Our current students

Charlotte Clare

PhD title

The Re-Naturalisation of ‘British’ Women, 1915-1923

Funded by

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

University

Keele University

Supervisors

Dr Rachel Bright (Keele University), Dr Alex Nobajas (Keele University), Roger Kershaw (The National Archives), Vicky Iglikowski-Broad (The National Archives) and Prof. Alannah Tomkins (Keele University)

Between 1870 and 1948, Britain’s naturalisation laws ‘denaturalised’ British women who married foreigners. Denaturalisation was literally the removal of British nationality. From 1 January 1915, ‘re-admission’ became open to denaturalised widows resident in Britain. This project uses the available records newly opened (2,420 applications), allowing the student to place the specific negotiation between applicant and administrator, and individual life stories, alongside much larger macro-histories of Britishness, citizenship, gender, and migration during and after the First World War. This will be the first opportunity to understand who these women were, why they applied, what being British meant to them, in their own words.

Kiera Fitzgerald

PhD title

Literary Heritage and the Public Archives: The Diverse Women of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, F Section

Funded by

DTP CDA (Techne)

University

University of Roehampton

Supervisors

Dr Ian Kinane and Professor Ian Haywood (University of Roehampton), Mark Dunton and Dr Katherine Howells (The National Archives)

This research aims to shed new light on the complex ways in which the efficacy and agency of Britain’s female Special Operations Executive F Section agents are constructed in history, public archives, and post-war literature including fiction, memoirs, and biographies. This cross-sectional approach to female operatives will allow for a new understanding of the ways in which femininity was perceived as an asset for undercover work during the Second World War and will offer a re-assessment of gender within the field of Intelligence studies. The project will also explore how perceptions of femininity interacted with other forms of personal identity (including class, ethnicity, disability, and ethno-religiosity) by examining four female agents recruited and deployed by F Section as documented in The National Archives.

Jessica Gregory

PhD title

Sex, Secrecy and Obscene Literature, 1857-1959 (Preliminary title)

Funded by

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

University

University of Kent

Supervisors

Dr Claire Jones (University of Kent), Professor Julie Anderson (University of Kent), Victoria Iglikowski-Broad (The National Archives) and Mark Dunton (The National Archives)

This project will examine print that was suppressed and outlawed under Britain’s 19th and 20th century censorship laws. It examines the intricacies of policing, prosecution and control that the state employed against print deemed too sexually explicit and/or ‘immoral’.

Jessica’s primary research draws on extensive governmental records to draw out the censorship priorities of the state and the response of illicit printmakers. Through a detailed examination of existing censorship records, she aims to provide greater insight into the everyday application of obscenity laws in the public sphere, examining targets of suppression beyond the cases of infamous novels subjected to obscenity charges. This research therefore examines items of mass production, often ephemeral and low-cost productions whose sexual content was deemed offensive, indecent and corrupting. Jessica’s research considers the materiality of such productions, their production, dissemination, and their reception.

Through a thorough investigation of the networks of illicit print production, the research will examine how sexual knowledge was articulated and consumed under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 and how, despite oppressive state oversight and action, such knowledge may have influenced and changed common understandings of sex and sexuality.

Research projects

The history of ‘indecent advertisements’ in public toilets

Collaborative doctoral student Jessica Gregory shares her research using records held at The National Archives.

The collection

Researching hospital-related records

Tracing hundreds of years, PhD student Jessica Gregory outlines some of the best ways to research hospital-related records at The National Archives.

Lauren Johnson

PhD title

Refugees, Religion and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

Funded by

Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

University

Manchester Metropolitan University

Supervisors

Professor Catherine Fletcher (Manchester Metropolitan University), Ruth Selman (The National Archives), Ada Mascio (The National Archives), Dr Rosamund Oates (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Using previously little-explored documents within the National Archives (PRO 31/9-10) this project will explore the relationship between English Catholic refugees in Europe and the Roman authorities with whom they interacted during the century after Henry VIII’s break from Rome. Filling a gap in the existing literature of English religious exile experience and European diplomatic history, it will consider issues of agency in exile and diplomacy both official and informal. It will question the notion that Roman authorities welcomed (or even trusted) their English co-religionists on the Continent, and explore how English refugees reconciled their conflicting national and religious identities, as well as their transnational family networks.

Laura-Ioana Luca

PhD title

e-Government for All? The role of technology relating to the processes and mediation of diverse citizen-state interaction

Funded by

AHRC, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

University

University College London (UCL)

Supervisors

Professor Jon Agar (UCL), Dr Elizabeth Lomas (UCL), Dr Jenny Bunn (The National Archives), Balint Csollei (The National Archives)

Technological changes such as a rise in personal computing and the development of the internet influenced the way our society operates. In the late 1990s as the New Labour government came into power in the UK, the party pledged to embrace new technologies and ‘modernise government’. Many of the subsequent policies and initiatives aimed to connect citizens to government in new ways, and rebalance power relations between the two.

This research project explores how technological changes of the time enabled or drove these plans and activities, and how these were experienced by citizens. It will focus on, amongst other things, openness and transparency in government and if/how these related to the e-Government agenda, the impacts on information systems, and the consequences of these changes on experiences of citizen-state interaction. Outcomes of this project could help to inform future developments in e-Government, particularly as we move into a new direction with increased use of artificial intelligence, ensuring fair and inclusive ways of governing.

Christina Peake

PhD title

Matters of Extraction: Atlantic lives and ecologies

Funded by

AHRC, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

University

University of Westminster

Supervisors

Kevin Searle and Rachael Minott (The National Archives) and Professor Roshini Kempadoo and Dr Uriel Orlow (University of Westminster)

Christina seeks to contribute to the formation of new ecological assemblages through creative production, emerging methodologies, colonial collections, eco-sculptural based solutions, community engagement and education within an archipelago of works within her practice, creating new territories of learning and engagement with each project and immersion within the commission framework itself. Christina describes this as a long term, complex creation of eco-cultural ideation and production, maroon collectivity and kinship, a creation of speculative futures imagining a thriving wild of multispecies, nature+ worlds.

Logan Rivers

PhD title

Writing Technologies in Transition

Funded by

AHRC OOC DTP Collaborative Doctoral Award

University of Westminster

University of Cambridge

Supervisors

Professor Orietta Da Rold (University of Cambridge), Dr Suzanne Paul (Cambridge University Library), Dr Euan Roger (The National Archives) and Dr Paul Dryburgh (The National Archives)

By the end of the Middle Ages, paper displaced animal skin – parchment – as the material most often used to make books. But these two technologies had a long co-existence: in England, paper was in use across the 14th and 15th centuries, primarily for legal and administrative documents, while parchment continued to be the standard writing surface in literary and liturgical books. Paper documents of this kind – and their possible influence on the material form and features of poetic manuscripts – have been little studied by literary scholars. This project will investigate TNA KB145, an archive containing records of inferior regional courts sent to the King’s Bench in Westminster on review. By bringing these documents into conversation with books of Middle English poetry, I hope to better explain the adoption of paper in England and uncover the artistic potentialities this new material offered to poets, scribes, and bookmakers.

Adefolatomiwa Toye

PhD title

Development and National Identity: Tropical Modernism in Post-Independence Nigerian Universities

Funded by

AHRC, Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

University

University of Liverpool

Supervisors

Prof. Iain Jackson (University of Liverpool), Dr Patrick Zamarian (University of Liverpool), Dr Juliette Desplat (The National Archives) and Dr Daniel Gilfoyle (The National Archives)

Adefolatomiwa's research will explore the roles played by Nigerians in redefining tropical modernist architecture in Nigeria during the period of decolonization in West Africa. It will focus on the architects and architecture of higher education projects created during and after the country’s independence in 1960.

Using The National Archives’ Colonial Office files and other archival sources, Adefolatomiwa will investigate the ways architecture was used as a medium to foster a new unifying national identity and development in the new nation.