Earlier this week, Michael Bierut, Sonia Williams, and I spent an hour on the phone together. Michael is an influential graphic designer based in New York, Sonia is a high school student in Paintsville, Kentucky, and I’m a designer at Automattic, living outside of Boston. Sonia came prepared with a great set of questions. She prompted Michael to tell us about his career, and to take us through some of his favorite projects. We talked about designing this website. Michael described how he came to use a photo of the earth to represent home: he’d aimed to show the most universal representation of ..read more

I have been a massive fan of Abbi Jacobson for years. Her TV show Broad City which she co-created with her best friend Ilana Glazer will forever be my favourite series, and her book I Might Regret This was so inspiring and important to me. So when I heard Jacobson was creating a new series about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (1943-54) based on the 1992 film of the same name, I knew it would be brilliant, funny, considerate and heartfelt. But I don’t think I realised just how good it would be as a piece of Public History. *** As someone who has studied Public/Gender Histor ..read more

For the fourth year in a row, I am dedicating a blog post to my forever favourite day: International Women’s Day. To everyone who celebrates, happy IWD 2022. I hope it is a positive day for you filled with love, hope and happiness. For me, IWD is a time to remember the foundations of my feminism, and to reaffirm the core values that I have learnt and internally developed over the years. One of the key influences on my feminism has always been books, perhaps because my degree inherently required me to investigate academic texts on feminism, but also because I had a genuine desire to read femini ..read more

Happy 1st of February everyone, and more importantly happy LGBTQ+ History Month!! As always my favourite way to celebrate and engage with specific fields of history (especially for the first time) is to watch something related to it. Film and television is by far my favourite medium of Public History, and I think it’s ability to make audiences feel understood, seen and represented is incredibly important. Please see below my comphrensive watchlist for LGBTQ+ History Month. Please dive in! Watching something, whether that is documentary or fiction, is a way to engage with LGBTQ+ History and lea ..read more

In recent years, we have been spoiled by some truly terrific female-driven historical dramas on our TV screen. As someone who is obsessed with TV and with gender history, I have devoured many of these series, and have written extensively about them in these blogposts. There is a definite turn in the way that historical dramas are being produced, they are no longer stuffy, moody and constrained to deeply accurate portrayals of history. There is now an opportunity for more playful interpretations, ones that incorporate a diverse cast, finally play around with the idea of queerness in the past, a ..read more

Over the last 18 months, I have been investigating a (relatively new) sub-genre of Public History that I have named Public/Gender History. Public/Gender History represents avenues of Public History (museum exhibits, statues, documentaries, books, films, TV shows, podcasts etc.) that are determined to tell new and improved stories about the history of gender, and more specifically about women. What makes this sub-genre notable, and worth recognising, is that creators truly believe they are doing something different and something more impactful than Public History that has come before. And in ma ..read more

Happy International Women’s day everyone!!! Every year I try to write a blogpost to commemorate my favourite day, and 2021 is no different. There are big changes coming for me at the end of this month, some set in stone, and some still undecided, but they have got me thinking about what I want my future to hold. The feature image for this post is a poem written by Rupi Kaur. I remember seeing it last IWD and feeling that it resonated with me so much. I have dedicated the last 2 years of my academic career to studying women and gender, and I have learnt so many incredible stories that have move ..read more

I won’t lie to you, Lockdown 3.0 has put me in a real slump. I feel demotivated, uninspired and tired all the time, and I am sure many others feel the same. It is hard, trying to engage with content and write meaningful content yourselves, when the world seems so dim and the days so very very long. However February and March have always been really exciting periods for me, because they consist of LGBTQ+ History Month (Feb) and Women’s History Month (March). Though this year will be different, and celebrations that normally take place in person will be existing in online spaces, I am determined ..read more

I am unsurprisingly a massive fan of Historical dramas, whether it is based on fictional characters and events (such as the highly anticipated new Netflix show being released on Christmas Day – Bridgeton) or on real life people from history (think the Tudors or Reign). I am also (unsurprisingly again) a massive feminist, and I primarily enjoy film and TV only when there are more than one well written, diverse women in the cast list. Personally I don’t think that is a lot to ask but you would be surprised how rare it can be in Public History entertainment. In general, I still think Public Histo ..read more

I wanted to create a short blogpost to commemorate the end of my Masters course. The course technically finished a few weeks ago, when I submitted my MA Dissertation, entitled: Uncovering Herstory; Gender and Public History’s engagement with Fourth Wave Feminism. Though this year of study has been slightly tainted by the global pandemic and subsequent lockdown in the UK, I have nevertheless thoroughly enjoyed my time at the University of Southampton. I spent my undergrad degree at the University of Birmingham, and whilst Birmingham and the History Department there taught me so much about the s ..read more