University of Greenwich.

Welcome to my site! I’m going to use this space to showcase my time working on a PhD at the University of Greenwich, and you’re welcome to join me on this ride.

I joined the University of Greenwich in autumn 2024, as a social and cultural historian, to research for my PhD looking at how women in the long-nineteenth century engaged with the natural world.

I chose Greenwich for this project for a number of reasons, but included in that list is that it’s my local university, and it looks like this *swoon*:

University of Greenwich, seen from the Thames.

For those that are nearby, but haven’t visited, I’d highly recommend taking a trip to Greenwich to visit the campus and surrounding area, as frankly - its gorgeous, and full of history, lovely buildings, parks and has great food and drink.

Anyway, back to my research…I’ll be spending the next SIX years (I’m a part-timer) thinking about women in the long nineteenth century (I’m pushing the end point up to the 1930s), and how they engaged with the natural world. I’m hoping that across my thesis I’ll engage with a wide variety of topics that come under the theme of ‘natural world’, but I’m starting with a chapter that looks at ‘Education’.

This first research chapter is all about finding out how women learned about the natural world. What books did they read? What periodicals? What were they learning from those sources? Where could they go to school to learn about the natural world? What did they learn there? How did society view their education? Who were these women that sought out further education, and why?

Across the next few months I’ll be updating my blog largely looking at my research into that chapter, but you can also expect that I’ll be posting about other aspects of my life as a history PhD student like what else I’m reading, updates on Uni events, trips to historical sites, other fun bits of history that I come across, and I’ll maybe even have some guest bloggers along the way.

‘Til next time!