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Hello everyone, I'm Hannah West and I'm a Senior Research Fellow in the new Centre of Excellence for Equity in the Uniformed Public Services as well as working in the Centre for Military Women's Research. I'm looking forward to welcoming you at our symposium.

My interdisciplinary research explores the relationship between women's military history and contemporary military cultures/behaviours. My doctoral research looked at women as counterinsurgents and combatants during the Malaya Emergency, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and Afghanistan.

Being a former Navy Air Engineer it has been quite a transition to critical military research and creative methods have helped me to navigate the realisation of what I couldn't see when I was serving. I'm on the Editorial Board for the Journal of War, the Council of the Army Records Society and Co-Chair the Defence Research Network.

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Shane Ewen, Professor of History, Leeds Beckett University

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I am a historian of the Fire and Rescue Service, having written two book length histories of the service and of fire safety. My most recent book is Before Grenfell: Fire, Safety and Deregulation in Twentieth Century Britain, published by London University Press: https://uolpress.co.uk/book/before-grenfell/

I have worked with several external stakeholders to raise the profile of history in decision making and fire safety education/commemoration, including the Fire Brigades Union, the National Fire Chiefs Council, West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

I am currently working on a public engagement project with Space2 (a social arts charity) and the Leeds Fire Heritage Group on the history of women in the Fire and Rescue Service. This project, which is funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, is intended to diversify the histories and stories of firefighting and rescue work beyond the traditionally male players. The project utilises archival research, oral interviews and story mapping as a tool for diversifying these histories. We have worked with heritage volunteers and my students on several story maps. For further information see https://space2.org.uk/trailblazers/

I also have interests in the history of the blue light services and of interoperability more generally. I have co-written an article on the topic of gender and time in civilian ambulance services with Rebecca Wynter: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071022.2024.2281151

I am also co-editor of the journal Urban History.

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Hi all,

I'm Juliette and I'm a Professor of War Studies at King's College London. I'm a socio-cultural historian with particular interests in gender and personal testimonies. I've published on women and men in and out of uniform in the two world wars: secret agents, civilian men and female and male service personnel as well as on humour, national identity, cultural memory, masculinity, incarceration and partisan warfare.

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Bethany Rebisz, Lecturer in Colonial and Decolonial Histories, University of Bristol

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I'm a historian of modern Africa, with a regional focus on Kenya. I’m particularly interested in gender and women's history, African oral histories, histories of humanitarianism, counter-insurgency warfare, colonial violence, decolonial praxis, and digital heritage.

My forthcoming book Women’s Lives Behind the Wire: Forced Resettlement and Kenya’s Mau Mau Emergency, 1954-1960 (MUP) follows the lives of Gĩkũyũ women who lived through forced relocation, dispelling institutional myths of the interplay between colonial violence and humanitarian endeavours. Drawing together oral testimony with archival research, it offers a unique examination of the social entanglements of resettled women, humanitarian fieldworkers, and colonial state actors. It reveals that coercive state developmentalism and the reconfiguration of gendered social structures were central to colonial counterinsurgency campaigns.

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Hi everyone. I’m a third year War Studies PhD Candidate with the Freeman Air and Space Institute (at King’s College London) and the Royal Air Force Museum. My research analyses the influence of women on the development of aviation in the interwar years, examining the intersection between gender and class across a range of case studies.

My work on aviation has seen me previously guest edit an ‘air power and culture’ edition of the RAF Historical Society’s journal, and I’m currently on a PhD placement with Kingston Museum to research and reinterpret their aviation collection.

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I’m Julie, an honorary research fellow in the school of historical studies at Birkbeck and a scholar of literary journalism/narrative nonfiction writing. I have published several books on women in conflict, most recently Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey, 2020), and a journal article on contested histories of female agents working for the German intelligence services created by post-war British spy writing which appears in The Journal of Intelligence and National Security and on a Writers in Intelligence blogpost. I am interested in how historians can collaborate with external stakeholders to produce creative content that is both engaging and accurate. My public engagement on these topics has included producing and contributing to radio and television documentaries, acting as a historical consultant to museums on exhibitions about female intelligence agents, and working as a consultant with screenwriters and playwrights.

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Hi everyone! I’m Grace Huxford, Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Bristol. I’m a social and oral historian of war and conflict, specializing in Cold War history. My research aims to highlight under-explored voices in modern conflict, especially women and children, and to explore the complex interfaces between military and civilian worlds. I’m author of The Korean War in Britain (2018) and various articles on the Cold War, veterans’ history, oral history and most recently the history of military boredom. At the workshop I’ll give a brief reflection on women’s service in the British military during the Cold War period and the specific methodological challenges in studying women’s military experiences in a war that was never fought. See my staff profile for more info and my publications. Looking forward to meeting in January and hearing about everyone’s research.

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Hi Everyone,

I am the curator of the Metropolitan Police Museum. In 2019 I curated an exhibition to mark 100 years since the first women joined the Met police. The exhibition included uniform, equipment, archive and photographs that told the story of women in the Met. The challenges they faced and the progress made.

In addition to my curatorial role I also give talks on the history of women in the Met and facilitate researchers using our archive to further research history of Women in the Met.

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I am a Departmental Lecturer in Lifelong Learning (History) at the University of Oxford, and have recently worked at the University of Strathclyde on the 'Border Crossings: Charity and Voluntarism in Britain’s mixed economy of health care since 1948' project, funded by Wellcome. I've had a variety of other roles in academia, including Senior Lecturer in Global History at the University of Hull. Between 2018 and 2022, I was the Chair of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, and I still remain a member of the Executive Committee.

For this event, my interest is in the uniforms which were worn by volunteers for the British Red Cross and St John Ambulance.

I'm currently writing The History of the British Red Cross, 1870-2020: Health and Humanitarianism, under contract with Bloomsbury, and I have published various chapters and articles on the history of infectious disease, health care, and humanitarianism. Of relevance for this conference, I've published: Stefan Ramsden and Rosemary Cresswell, ‘First Aid and Voluntarism in England, 1945-1985’, Twentieth Century British History, 30:4 (2019): 504-30, open access.

My first book, Rosemary Wall, Bacteria in Britain, 1880-1939 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), investigated the use of bacteriology in hospitals, workplaces and local communities. I have been the Principal Investigator for research grants including: 'Crossing Boundaries: The History of First Aid in Britain and France, 1909-1989', supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with Co-Investigator Barry Doyle (2016-2021); 'Oxfam and the History of War, Health and Humanitarianism', funded by Wellcome (2019-21); ‘War, Humanitarianism and the British Red Cross’, University of Oxford Bodleian Libraries Sassoon Visiting Fellowship (2017).

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I am a Senior Historian at the National Army Museum in London, where I also act as Narrative Lead for gallery interpretation.

The NAM is the regimental museum for the Women’s Royal Army Corps (WRAC) and holds its archive; we also recently took on the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) archive, though this is not yet accessible to external researchers.

As part of my role researching our collections for interesting stories that might support our exhibition programme and storytelling content, I came across some links between retired polar explorers and the design of women’s cold weather gear during the Second World War - that’s what my talk will be about for this event. I’m also working on a wider, trade history of this subject.

My academic background is in the cultural and literary history of war, with a PhD on Napoleonic veterans’ memoirs from the European University Institute in Florence in 2018. This became my first book, Dead Men Telling Tales (OUP, 2021). I held several research and teaching postdocs in Europe and the UK before moving into the heritage sector in 2022, but I continue to try and write and publish when I can, and recently co-edited two books: Napoleonic Objects and their Afterlives (Bloomsbury, 2025), with Nicole Cochrane, and Enemy Encounters in Modern Warfare (Palgrave, 2024), with Holly Furneaux. I have also been a Fellow of the Institute for Historical Research for the past few years.