Histories of Gender and Sexuality Research Group

(HGS) brings together staff and postgraduate students whose research embraces gender, sexuality and/or women’s history. Important shared interests currently include structure and agency in theory and practice; gender and systems of regulation; fertility and reproduction.

Through a range of formal and informal events (HGS) encourages critical exploration of crucial theoretical and methodological questions, and promotes the history of gender and sexuality across disciplines and periods from prehistory to the contemporary world.  Alongside a seminar series we also organise work-in-progress sessions, roundtables, workshops and symposia. (HGS) is designed to provide a forum in which both staff and student research can flourish, and current PhD students act as group co-ordinators alongside academic staff. 

(HGS) runs regular seminars throughout the academic year to which all are welcome. See seminar information here.

Current projects

• 'The Abortion Act (1967): A Biography' (Professor Gayle Davis)
• 'Gender equalities at work: an interdisciplinary history of 50 years of legislation' (Professor Louise Jackson)
• ‘Alice Thornton’s Books: Remembrances of a Woman’s Life in the Seventeenth Century’ (Professor Cordelia Beattie)

Co-ordinators

• Dr Kate Davison
• Dr Wannes DuPont
• Barbara Gabeler
• Dr Sarah Goldsmith
• Dr Zubin Mistry
• Dr Rochelle Rowe
• Dr Hatice Yildiz

Academic staff members

Archaeology

• Dr Chiara Bonacchi

• Classics

• Dr Lilah Grace Canevaro
• Dr Ulrike Roth

• History

• Dr Bill Aird
• Dr Angela Bartie
• Professor Crispin Bates
• Professor Cordelia Beattie
• Dr Adam Budd
• Dr Ashlee Christoffersen
• Professor Gayle Davis
• Dr Kate Davison
• Dr Wannes DuPont
• Professor Emeritus Julian Goodare
• Professor Louise Jackson
• Professor Stana Nenadic
• Professor Diana Paton
• Dr Rochelle Rowe
• Dr Tom Webster

Honorary staff and emeriti

• Dr Esther Breitenbach

Current PhD students 

• Kathryn Comper, ‘Church Discipline and the Godly Community in Scotland, 1660-1712’
• Thomas Crepin, ‘The Intersex Movement and Christian Denominations in the United States since 1990’
• Abigail Fletcher, ‘From Partition to Decriminalisation: Homosexuality in Northern Ireland 1921-1982’Jax Hughes, ‘The Changing Lives of Roman Freedwomen: Ancient and Modern at the Crossroads in the Long Twentieth Century’
• Barbara Gabeler, ‘A Conspiracy of Silence: Abortion, Birth Control and Eugenics in Early Twentieth-century Scotland’
• Moss Pepe, ‘Gender Non-conformity in Medieval French Romance’
• Mara Schmueckle, 'Dispensing Marriage in Pre-Reformation Scotland'
• Cecilia White, 'Assessing Changes in Elite Women's Garments in Fourteenth-century England'