Dr Zoe Alker

I am a digital historian of crime, justice, and punishment in Britain from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. My research has taken advantage of the opportunities opened up by digitisation and explored youth justice, custodial death, interpersonal violence, and femicide. I am currently writing a monograph on violence against women and girls in Victorian England, and I am also interested in what criminal records, alongside hospital and osteoarchaeological evidence, can reveal about bodies — from convict tattoos to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the body.

With colleagues, I have co-created a series of freely accessible digital archives that open up these histories to the public. These include The Digital Panopticon, which traced the lives of over 90,000 convicts sentenced to transportation or imprisonment from 1790; Convict Tattoos, which analysed more than 75,000 convict tattoos; and Skin and Bone, which recorded the injuries of over 40,000 Londoners between 1760 and 1901. I use these resources in my teaching on the History BA and Digital Humanities MA, where I encourage students to develop digital skills alongside traditional historical methods. I believe History degrees should prepare students to work in a world of data, and those competencies need to be re-inserted back into degrees, while using the same techniques to write every more powerful histories.

Research Interests

• Digital methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and data visualisation
• Digital archives and public engagement

Any aspect relating to crime, justice, and punishment in Britain or the historical body (1750–1950)

Dr Michael Brown

I am a cultural historian of modern Britain (roughly 1750-1914), interested in the fields of medicine and surgery, gender, the body, emotions, and war. My most recent research has explored the emotions of nineteenth-century British surgery, and demonstrates the vital, if changing, role that feelings played in shaping surgical identities, and in structuring relations between surgeons and their patients. This research has been published in a number of journal articles and in my latest book, Emotions and Surgery in Britain, 1793-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 2022). I am currently developing two research projects with Professor Joanne Begiato of Oxford Brookes University. The first of these considers the embodied and emotional history of the hand in Victorian Britain, while the other explores the material and emotional history of popular militarism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I am interested in supervising PhD students working on the topics of medicine, surgery, war, gender, bodies, and emotions from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Dr Christopher Donaldson

I contribute to the MA module 'Critical Heritage Studies' and co-supervise the 'Outreach, Heritage and Public History Placement' and 'School Placements' MA modules. My research is primarily concerned with the cultural history of landscape, with an emphasis on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have a particular interest in print history as well. My current research projects include Envisaging Landscapes and Naming Places: The Lake District before the Map (2021–2022), which is funded by the British Academy. In addition, I co-edit the Digital Forum for the Journal of Victorian Culture and edit The Ruskin Review.

Dr Baihui Duan

Baihui is an environmental historian of early modern East Asia. Her academic interests encompass the history of war, environment, climate, animals, disease, medicine, and governance in East Asia, roughly after the Imjin War (also known as the Great East Asian War of 1592-1598). Combining approaches from historical and geospatial analysis, she examines how nature and infectious diseases shaped migration, disaster relief, medical care, and governance in early modern Korea. She considers how the impact of epidemics spread beyond Korea’s borders to affect East Asian military strategy, commerce, diplomacy, and the circulation of medical knowledge, shedding light on interlinked histories of infectious diseases and environmental crises in the region. Through a comparison with the European history of public health, her project also contributes to the neglected field of epidemic management in early modern East Asia, opening up questions of power and its political meaning in global discourses of health. She is currently completing her book project, Relieving the People: Epidemic Management and Confucian Statecraft in Post-Imjin Korea.

Supervisory interests: I welcome projects in environmental history and East Asian history. I am particularly interested in supervising research on epidemics, disaster relief, governance, and the roles of climate, animals, and disease in shaping early modern societies. I also encourage comparative and interdisciplinary approaches, including global histories of public health, environmental crises, and the circulation of knowledge.

Dr Mark Hurst

My research focuses on campaigns conducted by human rights organisations during the Cold War, and on activism more broadly in contemporary history. My current research focuses on the history of Amnesty International, an organisation that has become synonymous with human rights concerns in the twentieth century. Despite this position, the influence of Amnesty International on the wider political process has been relatively understudied, something my research is aiming to address. I am particularly interested in how organisations such as Amnesty International functioned during the Cold War, when human rights issues were often at the forefront of international relations. Alongside this, I am interested more broadly in the history of human rights, dissent, and activism.

Professor Ian Gregory

I convene the MA Digital Humanities and supervise the module 'Digital Texts in the Humanities'.

I work in Digital Humanities and am particularly interested in using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with texts as well as the more traditional quantitative sources. I have used these approaches to study a range of topics from historical demography to Lake District literature. I am also co-director of Lancaster's Digital Humanities Hub, which draws together the university’s expertise in spatial humanities and corpus linguistics.

My particular interests include:

• The use of conventional Historical GIS techniques to study long-term change in Britain and Ireland in particular through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Using GIS to explore textual sources, especially large corpora, through the combined use of geo-parsing, spatial analysis and corpus linguistics techniques
• Developing an understanding of what GIS has to offer to the humanities and developing the use of these technologies in disciplines including history and literary studies
• Using digital technologies across the humanities and social sciences to gain a better understanding of the past.

This research has been the subject of a number of major projects, including the European Research Council funded Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places and the Leverhulme Trust funded Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities. For much more on my research see my web profile.

Dr Thomas Mills

I supervise the MA module 'A Special Relationship? The USA and Great Britain from World War II to the War on Terror'. My research lies in the field of international relations in the twentieth century, with particular interests in US foreign policy towards Latin America and diplomatic relations between the US and Great Britain. My early work explored Anglo-American relations in South America during the Second World War in the broader context of the post-war economic diplomacy undertaken by the wartime allies. My current research projects include a collaborative project exploring Anglo-American relations in Latin America throughout the 20th century; an exploration of the role of British and American business groups in economic diplomacy; and a project exploring Britain's emerging role in Latin America at the turn of the 21st century.

Professor Corinna Peniston-Bird

I am a regular contributor to the MA, and convene the MA Module 'Creative Voices: History and Fiction'. I have co-edited with Sarah Barber two edited collections on genre methodologies emerging from the MA module 'Beyond the Text'. My research focuses on femininities and masculinities at war, spatial and genre methodologies. My work on oral testimonies is centred on the relationship between memories and cultural representations. I am currently working on gendered commemoration, with a particular focus on British war memorials.

Professor Deborah Sutton

I co-convene the MA module 'Critical Heritage Studies'. My research work explores the extraordinary capacity of digital technologies to rethink the resonances and meanings of the past in the present. I co-created a dedicated software platform, safarnama, that allows complex heritage to be mapped out across Indian urban space and explored using a mobile phone. I have recently begun an AHRC-funded project that will use a digitised corpus of texts and cartographic materials to explore water scarcity in Coimbatore in South India. This project is a collaboration with the National Library of Scotland and it aims to create both trusted data relating to water scarcity and innovative visualisations relating to local strategies of water management.

Dr James Taylor

My work explores the cultural, political, and legal dimensions of economic change in Britain since the 1700s. I have published on subjects ranging from the rise of the corporation, the early history of corporate governance, and the regulation and punishment of commercial fraud, to the history of the financial press and literary representations of commerce. My latest research explores the history of advertising in Britain in the early twentieth century.

Dr Stephanie Wright

I am a historian of modern Spain, with broader interests in the histories of disability, psychiatry, gender and sexuality. I am particularly interested in the long-term legacies of armed conflict, and my first research project explored the experiences of disabled war veterans of the Spanish Civil War from the perspective of those maimed while fighting on the victorious side of Francisco Franco. As part of this research, I have also written about Moroccan disabled veterans of the Civil War, as well as relationships which developed between Moroccan soldiers and Spanish women during the conflict. My current research explores sexual violence under the Francoist regime, with a particular emphasis on the role of forensic doctors and psychiatrists within court cases linked to sexual crimes.

Professor Marco Wyss

I supervise the module ‘The Cold War in the Third World’. My research focuses predominantly on the international history of the Cold War. While the initial focus was on the role of neutrality and Britain in the East-West struggle, I am currently working on the Cold War in the so-called Third World, specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa and in relation to Britain's and France's postcolonial security roles in this region. Meanwhile, I have also carried out research on peacekeeping in Africa, and the transformation of European armed forces since the end of the Cold War. Prior to moving into and beyond the Cold War, I carried out research on volunteers in the Waffen-SS.