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About Me

My research interests lie in early modern military history and the British Civil Wars in particular. I am especially interested in how ordinary men and women experienced and remembered the conflict, and the impact of warfare on medical developments. I am also currently expanding my research into the effects of warfare on mental health during this period.

I  am currently the Project Manager/Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the AHRC-funded project ‘Welfare, Conflict and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars, 1642-1700’, based at the University of Leicester. This is a four-year collaborative project with the universities of Nottingham, Southampton and Cardiff. It examines the strategies used by maimed soldiers and war widows from the Civil Wars to obtain pensions and gratuities from the state, as well as how they represented military service and fashioned themselves as ‘deserving cases’. A fully-searchable website containing digital images and transcriptions of petitions submitted for charitable relief, medical certificates issued in support of these claims, court orders granting relief and accounts of the payments will be available at www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk from 26 July 2018.

Recent Publications

I. Pells, ‘Reassessing frontline medical practitioners of the British Civil Wars in the context of the seventeenth-century medical world’, Historical Journal (forthcoming)

I. Pells, ‘‘Stout Skippon hath a wound’: the medical treatment of parliament’s infantry commander following the battle of Naseby’, in A. J. Hopper and D. J. Appleby, Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018)

I. Pells, ‘Soliciting sympathy and the search for psychological trauma in seventeenth-century British Civil War maimed soldiers’ petitions’, in E. Peters and C. Richards, Early Modern Trauma (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming)

I. Pells, ed., New Approaches to the Military History of the English Civil War: Proceedings of the First Helion And Company ‘Century of the Soldier’ Conference, 2015 (Solihull: Helion and Company, 2016)

I. Pells, ‘Scriptural Truths? Calvinist Internationalism and Military Professionalism in the Bible of Philip Skippon’, in R. F. W. Smith and G. Watson, eds, Writing the lives of people and things, AD 500-1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 187-202

I. Pells, ‘Philip Skippon: The Norfolk Genesis of a Parliamentary General’, Norfolk Archaeology, 47:2 (2015), pp. 209-23

I. Pells, ‘Revival, Division & Restoration: The Artillery Company of London, 1611-1660’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 62 (2011), pp. 243-56

Media Coverage

Social Media

@Isminipells

Country Focus

British Isles

Expertise by Geography

British Isles, England

Expertise by Chronology

Pre-17th century, 17th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

Medicine, Military