I completed my AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2015, with Professor Martial Staub, having previously studied there for my MA in Historical Research and my BA, where I focused on late medieval cultural and religious history.
My thesis explored continuities and changes to communities of English nuns before and after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in sixteenth-century England, looking at how their communities were constructed with and without institutional walls, in their home country and in exile.
My current research explores the role that emotions have in forming communities of European nuns, the exiled experience of nuns in England in the 1580s, and religious communities and their material and visual cultures, particularly in sixteenth-century Yorkshire.
I have taught at the University of Sheffield, University of Birmingham, University of Loughborough, and with the Worker’s Educational Association from 2014, before joining York St John University as a Lecturer in August 2018.
I currently teach on the Researching and Presenting the Past and Empires first-year undergraduate modules and am part of the lecturing team on the Making of Britain course. I co-convene the Research Skills MA module.
My research interests are primarily focused in religious history, and in particular female spirituality, late medieval and early modern religious practice and expression, and the women religious' experiences of the Dissolution and Reformation. Material and visual culture, emotions, gender, exile and migrancy, and periodisation of the late medieval and early modern period, also feature heavily in my work.
I am also interested in researching pedagogy, teaching practices and the student experience in the Humanities in Higher Education, particularly communities of practice, transitions from further to higher education, innovation in assessment, casualisation, and students as researchers.
I am interested in supervising students interested in aspects of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century religious, cultural and gendered history.
- Member of the Royal Historical Society
- Holland Library Fellow at the University of Durham (awarded July 2018, to be undertaken Summer 2019)
- Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (July 2018)
- Honorary Research Fellow, University of Sheffield (July 2018)
- Nominated for Outstanding Teaching Award at the Annual Academic Awards, University of Sheffield (April 2018)
- Winner of the Bramley Award, Yorkshire History Prize, Yorkshire Society (December 2017)
- Arts Enterprise Fellow – Researcher into Medieval South Yorkshire Churches (August, 2017)
- Arts Enterprise Fellow – Researcher into the Tinsley Court Rolls (August, 2016)
- Prof. David Luscombe Award for Medieval History (June 2011)
