Jennifer Aston

I am currently Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Institute of Humanities at Northumbria University. I am also an Associate Member of the Centre for Workforce Futures at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

I joined Northumbria in 2017, having previously held the EHS Eileen Power Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research and research positions at the universities of Oxford and Hull. My research interests include gender and small business ownership, bankruptcy, and the law. I am the author of Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England: Engagement in the Urban Economy (Palgrave, 2016), co-editor of Women and the Land 1500-1900 (Boydell and Brewer, 2019) and have published several articles on female property ownership. I co-edited Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (2020) and co-founded ReWOMEN (Researching Women of Management and Enterprise Network).
My current research uses previously unexamined petitions heard before the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes to explore divorce in England and Wales, c.1857-1923.