Ruth Mather

My PhD project, beginning in September 2012 and funded by a generous Queen Mary President’s Scholarship for the Study of Space, Time and Home, focuses on the links between popular politics and the home in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This project has grown from a wider interest in the intersections between the personal and the political in the long eighteenth century, as well as from an interest in material culture, especially that of a personal but expressive nature, such as clothing or household goods. Using literary and archaeological sources as well as more traditional historical methods, I hope to discover not only the uses of the ideal of home in political rhetoric, but the ways in the home as a physical space was used by ordinary men and women for the formation and expression of political ideas.

Prior to my acceptance of a place at QMUL, I began my research at the University of York in October 2011, supervised by Dr Catriona Kennedy and assisted by a departmental fee-waiver teaching scholarship. Consequently, I ran two discussion groups as part of the department’s Making Histories module, gaining valuable experience of teaching at undergraduate level. I remain interested in creative teaching strategies and hope to continue to develop skills in this area as my career progresses.

Before embarking on my PhD, I completed an AHRC-funded Masters degree at the University of York, for which I obtained a distinction. My MA thesis examines interactions between women and military forces during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, with particular focus on the Yorkshire and East Lancashire regions. It encompasses issues of love and lust, charity work and female patriotism, commerce and culture and politics and protest, and examines how female experiences of militarised culture could impact upon British nationalism in a period in which it has been argued that war was "forging the nation".

My undergraduate dissertation, completed at the University of Cumbria in 2009, examined the Lancashire response to the Queen Caroline affair in 1820-21. This study found that past radical struggles had a considerable influence on the modes and sites of protest against the Queen's treatment and celebrations for her acquittal. This piece of work was awarded the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire prize for best undergraduate dissertation on a local theme, and is currently being reworked for potential publication in the Society journal.

Alongside my formal academic pursuits, I am interested in making history accessible to the general public. I look forward to the opportunities presented by the links between the Centre for Studies of Home and the Geffrye Museum, having previously enjoyed acting as a research intern at Fairfax House, York, researching and writing exhibition panels on military uniform, masculine fashions and the changing female silhouette for an exhibition on 'Revolutionary Fashion, 1790-1820. I also work as a research assistant on Professor Robert Poole's Peterloo Witness Project, which aims to create an online resource featuring a fully searchable database of all witness testimonies relating to the Peterloo massacre. In the most recent phase of this project, I have been involved in meeting and training volunteers who will assist in the transcription of eyewitness accounts, and thus will themselves become witnesses to an important historical event.

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