Staff profile

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.

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

Authored book

• Crosbie, B. (2020). Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England. Boydell & Brewer

Chapter in book

• Crosbie, B. Anne Fisher (1719-1778): Not Simply a Printer’s Wife. In The People of Print: Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge University Press
• Crosbie, B. (2024). The Rising Generation and the Fogram: Locating Adulthood in Eighteenth-Century England. In M. Cannon, & L. Tisdall (Eds.), Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z. London University Press
• Crosbie, B. (2020). Between the Broadside Ballad and the Folksong: Print and Popular Songs in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne. In S. Carter, K. Gibson, & R. Southey (Eds.), Music in North East England, 1500-1800. Boydell
• Green, A., & Crosbie, B. (2019). Beyond Coal and Class: Culture and the Economy. In B. Crosbie, & A. Green (Eds.), The Economy and Culture in North-East England, 1500-1800 (1-20). Boydell Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787441729
• Crosbie, B. (2018). Provincial Purveyors of Culture: the Print Trade in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne. In B. Crosbie, & A. Green (Eds.), Economy and Culture in North-East England, 1500-1800. Boydell & Brewer

Edited book

• Crosbie, B., & Green, A. (Eds.). (2018). The Economy and Culture in North-East England, 1500-1800. Boydell Press

Journal Article

• Crosbie, B. (2023). Anne Fisher: Gender and Print in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne. Archaeologia Aeliana, Series 6, vol. 2, 307-319
• Crosbie, B. (2014). Anne Fisher's New Grammar: Textbooks and Teaching in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle Upon Tyne
• Crosbie, B. (2013). Half-Penny Ballads and the Soundscape of Eighteenth-Century Electioneering