Steering Committee Biographies

Maggie Andrews is a cultural historian of twentieth century Britain who has been teaching in higher, further, and adult education for over twenty years and is now Associate Head of the Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Worcester, where she also teaches women’s history.  An active member of Women’s History Network in the Midlands region, she has since 2008, has worked with the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) and Nottingham University to convene a series of seminars on Remembrance, Commemoration and Memorials in Contemporary Culture. These seminars, which were funded by the Royal British Legion, have led to a jointly edited book, Lest We Forget: Remembrance and Commemoration, and a special remembrance edition of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. She has also instigated annual WHN (Midlands region)  day conferences at the NMA on themes related to women and war. Maggie  has a particular interest in the relationship between domesticity and women and is the author of The Acceptable Face of Feminism (Lawrence and Wishart 1997) a feminist history of the Women’s Institute movement, and most recently of Domesticating the Airwaves: Broadcasting, Domesticity and Femininity (Continuum 2012).  She is co-editor of All the World and Her Husband (Cassell 2000) a collections of essays exploring women’s relationship with consumer culture in the twentieth century and currently working on an edited collection on the relationship between media and women’s history for Routledge and a book on women and World War Two evacuation for Bloomsbury Academic.

Jane Berney studied history at Manchester University, graduating in 1984. She then qualified as a chartered accountant, working for one of the big four accountancy firms as an auditor in the Banking Sector, mainly in London but also 3 years in the Netherlands and 2 years in Cambridge. While living in Hong Kong she completed an MA in Public and Comparative History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2005/6) which led to her starting a PhD at the University of Hong Kong (2007/8). This was interrupted when her family were moved back to the UK in 2008. In 2009 she restarted her PhD on a full time basis at the Open University and expects to complete it by October 2011. Her main interest has always been in social history and in particular how certain groups within society negotiate with authority. Her current research is on the implementation and working of the Contagious Diseases Ordinances (CDOs) in nineteenth century Hong Kong.

Lucy Bland taught women’s studies and then history, including running the MA in Modern British Women’s History, at London Metropolitan University/University of North London/Polytechnic of North London for many years. She recently took voluntary redundancy (they closed history!). She has written widely on the history of feminism, gender and sexuality, including Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (1995, 2nd edition, 2002), and two books with Laura Doan\; Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires and a sourcebook Sexology Uncensored: the Documents of Sexual Science (both 1998).  Her forthcoming book Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper is due out in 2013, published by Manchester University Press. She is routinely contacted for expert advice and/or participation in radio and TV programmes on topics in her research fields. For example, she recently acted as historical advisor and interviewer for a 3 part BBC2 series on mixed race people in twentieth century Britain entitled Mixed Britannia, which was broadcast, to great acclaim, in October last year. She was Principal Investigator for a Leverhulme funded project on ‘Identifying the Parameters of the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1970s and ‘80s’ in 2008-09 (working with the Women’s Library), and was on the editorial collective of Feminist Review 1997-2011. She was the main organiser of the WHN annual conference in September 2011. She is currently a visiting senior research fellow in history at King’s College London, but is looking for a permanent post. Her new project is a history of adoption in Britain, 1926 to the present.

Sue Bruley is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, teaching modern British and European History and specialising in women’s/gender history and oral history. Most important publications: The Women and Men of 1926, A Social and Gender History of the General Strike and Miners' Lockout in South Wales  2010, paperback 2011; Ed. Working for Victory, A Diary of Life in a Second World War Factory 2001 paperback 2011; Women in Britain Since 1900 1999 hardback and paperback; Leninism, Stalinism and the Women's Movement in Britain 1929-39 1980, to be reissued as Routledge 'key work' Sept. 2012. I am also an ex – WLM activist, co-author and contributor to No Turning Back, Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement  1975-80, 1981. I have a proven ability to speak to non academic audiences. For example the paperback edition of Working for Victory was given top rating as a teaching resource in the Times Higher Education Supplement (1.10.10).  I am also an ex – WLM activist, co-author and contributor to No Turning Back, Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement  1975-80 1981. I was convenor of the London Feminist History Group in the late 1970s and also  contribute to its successor the Institute of Historical Research ‘Women's History Seminar’. I am a member of the Oral History Society, the Social History Society and the International Oral History Association. I have been a fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 2007. My current research is on the women's liberation movement. I have a book proposal currently under review with I.B.Tauris; Women’s Liberation and Personal Life, the Politics of Experience in Britain 1968-82.  I have an article on women's liberation forthcoming in Women's History Review. 

Barbara Bush is an Emeritus Professor of History at Sheffield Hallam University and is a member of the editorial board of Women's History Review. She has lived in Canada and the Caribbean and published widely in the area of Caribbean slavery and more recently, race, gender and empire. Key publications include Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Oxford, 1990), ‘Gender and Empire: The Twentieth Century’ in ed. Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire, (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Imperialism and Postcolonialism (London, 2006). She has also had considerable experience as academic consultant for documentaries on race and slavery for Channel 4, BBC2 and Radio 4.

Meagan Butler is a third year PhD student at the University of Glasgow.  Her thesis on divorce and separation in nineteenth-century Scotland, c. 1830-1880, uses the make-up of marriage and divorce law in Scots civil law as well as contemporary discourses to compare the legal process with the reality of married life and marital breakdown.  Meagan also received her MSc Social History degree from the University of Glasgow writing her dissertation on domestic violence in nineteenth-century Scottish ballads.  Meagan has been involved with Historical Perspectives, a postgraduate history society that links Scottish universities through their postgraduate communities, since 2009.  Last year, 2011-2012, she was the Conference Convenor for the May 2012 annual conference, 'Fresh Perspectives on the Past', and has been elected to be the Chairperson for 2012-2013.  In her three years within Historical Perspectives Meagan has also contributed to the  seminar series, 'Work in Progress' 2010-2011, the maintenance of the Historical Perspectives website, and is currently an editor for the online journal eSharp's special issue, Historical Perspectives 2011 Conference 'Real and Imagined Communities'.  Meagan is also a member of the Hufton Reading Group, and part of the Centre for Gender History at the University of Glasgow.

Amanda Capern is a Lecturer in Early-Modern Women's History at Hull, University. In addition to undergraduate teaching, she coordinates the MA in Women’s History and contributes to the MA in Women, Gender and Literature and the European collaborative MA in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of The Historical Study of Women: England, 1500-1700 (Palgrave, 2008), and is currently working on a second book – Women, Land and Family in Early Modern England. Other recent publications include Women, Wealth and Power (2007), edited with Dr Judith Spicksley, which was a special issue of the Women’s History Review arising out of the Women’s History Network conference of 2004; several contributions to Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Palgrave, 2005); ‘In Search of the Golden Chersonese’, HerStoria, 2 (2009); and ‘New Perspectives on the English Reformation’, Journal of Religious History, 33:2 (2009). She is the series editor of Gender and History and is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Gender Studies.

Tanya Cheadle is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of Glasgow on her thesis entitled A Very Scottish Sexual Anarchy: Sexuality and Gender in Fin de Siècle Urban Scotland. This entails an exploration of the lives and cultural productions of a loose network of men and women living in Edinburgh and Glasgow between 1880 and 1900, who were intent on challenging contemporary sexual and gender norms during the unsettled transitional period between Victorianism and Modernism, at a locale removed from the perceived cultural epicenter of London. Prior to this, Tanya was a television director, working first for the BBC in London, before moving to Scotland as the filmmaker on Castaway 2000, living on the island of Taransay for a year. She subsequently settled in Scotland, making history documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4, including several films for a series called 'Days That Shook the World', which used dramatic reconstruction to retell key events in history. She therefore brings to the committee knowledge of working within the media, as well as experience of organizing national and international events to tight deadlines. She returned to academia as a mature student in 2006, focusing on women's and gender history during her masters and writing her dissertation on a scandal at a Glasgow music hall in 1875.

Gráinne Goodwin gained her PhD at the University of York in 2009 and has recently taken up the post of lecturer in European History at Leeds Metropolitan University. She has a keen interest in women’s history fostered by a MA in Women’s and Gender History and by her doctoral studies into the life and works of the memsahib and author Flora Annie Steel. These studies reflect her ongoing research interests in the interplay between race, empire and gender and, in particular, colonial constructions of femininity. She has contributed an essay on fictional depictions of rural life in colonial India to a forthcoming collection on representations of the Punjab, and is currently working on articles on British women’s activities during the Raj and fin-de-siècle literary history. She has experience of organising seminars and social events as social secretary to the University of Edinburgh History Society and as seminar convenor in 2007 for the Graduate Modern History Society at York. With an academic background in English and History and experience of teaching across a range of degrees in Leeds Metropolitan’s School of Cultural Studies, she also brings a strong interdisciplinary dimension to the pursuit of women’s history.

Anne Logan is a historian specialising in nineteenth and 20th century British social history and women’s history.  She completed her PhD thesis entitled ‘Making Women Magistrates: Feminism, Citizenship & Justice in England & Wales 1920-1950’ in 2002.  Her first book, Feminism and Criminal Justice: A Historical Perspective, an examination of the involvement of women in penal reform pressure groups and the relationships between these and the feminist movement in the 1920-1970 period was published by Palgrave in 2008. Her next research project is on the penal reformer, S. Margery Fry (1874-1958).  Since 2001 she has been employed as a lecturer at the University of Kent in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research where she teaches history modules on the BSc Social Sciences, BA Criminal Justice Studies and the MA Criminology.  In addition to WHN, she is a member of the Social History Society and the British Society of Criminology. She can contribute to the WHN steering committee some practical experience of inter-disciplinary working at a time when communication between historians and other (related) disciplines is becoming more crucial.  She is also strongly in favour of academic historians communicating with a wider public, for example local and family historians, and has given talks to local societies about another of my research interests: the women’s suffrage movement in West Kent.

Kate Murphy has been a member of WHN since its inception.  She recently left the BBC, after 24 years, where she spent most of her career as a producer on Radio Four's Woman's Hour.  She joined the programme in 1993, becoming Senior Producer in 1998.  During this time, she produced hundreds of interviews and discussions on women's history, in all its forms and covering most periods.  This included many special editions such as the programme that launched the Women's Library in January 2002, a live panel discussion on suffragettes/suffragists.  In 2011 she gained her PhD at Goldsmith:  "On an Equal Footing with Men?" Women and Work at the BBC, 1923-1939, was supervised by Professor Sally Alexander.  Kate has written widely on women's history, for example, she wrote the Women's History Time-Line, part of the Woman's Hour web-page, and in 1990, Woman's Press/ Livewire published Firsts: British Women Achievers (republished 2001).

Linsey Robb is a third year PhD student at the University of Strathclyde in receipt of an institutional Andersonian Scholarship. Her thesis focuses on cultural representations, of gender and gender relations in the workplace during the Second World War. Linsey is currently co-convenor of the Scottish Oral History Centre’s seminar series as well as co-founder and co-convenor of the ‘From the Sources to the Discourses’ postgraduate seminar series, run jointly between the University of Strathclyde and Glasgow Caledonian University, which has been funded by the Modern British History Network, the Economic History Society and the Wellcome funded Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. In addition, she is a current member of the Scotland-wide postgraduate group ‘Historical Perspectives’. A member since 2008, she was secretary in the academic year 2009-2010 and chairperson in the academic years 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. The group not only organises a ‘Work in Progress’ seminar series but also an annual conference, both of which attract speakers from all over Britain and beyond.

Laura Sandy is Lecturer in American History at Keele University and a scholar of North America and the Atlantic world, with particular interests in race, gender and slavery. Her most recent published work has focused on the wives and families of plantation overseers in colonial Virginia and South Carolina, and has drawn on her wider research on the overseer himself, a figure reduced to a crude caricature in much current historiography and popular culture. He and his family, and their relationships with both their planter-employers and the fractious un-free workforce they managed, are the subject of her first monograph, due to be published by South Carolina Press. She is also interested in comparative approaches to women’s history; studies of slavery; people trafficking as a historic phenomenon and the histories of imperialism and colonial societies. In January 2011 she organised and hosted a colloquium embracing these latter themes, "The Organiser and the Victim: Power Relationships in the Colonial World" and will be co-editing the publication of papers from this event in a special edition of Colonialism and Colonial History. She is committed to maintaining the link between the archive and the classroom and has thus an especial interest in pedagogy. As an active member of the North America History Teachers Network she organised and chaired their second annual workshop in March this year, a wide-ranging event that covered topics as diverse as podcasting; promoting graduate employability and trans-Atlantic perspectives on the undergraduate experience. She hopes, in the future, to  be able to play an active role in defending what is best in British higher education - excellent individual and small group support for students; the organic link between teaching and research- in an increasingly challenging environment and to promote the discipline of history, in all its myriad forms and sub-disciplines, as an intellectual endeavour as fit for the twenty-first century as it has been for the preceding twenty.

Jocelynne A. Scutt is a Barrister & Human Rights Lawyer, filmmaker and historian. Her SJD (Doctor of the Science of Jurisprudence), conferred by the University of Michigan, covered 'Substantive and Evidentiary Issues of Consent in Rape'. Her PhD, through the University of New South Wales, dealt with 'Wage Rage - The Struggle for Equal Pay & Pay Equity in Australia from the Late 19th Century through to 21st Century'. In addition to her substantial legal practice,mainly in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, she taught international human rights law and international public law at the University of New England and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales. After serving as a Judge and Judge of Appeal in Fiji, she completed an MA in Independent Film, Video & New Screen Media at the University of East London, and is presently Visiting Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.Jocelynne has wide experience in media and communications, runs an active FaceBook page with political content, websites for WWAFE and www.theburqahdebates.com/ and has made short films in Australia & the UK, including interviews and a DVD installation 'Covered'. In addition to her MA she has completed courses with AFTRS (Australian Film, Television and Radio School) and NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art).

Imaobong. D. Umoren is a first year DPhil history student conducting research on a group of African diasporic women activist-intellectuals including Amy Jacques Garvey, Una Marson, Paulette Nardal, Zora Neale Hurston and Eslanda Robeson. My research explores the connections between the women's transnational travel and thought regarding gender, imperialism and the African diaspora and how this changed between the mid 1920s to the early 1950s. My other research interests include twentieth century Black British history. Currently, i am one of the convenors of the Gender and History in the Americas seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.

Flora Wilson has joined the Steering committee as our Schools Liaison Officer. Flora has been teaching History in and around London comprehensives for five years. Before that, she did a stint at the Institute of Education Students’ Union, as President with responsibility for Academic Affairs. Her PGCE was at the IoE, after her first degree at Cambridge, mostly in medieval History. She is proud to have studied at Newnham. Unfortunately, she is less proud of her record at integrating women’s history into the curricula of the schools in which she has taught – which is why she is thrilled to be involved now in the WHN, and hopes to be able to change both her record, and that of many schools around the country. Watch this space!