Amanda Vickery (PhD, London)
Professor of Modern British History
email: a.vickery@rhul.ac.uk
Research Interests
Amanda Vickery was born and raised in Preston, Lancashire. Growing up in a matriarchal mill town where wives worked out of the house as well as in, fostered her love of social and economic history, and her fascination with the warp and woof of work and family, power and emotion. Truth to tell, life in a cotton town also inspired a life-long love of clothes.
She studied History at Bedford College, University of London, a pioneering institution for the education of women and came to Royal Holloway in 1991 to build up the M.A. in Women's History, now the M.A. in Women, Gender, Culture: Histories 1500 to the Present. She is Director of Royal Holloway's Bedford Centre for the History of Women.
Professor Vickery has been a Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London, Churchill College Cambridge, The Clark Library UCLA, and the Huntington Library, California. In 2007, she was visiting Professor at the Historicum, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich. From 2004-7 she held a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship.
Vickery's first book, The Gentleman's Daughter (Yale, 1998), won the Whitfield prize, the Wolfson prize and the Longman-History Today prize. Her essay 'Golden Age to Separate Spheres', was republished in 2007 in the Historical Journal's 50th anniversary edition of '20 classic papers'.
Amanda Vickery reviews for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review, and writes and presents history documentaries for BBC TV and Radio.
From 2001-6, Professor Vickery was Associate Director of the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, a partnership between the Bedford Centre at Royal Holloway, the Royal College of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The purpose of the AHRC Centre was to enrich our understanding of the domestic interior in western Europe and North America from the Renaissance to the present day. A key theme was the relationship between gender and the domestic sphere. The AHRC Centre staged 17 international conferences and produced numerous books and scholarly articles, an online database, and A Casa. At Home in Renaissance Italy, a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. As part of her work for the AHRC Centre, Vickery co-edited the collection Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830 (Yale University Press, 2006)
Professor Vickery's latest monograph is Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. She is also working on the history of textiles and on a project entitled Love in the North: Women's Hopes from the New Look to the Beatles. She is a contributor to the forthcoming Mary Delany Exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art and the John Soane Museum.
Amanda Vickery is currently the holder of a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship to work with Loftus Productions Uk to write, record and broadcast a 30 part 'History of Private Life' for BBC Radio 4. The series beings on 28th September 2009, and will play 5 days a week for 6 weeks.
Professor Vickery is an experienced supervisor of MPhil and PhD dissertations and is keen to recruit new postgraduate students. She would especially welcome those interested in the history of women and gender, the history of home, consumerism and dress since the late Middle Ages, and those fascinated by archival research on unusual sources and in comparative projects. She has supervised Ph.Ds on, amongst other things, the history of abortion, illness and the family, erotica, aristocratic fashion, politics at women's colleges, the Victorian home, and dress codes between the wars. She has also been external examiner for Ph.Ds at the universities of Edinburgh, Aberystwyth, York, Warwick, Nottingham, Oxford and Cambridge, on subjects including Women in Scotland, Taste and Aesthetics, Gender and Dissent, Domestic Portraiture, the Nottinghamshire Nobility, Actresses, Gender and the Napoleonic War. Her MA and PhD. students have gone on to fellowships and lectureships at the universities of Exeter, Manchester, Oxford, Sheffield, York, and Bridgewater State College, Massachusetts and to jobs in publishing, public relations, and media.
Classes Taught (subject to availability)
Undergraduate
HS2020 Britain 1688-1832, Economy and Society
HS2021 Britain 1688-1832, Politics and Culture
HS2135 Experience, Culture and Identity: Women's Lives in England, 1688 -c.1850
HS2234 Modern Girls: Women in Britain, c.1914-1984
HS3270 Behind Closed Doors, 1660-1850
Postgraduate
HS5630 Gender and Society in Modern Britain: the debates
HS5640 18th Century Women in England (1): Structures and Constraints
HS5641 18th Century Women in England (2): Expressions and Possibilities
Links
- Amanda Vickery's website
- Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior
- To read Amanda in The Guardian:
- Amanda on radio, discussing taste, politeness and tea with Melvyn Bragg:
Tel/Fax : +44 (0)1784 443314 /433032