Ruth Mather Post Doctoral Research Associate University Of Exeter Commons username: @rmather Twitter handle: ruth_mather ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2029-6158 Following 1 members View ProfileActivitySites 0Following 1Followers 1Groups 0ForumsDocs Academic InterestsClassGenderHistory of FamilyhomeIdentitylong 18th centuryLong 19th centuryMaterial cultureNorthern EnglandPoliticsPopular culturePublic history Recent Commons Activity AboutI am a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project ‘The Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861 – 1865’ at the University of Exeter. Alongside Dr Simon Rennie and Professor Brian Maidment, I am involved in finding, interpreting and preparing for digitisation poems published in local Lancashire newspapers during the Cotton Famine. A major element of this project is a schools programme, in which Lancashire teachers and students assist with finding and transcribing poetry for us. In addition to providing support for the schools programme, I also help to arrange outreach activities and co-ordinate the project’s social media presence. More information can be found at http://cottonfaminepoetry.exeter.ac.uk/ I completed my PhD with Queen Mary’s Department of History and Centre for Studies of Home, supervised by Professors Amanda Vickery and Barbara Taylor. My thesis explores the politics of the symbolic and material environments of ordinary people’s homes in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, with specific reference to the role of home in forging and sustaining popular radicalism. This project grew from a wider interest in the intersections between the personal and the political in the long nineteenth century, combined with a growing interest in material culture, especially that of a personal but expressive nature, such as clothing or household goods. Using literary and archaeological sources as well as more traditional historical methods, I explored not only the uses of domesticity in political rhetoric, but the ways in the home as a physical space was used by ordinary men and women for the formation and expression of ideas about power. My thesis is available online at https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/24708. In 2011, I ran two weekly seminars for the University of York History department’s “Making Histories” module, gaining valuable experience of teaching at undergraduate level. I have subsequently designed and taught my own course on “York: From the Romans to the Present Day” and ran a day of history activities for a local primary school with the University of York’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. More recently, I was asked to participate in the University of York’s Moving Beyond Boundaries project, which explored students’ perceptions of gender history and sought to challenge some preconceptions about women’s history. The website for this project contains the lesson plans which my colleagues and I created for this purpose: http://www.teachingwomenshistory.com. I completed an AHRC-funded Masters degree at the University of York in 2011, exploring interactions between women and military forces during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, with particular focus on the Yorkshire and East Lancashire regions. My undergraduate dissertation, completed at the University of Cumbria in 2009, examined the Lancashire response to the Queen Caroline affair in 1820-21. This piece of work was awarded the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire prize for best undergraduate dissertation on a local theme, and has since been published in the Society’s Transactions. I have volunteered as a Historic Library Steward for York Museums trust, introducing visitors to the space and collections of the historic library of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and with the Borthwick Institute for Archives, assisting with the conservation of plans in the Atkinson Brierley collection. In addition to these voluntary roles, I have enjoyed acting as a research intern at Fairfax House, York, researching and writing panels for the exhibitions ‘Revolutionary Fashion, 1790-1820’ and ‘In the Name of the Rose: The Jacobite Rebellions, Symbolism and Allegiance’. I have also worked as a research assistant on Professor Robert Poole’s Peterloo Witness Project, which aims to create an online resource featuring a fully searchable database of all witness testimonies relating to the Peterloo massacre. In a key phase of this project, I was involved in meeting and training volunteers who will assist in the transcription of eyewitness accounts, and thus will themselves become witnesses to an important historical event. In addition to this, I spent ten months as a researcher and production executive at Bradford Literature Festival immediately following my PhD. In this role I gained experience of event planning and relationship building with international stakeholders, and assisted in the delivery of a ten-day festival featuring 300 events and reaching an audience of more than 50,000 people. Blog Posts
