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Overview

Dr Barbara Crosbie

Associate Professor (Early Modern British History)


Affiliations
Affiliation
Associate Professor (Early Modern British History) in the Department of History
Member of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Biography

Barbara specialises in British social and cultural history, with a particular interest in age relations and how experiences of age were enmeshed with perceptions of gender, rank, and place. Her first monograph adopted a macro perspective on generational change in later eighteenth-century England, exploring how age relations influenced attitudes towards concepts of authenticity, nationhood, patriarchy, domesticity, and progress. She is currently working on a complementary project that adopts a micro perspective on the same period, with the working title Age and Masculinity: At Home with Ralph Jackson 1749-1791. This book traces the experiences of one man as he navigates the various stages of the life course, presenting a captivating, and in the end rather melancholy, story of a relatively well-to-do entrepreneur who spent his adult life striving to construct an ideal home as the ultimate performance of his masculine identity.

Her future research plans are focused on youth culture and the concept of ‘youthquakes’, and will investigate the part age relations played in the construction of identities in the British Empire c.1760-1820, with specific reference to gender, class, race, nationhood, and locality. 

Barbara is a convenor of the Social History Society Life Cycle Strand.

Research interests

  • Age relations, life cycle, youth transition
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Household and family
  • Print culture, education, geo-social relations, popular politics

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Edited book

Journal Article

Supervision students