University of Oxford

Post-Doc, History

Junior Research Fellow in World History

Wolfson College

About

Currently, I am preparing my book 'Degrees of Guilt: Infanticide in England 1860-1960' for Liverpool University Press.  The book will examine how the killing of young children was both tried in the criminal courts and utilised in a variety of discourses – both implicit and explicit- between the so-called ‘infanticide panic’ of the 1860s, and 1960, by which point infanticide had long since ceased to be perceived as a widespread moral and judicial issue, and where both public and expert opinion was instead primarily concerned with the individual aspects of the small number of cases that came before the courts. Crucially, this period saw the first law (1922) that separated out the killing of newborns from other types of murder in England and Wales, and its amendment in 1938 to include the killing of children aged up to twelve months. Despite occasional calls for its revision in the post-war period and the opportunity to include further reforms in the sweeping changes to the law on murder and manslaughter brought in by the 1957 Homicide Act, it is significant that the Infanticide Act 1938 still remains in force in 2012. I argue here that the wider social significance of trials for infanticide, and its retention as an important cultural metaphor in this period, has thus far been underestimated.

I am also in the early stages of two new projects in transnational British and South Asian history. The first of these has the working title 'Codes of Conduct: Gender, Religion and Homicide in British India 1793-1914'. This investigates how the influence of cultural, social and legal ideas about such issues as race, gender, sexuality and religion impacted on the views of British people with regard to India in the long nineteenth century, including the implementation of the 1860 Indian Penal Code - which is still the basis for Indian criminal justice - in the aftermath of the Great Rebellion. A key element of the project is its integration throughout of the Scottish perspective - arguing that the separate legal system of Scotland had a much greater influence than has yet been acknowledged in the formulation of imperial law.

The second project, 'Feminist Campaigns Against Child Sexual Abuse: Britain and India, 1860-1947' charts the transnational importance of this issue for the British women's movement. This monograph will be published by Continuum Press in 2015.


I am also one of the convenors of the Gender History Forum at the University of Oxford; and of the President's Seminars at Wolfson College.