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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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). 

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.