Participant Info
- First Name
- Anna
- Last Name
- McKay
- Country
- United Kingdom
- State
- drannamckay@gmail.com
- Affiliation
- University College Cork
- Website URL
- http://anna-mckay.com/
- Keywords
- Prison Ships, Prison Hulks, Convict History, Maritime History, Penal Transportation, Prisons, Prisoners of War, Social History, Cultural History, Penal History, Administrative, Labour, Reform, Material Culture, Shipboard Violence, Shipboard Routine, Warfare, Napoleonic Wars, American Revolution, Britain, Bermuda, Dockyards, Colonial History, Imperial History, 18th Century History, 19th Century History
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Dr Anna McKay is a social and cultural historian who specialises in confinement and forced migration in the British maritime world across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a research focus on convicts and prisoners of war.
Her PhD, ‘The Development and Abolition of British Prison Hulks, 1776-1857’, was an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Project between the University of Leicester and Royal Museums Greenwich, and was awarded in 2020. Prison hulks – decommissioned naval warships repurposed as floating prisons – were used by the British government in response to a prison housing crisis. They held both convicts and prisoners of war at home and in overseas colonial territories including Bermuda, the Bahamas, New York, Gibraltar and Ireland.
Recent posts include a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Cork, the Pearsall Fellowship in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research and a Caird Library research fellowship. Anna has undertaken archival research in the UK, Australia, Bermuda and Canada, and conducted site visits to dockyards, former prisoner of war depots and penal colony sites across the world.
- Recent Publications
(2021) ‘Allowed to die’? Prison Hulks, Convict Corpses and the Inquiry of 1847, Cultural and Social History, 18:2, 163-181, DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2021.1893917
For links to blog posts, see my website: http://anna-mckay.com/
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- @AnnaLoisMckay
- Country Focus
- Britain, Ireland, Bermuda - British colonies
- Expertise by Geography
- Australia, Atlantic, British Isles, England, Ireland, United Kingdom
- Expertise by Chronology
- 18th century, 19th century
- Expertise by Topic
- American Revolution, Colonialism, Gender, Government, Labor, Material Culture, Military, Public History, Rebellion & Revolution, Slavery
