Child marriage is often conceived of as embedded in the past, but there is little attention to its historical context. Rhian Keyse explores how this obscures the shifting dynamics and social meanings of such practices.
When does the call for ‘speaking out’ against sexual violence begin to silence victim-survivors? Through reflecting on the #MeToo moment, Allison McKibban argues mainstream Western movements against sexual violence are often insidiously…
Why, since Brexit, have working class people in Britain come to be thought of as not just white but also male? Laura Schwartz suggests to understand this, we must look at history.
A look at the lives of early women physicians in India reveals the impact of social reform in on health outcomes. Dr. Krishnabai Kelavkar, who transformed maternal and infant health in the state of Kolhapur, is such a trailblazing woman, as…
How should historians respond to acts of violence in the official archive? Catherine Phipps considers the life of Samia, an Algerian-French teenager, arguing that the epistemic attacks she faced highlight the urgency of historical work…
How did haircutting and haircare shape narratives of slavery, oppression, and belonging in the early modern Mediterranean? Stefan Hanß explores the intimate politics of hair.
If you were the president of a higher education institution, would you accept a substantial donation to endow a professorship on the condition that you also construct a tunnel between the professor's lodgings and student accommodation? This…
Historian Karen Harvey on the hidden symbolism of rabbits and women's bodies in The Favourite, and the real-life case of eighteenth-century mother Mary Toft.
How are decisions made in a union? Jack Saunders looks at workplace organisation in the NHS and the motor industry in the post-war period, and offers lessons for the present day.
Matt Cook, History Workshop Journal editor and professor of modern history at Birkbeck, on a moving collection of oral histories gathered from people living in the city of Brighton and Hove, who identify in various ways as trans.
‘What is the History of Sexuality?’ at Birkbeck brought together doctoral students from across the world, and was an opportunity for their innovative research to be critiqued and developed through discussion with scholars in the field.
British academic historians are now painfully familiar with the imperative to research our own impact. Our funding is to be dependent, in part, on the measurable impact of our researches in the domain outside the academy. For radical…
