Dr Ismini Pells

Biography

Ismini joined the Department for Continuing Education at Oxford in September 2021. Prior to that, she had worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, where she was Project Manager of the Civil War Petitions project (www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk); and as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter on a Wellcome Trust-funded project examining early modern medical practitioners, during which she researched the careers of practitioners in Civil War armies.

She studied for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she completed a thesis in 2014 examining the career of Philip Skippon, commander of the infantry in the New Model Army. Ismini has published a monograph on Philip Skippon, Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: The "Christian Centurion" (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020) and an edited collection, New Approaches to the Military History of the English Civil War (Solihull: Helion, 2016).

She has also published articles and contributed chapters to collections on various military and medical topics relating to the Civil Wars. She is a trustee of the Cromwell Association and sits on the Council of the Army Records Society, the Battlefields Panel of The Battlefields Trust and the Research and Collections Advisory Panel of the National Army Museum.

Away from work, Ismini enjoys running to keep fit, supporting Ipswich Town and English cricket, and other such hopeless causes.

Publications

I. Pells, 'Understandings of Adversity and Resilience amongst Women and Children during the Seventeenth-Century British Civil Wars', in O. Rees, K. Hurlock and J. Crowley, Combat Stress in Pre-Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 171-98.

I.Pells, 'From Revolutionary Bulwark to Loyalist Bastion: The Restoration Refashioning of the London Artillery Company, 1660-85', in L. Bowen and M. Stoyle, Remembering the English Civil Wars (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 145-67.

I. Pells, 'The Politicised Child During the Seventeenth-Century British Civil Wars: An Historical Perspective on Representations of Children and Trauma During Conflict', Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 46 (2022), pp. 615-31. Available open access at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09741-6.

I. Pells, Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: the 'Christian Centurion' (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

I. Pells, ‘Soliciting sympathy: the search for psychological trauma in petitions from seventeenth-century maimed soldiers’, in E. Peters and C. Richards, Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), pp. 129-50.

I. Pells, 'Reassessing frontline medical practitioners of the British Civil Wars in the context of the seventeenth-century medical world', Historical Journal, 62: 2 (2019), pp. 399-425. Available open access at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X18000067.

I. Pells, ‘‘Stout Skippon hath a wound’: the medical treatment of parliament’s infantry commander following the battle of Naseby’, in A. J. Hopper and D. J. Appleby, Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018), pp.78-94.

I. Pells, ed., New Approaches to the Military History of the English Civil War: Proceedings of the First Helion And Company 'Century of the Soldier' Conference, 2015 (Solihull: Helion and Company, 2016).

I. Pells, ‘Scriptural Truths? Calvinist Internationalism and Military Professionalism in the Bible of Philip Skippon’, in R. F. W. Smith and G. Watson, eds, Writing the lives of people and things, AD 500-1700 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 187-202.

I. Pells, ‘Philip Skippon: The Norfolk Genesis of a Parliamentary General’, Norfolk Archaeology, 47:2 (2015), pp. 209-23.

I. Pells, ‘Revival, Division & Restoration: The Artillery Company of London, 1611-1660’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 62 (2011), pp. 243-5.