Joanne Bailey

Joanne Bailey joined Oxford Brookes in March 2005 from Murray Edwards College, Cambridge where she was a fellow and director of studies in history. Prior to this she was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford and read for her BA and PhD at the University of Durham.

Dr Bailey is a historian of early modern, Georgian and Victorian Britain, with particular interests in marriage, marriage breakdown, family relationships, the domestic economy, parenting, masculinities and identities. She is fascinated by the ways in which people encountered their material and emotional worlds and draws on a range of different types of primary sources to investigate them, from the printed word, to visual images, to objects and spaces.

In 2012 she began a new research project provisionally titled A Manly Nation: Making and Breaking Masculinities 1750-1918. This project will investigate masculine identities in the military, work, leisure, and the home.

Her second monograph Parenting in England c.1760-1830: emotions, self-identity and generation (funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, a British Academy Small Research Grant, and a Scouloudi Historical Award) was published in April 2012. See a review here. This study traces parenting both as a concept and a mode of being in an era marked by the cultures of Sensibility and Romanticism. The golden thread connecting these movements was the expression of emotion and this research therefore analyses the interplay between practices, feelings and ideas during a period of change in ideas about childhood, family, gender and self.

She has also published several articles on fatherhood and masculinity, representations of pauper parents, the relationship between memories of parents and the formation of personal identity.

Her first monograph was Unquiet Lives: marriage and marriage breakdown in England 1660-1800 (CUP, 2003, re-issued in paperback in January 2009). See a review of this book. Related publications include a study of married women's experience of coverture and an analysis of the use of church court records as an historical source.

She is also involved in a collaborative project on beds in early modern England with Dr Sasha Handley (Northumbria University), Dr Angela McShane (V&A), and Sue Prichard (Curator, V&A).