Dr Nicola Phillips - Lecturer in 18th Century British History & Gender

I am a Gender Historian of Georgian Britain with a particular interest in the social, cultural and legal history of that vibrant period. I teach an undergraduate module on Georgian Society, Culture and Crime, and a final year module on Sex, Society, and Identity, 1660-1815. I also lead the core research Skills Module on our MA History Course and will be running a new MA option module on ‘Justice, Gender and Emotion in Georgian Britain’.

My first book examined the legal, cultural, social, and economic position of Women in Business, 1700-1850 (Boydell Press, 2006). My second book, The Profligate Son; Or, a True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice and Financial Ruin in Regency England (OUP, Oxford & Basic Books, New York, 2013) followed the troubled relationship between a father and his son whose struggles with debt and fraud and forgery finally led to transportation to Australia. Since 2018 my research has focused on a socio-cultural legal history of transatlantic advocacy and the influence of British lawyers on American legal culture and adversarial trial. My latest article, ‘The Politics of Libel: Thomas Erskine, Freedom of the Press and Transatlantic Legal Culture, c. 1780-1830’, was published in Law and History Review in 2023.  I am currently Leading a collaborative digital project with our Engaged Humanities Lab, Parliamentary Archives and The National Archives on 'Recreating Advocacy in the C18th Court of King's Bench'. This Augmented Reality recreation of Britain’s highest Common Law in Westminster Hall, which was dismantled in 1820, will enable viewers to enter an immersive 3D recreation of the vanished court and hear how lawyer's voices sounded arguing a libel case there. That is almost complete, so I have begun work on a broader research project entitled ‘An Eloquence of Lawyers:  Advocacy, Gender and Emotion in Britain and America c. 1770-1830’, which analyses the rhetorical strategies and emotive modes of ‘manly’ persuasion in lawyers’ trial speeches.

I am a Director of the Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender and editor of the Bedford Centre blog. I have a keen interest in women's and gender history, from all periods, particularly its public representation online and in the media, in film and at heritage sites, museums, archives and monuments.    I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and have been a member of the National Archives Advisory Group and Chair of the Historical Association Public History Committee.  I have also enjoyed acting as a Historical Consultant for organisations including The National Trust and Royal Mail, as well as contributing to radio and television programmes.