HIST.CAM.AC.UK - Key Persons

Adam B. Forsyth

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Student in Early Modern History

Adam Lebovitz

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WYNG Research Fellow, Trinity Hall

Alexandra Walsham

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Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Historical Research
Professor of Modern History

Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History. She served as Chair of the Faculty of History between 2019 and 2022. She was an undergraduate and Masters student at the University of Melbourne before coming to Trinity College, Cambridge, for her PhD. After a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, she taught at the University of Exeter for fourteen years before returning to Cambridge in 2010. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013. She was appointed a CBE for services to History in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2017. Research interests Alexandra Walsham's research interests fall within the field of the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and focus on the immediate impact and long-term repercussions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations set within their European context. She has published extensively on a range of themes, including post-Reformation Roman Catholicism; religious tolerance and intolerance between 1500 and 1700; providence, miracles and the supernatural in post-Reformation society and culture; the history of the book, the advent of printing, and the interconnections between oral, visual and written culture; religion and the landscape; the memory of the Reformation; age, ancestry and the relationship between religious and generational change. Her current major project is a monograph based on the Ford Lectures she delivered at the University of Oxford in 2018, entitled The Reformation of the Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in Early Modern England. The research for this was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2015-2018. Teaching Alexandra Walsham currently teaches a Part II Special Subject on 'Memory in Early Modern England'. She has taught a Specified Subject on ‘Persecution and Toleration in Britain 1400-1700'. She contributes lectures for Part I Paper 4 (British Political History 1450-1750) and Paper 9 (British Economic and Social History 1500-1750) and offers an option on 'Space, Place and Landscape in Early Modern History' to students on the MPhil in Early Modern History. Alexandra Walsham is co-editor, with Matthew Hilton, of the journal Past and Present and also sits on the editorial boards of a number of other journals. She is one the Series Editors of Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (CUP). She was the Principal Investigator on a major collaborative project on 'Remembering the Reformation' based jointly at the Universities of Cambridge and York, involving Professor Brian Cummings and Drs Ceri Law and Bronwyn Wallace. This interdisciplinary project, which was awarded £831,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, ran from 1 January 2016 to 30 September 2019. For further details, see http://rememberingthereformation.org.uk/. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and the Huntington Library. She has delivered lectures and papers in many countries, including Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Alexandra Walsham has also served as Chair of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Historical Research. She has been appointed to the sub-panel for History for REF 2021.

Alice McKimm

Alice McKimm is a PhD student at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her thesis examines the multivocal yet interconnected movements to establish women's shelters across the UK after 1971. Alice's research compares the literal and symbolic accommodation of women of different ages, ethnicities, sexual orientations and disability statuses in individual women's refuges. It further characterises women's shelters as a collaborative social movement, considering their influence on cultural discourses and national policy. This project is funded by a Derek Brewer Research Studentship and a Gordon Glasgow Scholarship. Prior to her PhD, Alice completed an MPhil (2021) at the University of Cambridge, studying the representation of everyday violence in archived oral histories, 1880-1988. She achieved a BA in History and French from Durham University in 2020. Her undergraduate thesis, which examined cultural dissociation from child sexual abuse in late nineteenth-century newspapers, won the prize for the best undergraduate History dissertation at Durham University. Alice was co-convener of the Modern British History Graduate Workshop at Cambridge, 2021-22. She is also interested in public and popular history, and volunteers with the East End Women's Museum and Imperial War Museum.

Allan Pang

Allan Pang is a PhD candidate supervised by Dr Rachel Leow. His research project, titled ‘Didactic Histories and Chinese Communities in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, c. 1950s-90s', examines the transmission of historical knowledge within and without classrooms. It analyses history education at schools and informal pedagogical platforms such as monuments, theatres, and children's magazines. This project analyses how the Cold War, decolonisation, and Chinese politics connected and disconnected historical narratives among Chinese overseas. By exploring the transregional flows of textbooks, intellectuals, and culture, it challenges the regional divide between East and Southeast Asia. This study also dissects the long-term process of how historical actors, such as intellectuals, officials, and students, sought to shape the meanings of being 'Chinese' in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. This PhD study is funded by the Hughes Hall Cambridge International Scholarship. Allan completed his BA and MPhil in History at the University of Hong Kong. His former research investigated cultural policies in late colonial Hong Kong. It examined how colonial officials attempted to preserve, promote, and shape Chinese culture through language policies, entertainment, and postage stamps. In his spare time, Allan enjoys studying the transregional history of Hong Kong's popular music since the 1950s (when he is not addicted to the songs). In 2023-24, Allan is one of the convenors of the World History Workshop. Research interests Hong Kong history Transnational Chinese history Southeast Asian history British imperialism in Asia History education Transregional history of East and Southeast Asia

Allison Ksiazkiewicz

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Research Grants Administrator

Amelia Gardner-Thorpe

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Student in History

Amelia Gardner-Thorpe is a PhD student in History at Newnham College. In 2022, she graduated with an MPhil in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall), and a BA (Hons) in History in 2021 from the University of Exeter. Her PhD dissertation examines the familial relationships and networks of bojars (nobles) and posadniks (elected officials) in the Novgorod Republic, which Soviet scholars argue was an oligarchic regime, in the fifteenth-century. How did marriage alliances, land-ownership, patronage of churches and monasteries, and genealogical continuity within select bojar families, from whom posadniks were frequently selected, contribute to the construction and maintenance of noble power in the Novgorod Republic at this time and what challenges did their authority and power in Novgorod pose to the Rjurikid dynasty? She is supervised by Dr. Olenka Z. Pevny. Her research is funded by an AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge DTP - Newnham College Studentship. In 2021/22, she was a prize research student at the Joint Centre for History and Economics. Amelia is co-convenor of the History of Memory and Emotions graduate workshop (2022/23). Research interests Amelia's primary research interest is in "vernacular" literacy, namely expressed through birchbark documents written in Old East Slavic and its dialects, although her research has also considered graffiti and inscribed objects. She is most interested in the period c. 1100-1300, and the geographical region of Kyivan Rus' specifically. Amelia is also interested in historical social and economic networks, including their visualisation using digital humanities tools.

Andrew Thompson

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Senior College Teaching Officer and Fellow, Queens' College

Angela Wilson

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Undergraduate Part II Administrator / Subject Group Secretary

Anne Green

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Senior Accounts Clerk

Bipasha Bhattacharyya

Bipasha Bhattacharyya is a second year Phd Student (Department of History) as well as Trinity College's Prince of Wales Student. She was a Prize Research Student in the year 2022 at the Center for History and Economics, Cambridge, and continues to be an actively engaged in its proceedings.She also co-covened the Faculty of History's World History Workshop for the academic year 2022-2023. Bipasha read history at Presidency University, Kolkata. Her MA thesis (‘Hope is a thing with feathers: Lakshmiswar Sinha and the Search for Indian Esperantos', Presidency University Press, 2021) attempted to give voice to a pioneering history of Esperanto usage in the early twentieth century Indian subcontinent through the lens of a forgotten Bengali Esperantist, carpenter and playwright. During her time at Presidency University, Bipasha successfully revived the once defunct peer-reviewed student journal ‘Presidency Historical Review' and served as its executive editor. She initiated a successful campaign to preserve and catalogue a disintegrating archive owned by Presidency University. This effort is today supported by a generous endowment by the British Library Endangered Archives program. Bipasha's thesis aims to develop her interest in constructed languages, language politics and pedagogy through an attempt to historicize Esperanto and the search for an International auxiliary language. Through ethnographic and historical explorations based on a non-insular understanding of region, the thesis aims to explore how Asian interventions within this search led to the creation of both universal particulars as well as particular universalisms. Alongside such pursuits, she is currently attempting to situate the unpublished 1960s correspondences of American Esperantist Ina Tillman with a Siberian Esperantist whose familial connections date back to Leo Tolstoy 's own late nineteenth century Esperanto friendly publishing firm, Posrednik.

Cherish Watton

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Student

Cherish is a PhD student in Modern British History at Churchill College, Cambridge. She studies the history of scrapbooks in Britain during the twentieth century, funded by the Wolfson Foundation. Her thesis aims to use scrapbooks to interrogate broader histories of life-writing, archiving, collecting, gender, and emotions. Cherish completed her BA and MPhil degrees at Cambridge. In 2018, Cherish won the Royal Historical Society's inaugural Undergraduate Public History Prize for her work running www.womenslandarmy.co.uk. Cherish is regularly in the media discussing the work of the Women's Land Army. Watch Cherish's interview on BBC Breakfast in the run up to the 75th Anniversary of VE Day here.