About

I am an associate professor at the University of Oxford, mother of two wonderful little boys, a godmother and an auntie.

I teach, research, and study history because I believe that it has the potential to expand our humanity.  By studying the past, we learn more about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a member of a society.  Most of all, we learn that nothing is certain – history provides a way for us to argue back when people say we should only think about things in a certain way, and it makes us look at problems from lots of different angles.

This blog aims to show just how we can do this.  Lots of history books for children and young people now are about kings and queens, knights and princesses, and gory and bloody battles.  But modern historians look at all kinds of other things, and I think that children deserve to think about these subjects too: I discuss, for example, the history of emotions and feelings, what it was like to be a child in the past, how beggars were treated, how women and men related to one another.