Reader in Women’s and Gender History

Contact Details

Telephone: +44 (0) 1243 816212

Fax: +44 (0) 01243 816080

Office Number: New Hall, N122

Email: s.morgan@chi.ac.uk

Research Interests and Current Projects

My research interests over the last twenty years have focused on the history of the intersections between gender, sexuality and religion in nineteenth and early twentieth century  Britain. The process of modernisation is normally regarded as going hand in hand with secularisation, a narrative which my research has tried to at least complicate, if not unravel. My earliest publications explored late-Victorian women’s rhetoric of sexuality and spirituality in a series of influential moral reform campaigns during the 1880s and 1890s. These social purity campaigns were responsible for the implementation of important legal developments in the areas of sexual morality, prostitution, family life and the censorship of popular entertainment, all of which threw a long shadow over the early twentieth century.  I have also worked on late-Victorian and Edwardian religious constructions of masculinity to show the way in which the churches drew heavily upon popular cultural motifs of chivalry, empire and militarism in order to increase its appeal to a male audience.

More recently I have produced a longer history (1800-1940) of changing religious attitudes towards gender and sexuality, drawing on institutional church records, autobiographies, personal diaries, correspondence and published writings. I am currently developing this into a book-length project which explores religious responses to new intellectual developments in psychology, sexual ethics and politics during the Edwardian and inter-war period.

Publications

• Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800-1940 (joint editor with Jacqui deVries) (London, New York: Routledge, 2010)
• ‘Theorising Feminist History: A Thirty Year Retrospective’, Women’s History Review vol. 18, no. 3 (July 2009): 381-407
• Manifestos for History (joint editor with Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow) (London, New York: Routledge, 2007)
• ‘”Wild Oats or Acorns?” Social purity, sexual politics and the response of the late-Victorian church’, Journal of Religious History, Vol. 31 no. 1 (2007)
• The Feminist History Reader (sole editor) (London, New York: Routledge, 2006)
• ‘The social purity movement in the late-Victorian period’ in Susan Mumm (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Love, Sex and Culture: The Nineteenth Century (Greenwood Press, 2006)
• ‘Jane Ellice Hopkins (1836-1904), social reformer’ and ‘Sarah Robinson (b.1834)’ in H.C.G.  Matthews  (gen. ed.)  Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750-1900 (sole editor) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002)
• Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture (joint editor with Andrew Bradstock, Anne Hogan and Sean Gill) (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

Teaching (Undergraduate)

• Rethinking History
• Faith and Doubt: Religion, culture and society in modern Britain
• Studies in Gender and History
• Writing Women’s Histories: Debates and Directions
• Slavery, ‘Race’ and Empire and the British Imagination, 1780-1918
• Sex, Gender and the Victorian City
• Men, Women and Religion in Britain, 1850-1918

Postgraduate supervision

I am interested in supervising MPhil and PhD students in nineteenth and early twentieth century British social and cultural history, with a particular focus on religion, gender and sexuality. I have supervised five students to completion and am currently supervising students working on ‘Evangelical Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century England’ and ‘Lesbian Identity Formation in Britain, 1850-1950’.

Scholarly Activities

Editorial Positions

• Reviews Editor for Rethinking History: International Journal of Theory and Practice, 2001-05
• Editorial Board Member for Gender and History, Rethinking History and Women’s History Review
• Manuscript reviewer and reader for the above journals and the following publishers: Oxford University Press, Cambridge Scholars Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Broadview Press, Manchester University Press, University of Leuven KADOC Research Centre.

Consultancy

• Assessor for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada 
• Member of AHRC Peer Review College (modern British history)

Media

• BBC2 (2010) ‘The Age of the Do-Gooders’, presented by Ian Hislop. Talking head and script advisor for Programme 3, ‘Sinful Sex and Demon Drink’.
• BBC Radio 4 (2000), Women’s Hour feature on recent scholarship on ‘Victorian Prostitution and Reform’.

Fellowships and Societies

• Member of Ecclesiastical History Society
• Member of British Association for Victorian Studies
• Member of Women’s Archive of Wales
• Elected member of National Steering Committee of UK Women’s History Network

Conference Papers

• ‘Sex and Common Sense: some reflections on approaching the history of religion and gender’ (Theology postgraduate seminar, University of Chichester, 2011)
• ‘Duty and desire: historicising women and sexuality’ (South Coast Eighteenth Century Research Group, University of Chichester, 2010)
•  ‘Women, gender and religious cultures’ symposium (American Historical Association, New York, 2009)
• ‘The Word Made Flesh: Religion and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, (Liverpool Hope University, 2009)
•  ‘Women, Religion and Political Spaces’ (Women’s History Network Annual Conference, St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, 2009)
•  ‘Rediscovering religion after the postmodern turn: Feminist Histories of Modern Britain’ (Boston College Conference on the History of Religion, Boston, US, 2006)
• ‘Rethinking Religion in Gender History’ (University of Southampton, 2006)
• ‘Thinking Women: Education, Religion and Culture in nineteenth-century Britain’, (WHN Annual Conference, University of Durham, 2006)
• ‘The Power of Womanhood: religion, gender and sexuality in late-Victorian Britain’ (North American Conference on British Studies, Boston, US, 2006)
• Panel convenor and paper for ‘Religion, Sexuality and Family Life’ (International Federation of Research into Women’s History, Queen’s University, Belfast, 2003)
• ‘In celebration of the Dictionary of National Biography: Social reformers in the late-Victorian period’ (University College Chichester, 2003)
• ‘Border Crossings: racial and sexual mixings in inter-war Britain’ (Berkshire Conference on History of Women, University of Connecticut, Storrs, US, 2002)
• ‘Race, gender and national identity’ (European Social Science History Conference, International Institute of Social History, The Hague, 2002)
• ‘The role of religion in 19th century women’s history: some historiographical reflections’ (Modern Religious History seminar, Manchester-Harris College, University of Oxford, 2001)
• ‘Sexual and moral education in the 1880s’ (History of Education Society (UK) Annual Conference, Winchester, 2000)
• ‘Religion and Social Purity in Britain, 1870-1900’ (Third European Social Science History Conference, International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam, 2000).