Speaker
Christian is Professor of Late Medieval History at the University of Durham. His first book was War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns: Bristol, York and the Crown, 1350–1400 (Woodbridge, 2005). His second book was The Bishopric of Durham in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2008). In 2015 Christian co-curated the ‘Magna Carta and Changing Face of Revolt’ exhibition at Palace Green Library, Durham. His most recent book is Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford University Press, 2017). He was an advisor to the ‘England’s Immigrants 1330–1550’ project at the University of York. Christian’s current interests lie in the relationship between ideas of citizenship and practices of resistance.
Speaker
Bethany is Assistant Head of Sixth Form at Abbot Beyne School in Staffordshire where she teaches Mathematics. Bethany completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2018 where she specialised in researching refugees of the British and Irish Civil Wars. While still a postgraduate, her essay ‘Lodging the Irish: an examination of parochial charity dispensed in Nottinghamshire to refugees from Ireland, 1641–1651’ won the Midland History Prize and was published in the academic journal Midland History in 2017. Bethany also undertook a doctoral placement at the National Civil War Centre, Newark-upon-Trent, where she worked on the ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ and ‘Fake News’ exhibitions. In 2019 Bethany was awarded the Roy Foster Irish Government Senior Scholarship at Hertford College, Oxford.
Speaker
Vivienne is the honorary general editor of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland and also edited Huguenot Networks: The Interactions and Impact of a Protestant Minority in Europe, 1560–1680 (2017). Before her retirement Vivienne was assistant editor of the project now published as The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1640–1660 (2023) and previously an in-house research editor at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, where immigrants were one of her specialist areas. She has published widely on subjects including Oxfordshire and Warwickshire gentry, religion in England, and Anglo-Swiss relations.
Speaker
Meleisa is Associate Professor and Brittenden Fellow in Black British History at Queen’s College, Oxford. Meleisa is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She is interested in the everyday ways people oppressed within society negotiate and navigate structures of power and inequality, as well as the legacies and politics of writing such histories within contemporary society. Her current research focuses on the life of an Afro-Jamaican woman in late eighteenth-century Jamaica and Britain and the archival remnants of her life. Meleisa is also currently developing a community-engaged project which looks at the history of Black mothering in Britain and the use of creative storytelling. Both of these projects draw upon her strong interest in community-engaged and Caribbean research methodologies.
Speaker
Yasmin is Associate Professor in History at the University of Oxford. Her publications include The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press/Penguin India, 2007) which won the Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society, and also The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (Bodley Head, 2015). Yasmin has also published in journals including History Workshop Journal, Modern Asian Studies and the Roundtable: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. In 2018 she was the presenter of the BBC2 TV series A Passage to Britain and in 2022 the co-presenter of BBC2’s Back in Time for Birmingham.
Course Director
Andrew Hopper has been Professor of Local and Social History in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford since 2021. Previously Andrew taught History at the Universities of East Anglia, Birmingham and Leicester. He is the author of Black Tom: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). He is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Civil War Petitions Project and is currently working on his third monograph Widowhood and Bereavement during and after the English Civil Wars for Oxford University Press. Andrew is patron of the Naseby Battlefield Project and chairman of the editorial board of Midland History. He was appointed a Fellow of the Society for Army Historical Research in 2024.
