Lisa Berry-Waite
- Roles
- Author
- Researcher
Records Specialist – Modern Parliament
About
Dr Lisa Berry-Waite is the Modern Parliament Records Specialist at The National Archives, and works with Parliament’s Archive Collection from 1900 to the present day.
Lisa's research focuses on 20th century political and women’s history, with expertise in women MPs, women’s suffrage, elections, and the interwar period. Lisa is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Reading, an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the Women’s History Network. In 2024, she was listed as one of BBC History Extra’s 30 historians under 30.
Research activity
Lisa holds a PhD in History from the University of Exeter. Her thesis focused on the parliamentary election campaigns of women candidates from 1918 to 1931. She is currently completing her monograph titled, 'A Woman MP?: From Parliamentary Candidates to Westminster Representatives, 1918-1939' which will be published by Routledge. To celebrate the 1928 Equal Franchise centenary in 2028, she is co-editing and contributing to a special issue of Parliamentary History.
Lisa also enjoys sharing her research with public audiences via podcasts, talks, displays and online content. In August 2026, she curated a display about a scrapbook from Parliament’s Archive Collection which charts the parliamentary career of Norah Runge.
Before joining The National Archives, Lisa worked at the UK Parliament as a Programme Manager leading the planning for the 1928 Equal Franchise Act centenary in 2028, as well as in the Heritage Collections Team. She has held previous roles in various local museums and archives.
Publications
- ‘We are therefore asking you to provide us with more suitable facilities’: Women MPs and Parliamentary Space, 1945-1997’, in Ruth Davidson, Lyndsey Jenkins, Farah Khanum Hussain and Anna Muggeridge, (eds) Women, Politics and Power, 1945-1997 (University of Oxford, 2026).
- ‘It’s the party that counts’? The Rise of Labour and the Image of the Woman Politician at English Elections, c.1929-1950’, with David Thackeray, Gender & History, 37 (2025), pp. 684-699.
- ‘A rancour and a passion would be introduced into politics’: Perceptions of the Woman MP in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain’, Parliamentary History, 42 (2023), pp. 148-167.
- ‘I stuck to Plymouth, Plymouth stuck to me’: Nancy Astor, Electioneering and Female Parliamentary Candidacy’, Open Library of Humanities, 6 (2020), pp. 1-41.
- ‘The ‘Woman’s Point of View’: Women Parliamentary Candidates, 1918-1919’, in David Thackeray and Richard Toye, (eds) Electoral Pledges in Britain since 1918: The Politics of Promises (Cham, 2020), pp. 47-69.