’s lives and their dual burden under slavery as reproducers and labourers. Part of this project involved working with a team of historians interested in enslaved women’s reproduction across the Atlantic world, funded by an AHRC international Network Grant: Mothering Slaves. The network also resulted in two journal special editions (Slavery & Abolition and the Women’s History Review).

Emily's own work on enslaved mothers highlights enforced wetnursing as the unique intersection of reproductive and work-based exploitation. Another strand of her research explores free women of colour in the antebellum South and the ways in which both poverty and increasingly restrictive legislation forced these people into slavery or quasi-slavery. 

Contact information: e.r.west@reading.ac.uk

Her wider research interests include new imperial history, cultural history, postcolonialism, and histories of science and medicine.

The above research image is a photograph of Sir Ronald Ross with his wife Rosa Bessie Bloxam, and his Indian laboratory assistants standing behind them, from London School of Tropical Medicine.

Contact: apurba.chatterjee@reading.ac.uk

Gender is a central theme in her current British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship book project, which explores the emotional experiences and memories of enslaved and formerly enslaved women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This project combines methods from slavery studies and emotional history to reveal how societal standards shaped enslaved women's emotional expression (as opposed to enslaved men’s), their varied emotional experiences of slavery and emancipation, and the complex long-term emotional impact of enslavement. Beth also has a forthcoming publication based on this theme, exploring anger in interviews with formerly enslaved women.

Contact information: b.wilson2@reading.ac.uk

I am interested in the changing medical treatments, from hormonal therapy to the advent of sex reassignment surgery and the influence of Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering Institute on British medical practice. 

I explore the work of British sexologists, particularly Havelock Ellis and John Symonds Addington, with regards to gender-crossing behaviours. I compare both the medical and cultural experiences for transmen and transwomen. I engage with debates surrounding terminology and how best to categorise gender fluidity in a period that predates modern terms. I also examine the extent to which a transgender subculture existed in Britain and the outlets for and modes of expressing gender variance before medical procedures were available.

Contact information: a.l.c.austin@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Through these oral histories, the research explores the dynamic, layered ways in which women shape and are shaped by conflict. It also traces patterns of gender-based violence against women and girls in Tigray to unpack the weaponization of sexual violence during the Tigray War (2020 – present).

Contact email: f.baldwin@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Image credit: artwork by Gabrielle Tesfaye.

Drawing on sources such as published medical texts, diaries, and doctors’ casebooks, my research investigate how contemporary gendered medical theories of the body applied to the older patient, and provides opportunities for testing entrenched ideas about gender norms of this period. For example, how undervalued older women really were in society, given the time and money spent on their treatment, and whether weeping – a culturally 'feminine' emotion gesture – was regarded with greater tolerance in 'ancient' men, as they 'abounded' with excess detrimental ‘humoral moisture’.

Contact email: amie.bolissian@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Image:Jan Lievens, Head of an old woman seen in profile, c.1629 RKD 61207, Wikimedia commons 

By stereotyping black women as hypersexual, enslavers forced them to procreate with multiple enslaved men, either through marriage or through rape. My research focuses on the methods employed by enslavers to force enslaved couples together, and the impact that this had on concepts of masculinity, parenthood, and marriage. I primarily use sources from formerly enslaved men and women, such as interviews and autobiographies, who witnessed or experienced incidents of forced reproduction. Through this, I highlight how forced reproduction was a prevalent, and often violent, form of sexual labour experienced by most enslaved people.

Contact information: a.djelid@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Her project combines the oral testimonies of African women who were part of the land reform movement, and archival material from international humanitarian organisations and government officials. These testimonies will also enable an examination of the instrumental roles of trade, politics and identity in land reform and how they affected the decolonisation process in Zimbabwe.

Contact information: shingirirai.hopkins@pgr.reading.ac.uk

In particular, I am interested in the ways in which Christian Science was received by various groups of female adherents, and how distinct parallels can be drawn between the methods employed by each group to establish their authority in various contexts. The objective of my thesis is to demonstrate a consistency in the feminist output of Christian science that has thus far been the topic of controversy in academic literature.

Contact email: melanie.khuddro@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Additionally, her research looks at women’s organisations and their influence on agricultural education, and how such knowledge can be used to identify gaps in current policies in regards to women’s access to farm ownership and labour.

Contact email: T.l.latherow@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Traditionally, political participation had been reserved to adult men. The introduction of colonial rule in 1890 in Zimbabwe, however, brought with it mission Christianity and opportunities to re-negotiate individual and group identities. Shepherd’s study applies a qualitative analysis by using a collective and individual biographical approach, through semi-structured and life history interviews of women. Social and personal memory is utilised as a methodological toolkit to engage with concepts of memory to re-capture women’s shared actions and political activities.

Contact information: s.mutswiri@pgr.reading.ac.uk

By comparing and contrasting major canonical works with sources produced ‘on the ground’ that more accurately reflected every-day practices and notions, this project aims to explore theoretical concepts that were commonly used in practice and to consider why some legislation might have been ignored or suppressed at times. Consequently, I hope that my research will help to advance the understanding of the gendered nature of medieval canonical legislation and its implications on the practice of law.

Image: Manuscript Leaf with Marriage Scene, from Decretals of Gregory IX, Wikimedia Commons, Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0 1.0 Universal

This thesis will examine the extent of enslaved women's exploitation to determine why women used violence as a strategy of resistance and secondly, by establishing the frequency and different modes of violence deployed by female slaves within North and South Carolina.

Contact email: e.f.shearer@pgr.reading.ac.uk

For this, I am looking at a variety of national newspapers and tabloids with a special emphasis on coverage on feminist topics such as marriage, motherhood, equal pay, sex, reproductive freedom, and the Women's Liberation Movement. As such, the project sits at the intersection of scholarship regarding the Women's Liberation Movement, changing gender roles in late twentieth century, the history of the press, and cultural studies.

Contact information: m.tessmann@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Luke’s research area covers the twilight years of the seventeenth century, and the early years of the eighteenth, and focuses upon the trials and tribulations of the privateer, the pirates' lawful counterparts. During this spectacular period of history, one can witness the often-unbelievable stories of some of the world's most notorious pirates, including Henry Avery, Samuel 'Black Sam' Bellamy, Edward 'Blackbeard' Thatch, and the only known women pirates of the Golden Age of Piracy- Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Contact information: l.walters@pgr.reading.ac.uk

It problematised the too often simplified narrative of the king arranging marriages of heiresses and argues that control of marital strategy remained a matter for negotiation throughout the thirteenth century.

Post-war shifts in women’s lives, such as increasing opportunities for work and education, were complemented by feminist activism from the 1970s onwards. However little historiography engages with how ‘ordinary’ people experienced these changes, how they regarded feminism, and how they negotiated gender in their everyday lives. I engage with the concepts of agency and ideological reproduction in relation to childhood and girlhood, and will be conducting oral history interviews with former school students in order to reveal an alternative narrative of the 1970s onwards, which centres on the experiences of teenage girls.

She is currently Lecturer in Modern African History at the University of Bristol.