Staff profiles
Dr Alison Twells
MA, PhD, Principal lecturer in history
Phone 0114 225 3587
E-mail a.twells@shu.ac.uk
Research interests/current work
- Most of my research to date has focused on the British missionary movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My work places domestic and overseas missions within the same frame, to explore: the role of missionary philanthropy in the development of middle class provincial culture; the role of women in the movement; the relationship between religion and empire; and changing ideas about race, ethnicity and cultural difference.
- Recently, I have been looking at the importance of religious belonging to women in the nineteenth century, and particularly the significance of movement across denominational boundaries. I am currently researching the faith journeys of two women: the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer, who travelled to America in 1849-1851 in search of women's rights and religious freedom; and her English translator, Mary Howitt, a popular English poet, who made a very different faith journey from her Quaker childhood, to involvement with the Unitarians in the 1840s, and Spiritualism in the 1850s and 1860s, and finally joined the Roman Catholic Church.
- Due to serendipity, I am currently researching women's life stories in C20th Britain. At the end of last year, I inherited seventy years of pocket diaries from my great aunt, Norah Hodgkinson (1925-2009). As well as being utterly delightful, the diaries raise many questions: about women's lives in the C20th; how to 'read' the pocket diary (as opposed to the literary journal); and the interface between family, public and academic histories.
Collaborations
I have been involved in collaborative projects with the Development Education Centre in Sheffield; and with Sheffield Museums and Libraries at the time of the 2007 bicentenary celebration of the slave trade.
I am a member of the editorial board for Women's History Review.
I am a member of the History Subject Centre Advisory Panel, and am currently collaborating with Dr June Balshaw (University of Greenwich) on a project looking at the incorporation of public history placements and work based learning into the undergraduate curriculum.
Research outputs since 2006
Books
The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class: the heathen at home and overseas 1792-1857 (Palgrave, 2009)
British Women's History, 1780-1914: A Documentary History (IB Tauris, 2007)
Articles in referred journals
'Missionary Domesticity, Global Reform and 'Women's Sphere' in early Nineteenth-Century England', Gender and History, 18:2' (2006), 266-284
'An Africa of Religious Life: Fredrika Bremer's American Faith Journey, 1849-1851' (currently under consideration)
'Mary Howitt and the topography of religious belief nineteenth Britain' (currently under consideration)
Chapters in edited collections:
'We ought to obey God rather than Man': Women, Anti-slavery and Nonconformist Religious Cultures, 1800-1840', in Elizabeth Clapp (ed.), Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010)
'Missionary Fathers and Wayward Sons in the South Pacific, 1796-1827', in Helen Rogers and Trev Broughton (eds), Fatherhood in Britain 1780-1914 (Palgrave, 2006)
Schools' History resources: Olaudah Equiano Visits Sheffield (Development Education Centre South Yorkshire, 2007), a resource for Key Stage 2 (with Rob Unwin).
