Krista Cowman

After studying English and History at the University of Keele I taught in a secondary school in East London while studying for an MA in the History of the European Labour Movement at the Institute of Historical Research funded by Newham Council. My D.Phil at the Centre for Women’s Studies University of York was funded by the ESRC.

Following this I taught in the Department of History University of York and for the Open University then the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University from 1998. In 2006 I moved to the University of Lincoln as its first Professor of History. I joined the School of History Politics and International Relations at Leicester in the summer of 2021

My D.Phil studied women’s activism across a range of political organisations investigating the impact of a large militant suffrage campaign on the women’s sections of political parties in Merseyside. My next project focussed on organizers in the militant suffrage society the Women’s Social and Political Union. Following that I worked on the social history of the First World War exploring British perceptions of living behind the lines on the Western Front.

I am currently involved in 2 research projects:

Women’s quotidian urban activism Britain c.1920-1990. This returns to my earlier interests in women and politics but moves away from formalised activism to focus on how everyday concerns such as housing play space education & health rather than political philosophy were the catalyst for women's public activism.

A (Socially Isolated) Room of One’s Own: Women Writing Lockdown. This interdisciplinary AHRC project (with Professor Lucie Armitt [Lincoln] Professor Sarah Pedersen [Robert Gordon] and performance poet Liv Torc) explores the gendered dimensions of the first lockdown March - August 2020 through studying contemporary autobiographical writing by British women.