Professor Carolyn Steedman

Contact Information:

Room: H326, Humanities Building
Phone: 02476 523624
Email: c.k.steedman@warwick.ac.uk 

Academic Profile
  • BA Sussex
  • MLitt, PhD Cambridge
Undergraduate Modules Taught
Selected Publications
  • Policing the Victorian Community (1984)
  • Landscape for a Good Woman (1986)
  • The Radical Soldier's Tale: John Pearman, 1819-1908 (1988)
  • Margaret McMillan. Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain (1990)
  • Strange Dislocations. Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (1995)
  • Dust (2001)
  • Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (2007)
  • Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (2009)
Research

Having spent most of my life - or rather, research career - in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I made the bold and brave decision to move to the eighteenth. (What I told people at the time, was that I was tired of the nineteenth-century: horrible clothes, hideous furniture; no jokes.) I have been working on service, servitude and servants, from about 1750 to 1820. Domestic servants made up one of the largest occupation groups in the society, and yet for a long time, were almost entirely neglected by social and labour historians. In 2007 I came to the end of a three-year, ESRC-funded research project, on service, society and the state in the English eighteenth century. The book of the project - Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England - will be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2009. [http://www.regard.ac.uk for further information about the project].

I see my work on servants as closely connected to my past interests: the organisation and policing of societies; the neglect of embarrassing categories of people by twentieth-century social history (policemen and soldiers); the variety of ways in which people have constructed self-identity in the past. I have started work on my next project, about the law and ordinary people - how legal categories and legal procedure shaped self-perceptions and self-understanding in the past.

Recent Research Topics Supervised (PhD, MA)

Since 1984 I have seen about thirty PhD theses through to completion. Among them are:

  • Hilary Minns, `A Study of Irish Childhood in Nineteenth Century Derby' (1995)
  • Louise Jackson, `Child Sexual Abuse and the Law: London 1870-1914' (1997) [as external supervisor at the Roehampton Institute]
  • Denis Fowler, `Social Distinction and the Written Word: Two Provincial Case Studies, Warwick and Draguignan 1780-1820' (1998)
  • Ruth Livesey, `Women, Class and Social Action in Late-Victorian and Edwardian London' (1999)
  • Duncan Hall, `A Pleasant Change from Politics. Music in the Labour Movement between the Wars' (2000) [with Professor Tony Mason]
  • Christopher Brader, `Female Munitions Workers in Gretna during the First World War' (2001) [with Professor Tony Mason]
  • Antje Lindenmeyer, `Autobiography as a Myth of Origin' (2001)
  • Paul Long, `The Aesthetics of Class in Post War Britain' (2001)
  • Seth Denbo, `Speaking Familiarly. Incest Narratives in the Eighteenth Century' (2001)
  • Dr Potithi Hantzaroula (European University Institute, Florence), `The Making of Subordination: Domestic Servants in Greece, 1920-1945'. (2003)
  • Matthew Adam, `History Writing in the Eighteenth Century' (2003)
  • Jonathan Jones, 'Orphans. Childhood and Alienation in Rousseau, Shelley and Wordsworth' (2003)
  • Elinor Harper, `Marriage, Men, Love and Divorce in post-War Britain' (2004)
  • Sasha Handley, `Visions of an Unseen World. Ghost Belief in the Long Eighteenth Century' (2005)
  • Fuziah Shafie, `The Development of Child Welfare Services in Post-colonial Malaya' (2007)
  • Zillah Scott, `The Inquiring Sort. Knowledge and Learning in Eighteenth-century Birmingham' (2007)
  • Nicola Wilson, `Space in the Working-class Novel' (2007)

Some of the work I am currently supervising is on:

  • The Indian Workers' Association in post-Second World War Coventry
  • Elite adultery in the English eighteenth century

Professor Carolyn Steedman