Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

About Me: I am a British-born feminist, writer and historian. My first book explored how sensibility, a way of being that celebrated human sympathy, was central to the American Revolution. Sensibility and the American Revolution suggested that revolutionaries sought the transformation of citizens and society, as much as to create new republican forms of government.

My underlying curiosity in how we experience change, how we feel our way through events, unfolds through two fields of research. Witnessing the Age of Revolutions, 1776-1804 explores first-person narratives of events in the United States, France and Saint Domingue, as a means of telling the cultural history of the Age of Revolutions.

The other research is more intimate in nature and more innovative in method. Mother Is a Verb is a history of childbearing in Britain and North American since the seventeenth century: based on anecdote – what can be drawn out from the shards and fragments of the archives – and composed in the form of a first-person essay.

I have a particular interest in the craft of historical writing. I have served as both Associate and Acting Editor of the American Historical Review, the American historical profession’s flagship journal. In 2013, I was elected to the Editorial Board of the UK’s Past and Present.

Recent Publications: “Narrating the Age of Revolutions”, William and Mary Quarterly 73 (2016)

“Female Liberty? Sentimental Gallantry, Republican Womanhood, and Rights Feminism in the Age of Revolutions”, William and Mary Quarterly 71 (2014)

“The Patient’s Case: Sentimental Empiricism and Knowledge in the Early Republic”, William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010)

Sensibility and the American Revolution (Omohundro Institute, University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Expertise by Topic: American Revolution, Children & Youth, Gender, Public History, Women