Dr Jane Hamlett
ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Jane.Hamlett@manchester.ac.uk
Alexander Building, S2.19
Research:
My research interests lie in the field of modern British social and cultural history. I am currently turning my doctoral research into a book, 'Material Relations: domestic interiors and the middle-class family in England, 1850-1910,' which will be published by Manchester University Press in 2009. The book examines the relationship between domestic material culture and the construction of gendered identities in the middle-class home in England from 1850 to 1910. Social historians suggest that as the nineteenth century waned, domestic space became increasingly segregated and private. My research challenges this interpretation, arguing that the home was structured to produce
a complex variety of social relations between family members and servants. Rather than reinforcing the use of class as the dominant social category of analysis, this project demonstrates the full range of meanings that could be attached to domestic objects including class, gender, age, and religion. I am also developing a new research project, provisionally titled 'Framing Intimacy: the origins and development of the family photograph in Britain and the USA, 1880-1980.'
Publications (in print):
J. Hamlett, '"Nicely Feminine, yet learned": student rooms at Royal Holloway and the Oxbridge Colleges in late nineteenth-century Britain', Women's History Review (March 2006),15, 1, pp.137-161.
J. Hamlett, 'Displaying educated womanhood: cultural identity in staff and student rooms at Royal Holloway College for women in the late nineteenth century,' Quaderni Storici (December 2006), 3, pp.583-608.
J. Hamlett, 'Managing the Home: domestic advice manuals', in AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, J. Aynsley and C. Grant eds., The Imagined Interior: Representations of the Domestic Interior Since the Renaissance (London, 2006), pp.184-185.
Forty five entries on the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior database. See http://www.rca.ac.uk/csdi/didb/
Publications (forthcoming):
J. Hamlett, Material Relations: domestic interiors and the family in England, 1850-1910 (Manchester University Press, 2009).
J. Hamlett, '"Tiresome trips downstairs": middle-class domestic space and family relationships in England, 1850-1910,' submitted to 'The Politics of Domestic Authority' conference proceedings, edited by L. Delap, B. Griffin and A. Wills.
J. Hamlett, A. Alexander, A. Bailey and G. Shaw, 'Reconstructing the British Retail Landscape in the 1950s and 1960s and the contemporary supermarket regulation debate: an oral history perspective,' History and Policy.