![Gay rights demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London in 1972](https://www.mmu.ac.uk/sites/default/files/styles/page_header_half/public/2021-06/youth-gender-sexuality.jpg?h=49f40af6&itok=B_W3OL0b)
Research group: Race, Gender, Sexuality, Identity
Exploring cultures of race, gender, sexuality, and identity.
About
About our research
Our research explores the cultural meaning attached to youth, gender and sexuality throughout history - from antiquity to the contemporary period.
Our group has particular expertise in the ancient Mediterranean and North Africa, early modern France, the 19th-century United States, modern Britain and 20th-century Germany.
We seek out voices often overlooked or under-represented in mainstream history, including:
-
children
-
adolescents
-
women
-
the non-binary gendered
-
queer people
We examine how some cultures and groups have shaped unique identities in the time and place they lived - making their voices and concerns a point of historical interest in their own right.
Our approach is interdisciplinary, bringing together multiple perspectives to consider different cultural contexts and the ways in which particular social, political and religious groups were treated and how individuals within them held agency.
We work in partnership with other academic groups and heritage organisations to conduct our research.
As well as conducting innovative projects, we also supervise a diverse range of research by our postgraduate students.
You can find details of PhD or masters opportunities on our study with us page. Details of our members’ research interests and specialisms can be found on their staff profiles.
We also publish details about projects our current PhD students are working on, as well as information about our history research community.
Selected projects
-
Key publications
- Cromwell, J (2019) ’Listen to my mistreatment’ – support networks for widows and divorcées in the Coptic record. In: The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World. Cambridge University Press
- Cromwell, J (2017) Recording Village Life: A Coptic Scribe in Early Islamic Egypt. University of Michigan Press
- Cromwell, J (2017) Five Tax Receipts from Djeme in the Collection of Columbia University. In: Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
- Fenemore, M (2019) Fighting the Cold War in Post-Blockade Pre-wall Berlin. Routledge
- Fenemore, M (2008) Shaping Sexual Knowledge. In: Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe. Routledge
- Fenemore, M (2007) Sex, thugs and rock ‘n’ roll: Teenage rebels in cold-war East Germany. Berghahn
- Griffiths, C (2021) The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany. Oxford University Press
- Griffiths, C (2019) The International Effects of the Stonewall Riots. In: Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History
- Griffiths, C (2016) Sex, Shame and West German Gay Liberation. In: German History
- Molloy, M (2019) [co-edited with Laura Sandy]. The Civil War and Slavery Reconsidered Negotiating the Peripheries. Routledge
- Molloy, M (2018) Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South. University of South Carolina Press
- Molloy, M (2016) “A Noble Class of Old Maids”: Surrogate Motherhood, Sibling Support, and Self-Sufficiency in the Nineteenth-Century White, Southern Family. In: Journal of Family History
- Swift, E, Stoner, J and Pudsey, A (2021) Everyday Life in Roman and Late Roman Egypt, A Social Archaeology. Oxford University Press
- Pudsey, A and Vuolanto, V (2021) Children’s urban environments in an ancient city, physical and social realities. Childhood in the Past
- Pudsey, A and Vuolanto, V (2021) Enslaved children in Roman Oxyrhynchos, Kahlos, M, de Wet, C and Vuolanto, V in Slavery on the Margins of Empire. Perspectives from Late Antiquity
- Baird, JA and Pudsey, A (eds) (2021 - forthcoming). Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Material and Textual Approaches, CUP
- Shore, H (2017) [co-edited with B. Godfrey, P. Cox, Z. Alker]. Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses and Life Chances From 1850. Oxford University Press
- Shore, H (2015) London’s Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720 - c. 1930: A Social and Cultural History. Palgrave-Macmillan
- Shore, H (2009) “The Reckoning”: disorderly women, informing constables and the Westminster justices, 1727–33. In: Social History
- Spangler, J (2021) [edited with Zita Rohr]. Significant Others: Aspects of Deviance and Difference in Premodern Court Cultures. Routledge
- Spangler, J (2015) Mother Knows Best: The Dowager Duchess of Guise, a Son’s Ambitions, and the Regencies of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria. In: Aspiration, Representation and Memory: The Guise in Europe, 1506-1688. Routledge
- Spangler, J (2009) The Society of Princes. Ashgate
- Tebbutt, M (2020) Questioning the Rhetoric of British Borstal Reform in the 1930s. In: The Historical Journal
- Tebbutt, M (2012) Being Boys. Manchester University Press
- Tebbutt, M (1992) Women’s Talk? Gossip and women’s words in working class communities, 1880-1939. In: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880-1939. Manchester University Press
Organisations we work with
![Logo of Manchester Histories](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2021-05/Manchester%20Histories.png?itok=TMA2jcLY)
Manchester Histories
![Logo of The Raphael Samuel History Centre](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2021-05/Raphael%20Samuel%20History%20Centre.png?itok=tkv9VdeK)
The Raphael Samuel History Centre
![Logo of the Petrie Museum, UCL](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2021-05/Petrie%20Museum%2C%20UCL.png?itok=SW2_eOwr)
Petrie Museum, UCL
![Logo of the Classical Association](/sites/default/files/styles/logo_scalable/public/2021-06/The%20Classical%20Association.png?itok=zpcDd2Gj)
The Classical Association
Contact us
You can contact individual members of the team through their staff profiles.
For general enquiries or to join our mailing list, please contact research group leads Prof Heather Shore and Dr Craig Griffiths.