Dr Hannah Barker
Contact Details
hannah.barker@manchester.ac.uk
Ext: 57791
Room: W.2.09
Profile
I joined the University of Manchester in March 2000, having previously been a lecturer in history at Keele University and Worcester College, Oxford .
Research
One of my areas of research interest is the impact of economic, social and cultural change on women's work. I published two articles on this subject, 'Women, work and the industrial revolution: female involvement in the English printing trades, c. 1700-1840', which appeared in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, published by Longman in 1997, which I co-edited with Elaine Chalus; and 'Gender and trade in Manchester , 1780-1840', in 'On the town': Women and urban life in eighteenth-century England, c. 1660-1820 (Ashgate, 2003), which I wrote with Karen Harvey. I have just completed a monograph on this subject, entitled The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760-1830, which was published by Oxford University Press. This project was funded by both the ESRC and the AHRC. It explores a number of issues relating to gender relations, urban culture and the growth of towns in the north of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing specifically on women traders, it examines the role of petit bourgeois women in exploiting and facilitating urban developments. It reveals a picture of urban society and cultural life which is more detailed and wide-ranging than that provided by most traditional accounts of northern 'industrial' towns in this period, as well as forcing a re-evaluation of urban culture and gender relations in late Georgian England. I have also recently edited, with Elaine Chalus, a collection of essays, British Women's History: An Introduction, 1700-1850, for Routledge, which was published in 2005. This provides a companion volume to June Purvis's existing work covering the period 1850-1945. I am currently writing an article on masculinity amongst the lower middling sorts in Manchester, provisionally entitled 'Soul, purse and family: middling and lower-class masculinity in eighteenth-century Manchester'.
In addition to my work on gender, I have also been engaged in research on print and urban culture. My book, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England, was published by Oxford University Press in 1998, and I also completed a book for part of Longman's'Themes in Social History' series, entitled Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1700-1850, which was published in 1999. As with Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion, this focuses on the role of the press in popular political culture, and the relationship between the press and public opinion. My interest in the role of print in provincial life, and in popular politics in particular, was behind another project I completed with David Vincent. The Language of Politics: Newcastle-under-Lyme Election Broadsides, 1790-1832 (Parliamentary History Record series, 2001) reproduces documents held at Keele University Library and other Staffordshire archives. These are accompanied by an extended introduction that explores the role of print in provincial political culture. I have produced another print culture project: a collection of essays jointly edited with Simon Burrows, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America , 1760-1820 incorporates chapters on eight different countries, and draws together the work of a distinguished group of European and American historians. The book explores the links between print, public and political culture, and in particular, it examines the role of the 'public sphere' in various national and pan-national contexts. More recently, in 2004, I published an article in Urban History, entitled '"Smoke cities": northern industrial towns in late Georgian England' and in 2007 I was awarded a grant by the Wellcome Trust to write another article on Medical advertising, trust and locality in late Georgian England.
Teaching and Learning
I am committed to innovation in teaching, as well as being interested in theoretical work on teaching and learning. Along with Mark Roseman and Monica McLean, I completed a HEFCE funded project on history teaching at universities aimed at improving student communication and groupwork skills. Our findings are outlined in an article which describes 'best practice' when incorporating 'historical skills' into mainstream history teaching. 'Skills and the structure of the history curriculum', appears in The Handbook of University History Teaching, ed. Alan Booth and Paul Hyland (Manchester University Press, 2000). More recently, I was funded jointly by the University of Manchester and the History, Classics and Archaeology Subject Centre of the Learning and Teaching Support Network to undertake a project on 'Progression and undergraduate history teaching' with Dr Monica McLean of Oxford University. The findings of this project were published as 'Students making progress and the "research-teaching nexus" debate', Teaching in Higher Education (2004). In 2006 I was awarded a grant along with my colleagues, Max Jones and Lawrence Brown from the University of Manchester's Strategic E-learning Development Fund to produce e-learning materials for History courses which develop both transferable skills and subject-specific competences amongst undergraduate students in new and imaginative ways by creating interactive interfaces that link WebCT's assessment tools to on-line sources of historical evidence and academic scholarship.
At a national level, I was involved in the History 2000 project, funded by HEFCE. History 2000 aimed from its inception in 1996 until the project ended this year. History 2000 aimed to improve the standard of history teaching in British universities. As a member of the History 2000 network, I attended, organised and ran seminars as part of the process of disseminating best practice. Following my involvement with History 2000, I have joined another national network on teaching and learning and I am now a member of the History Advisory Panel for the Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology. The centre provides a comprehensive framework for the support and development of learning and teaching amongst archaeologists, classicists and historians. It provides practical information to, and support for, university teachers and encourages the sharing and development of teaching practices and innovations. The Advisory Panel acts to guide and monitor the work of the Subject Centre, which is one of 24 subject centres that form the new Teaching Support Network, an initiative funded by HEFCE. I was also involved in the ' Skills plus' project, funded by DfEE, which was a collaborative project between universities in the north-west aimed at improving student learning and employability.
Teaching
My current teaching includes:
HIST 20872 The History of Women in Britain , 1780-1980 (level II); HIST 30832 Gender in English Society, 1750-1850 (level III); HIST 60242 English Provincial Towns, 1700-1840. Details of all these courses can be found on the school web pages.
I have also supervised PhD students working on cotton workers in Bolton and Oldham in the twentieth century, comic periodicals of the nineteenth century and forgery and the paper pound in the late C18th/early C19th. I am currently supervising students working on the Royal Manchester Botanical Gardens, popular politics in Manchester in the C18th and C19th, and on popular politics and visual culture in early nineteenth-century northern towns (an AHRC collaborative studentship, held jointly with the People's History Museum).
I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students in the fields of gender, work and print culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and in local history projects in this period, as well as from prospective MA students interested in the British History MA and aspects of North-West history.