Staff profiles
Dr Nicola Verdon
BA, MA, PhD
Phone 0114 225 3693
E-mail n.verdon@shu.ac.uk
Current work
I am a British historian, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research centres on the social and economic history of the countryside and I have published widely on employment patterns, female and child labour, farm and rural households.
Currently I am working on a history of the farmworker in England from 1850 to the present day, which will be published by Palgrave. I am secretary of the British Agricultural History Society and sit on the Board of the Museum of English Rural Life, Reading.
Key publications
Books
Rural women workers in nineteenth-century England: gender, work and wages (Boydell: Woodbridge, 2002)
Refereed journals and book chapters
'The modern countrywoman': Farm women, domesticity and social change in interwar Britain', History Workshop Journal, 70, Autumn 2010, pp. 86-107
With Alun Howkins, 'The state and the farm worker: the evolution of the minimum wage in agriculture in England and Wales, 1909-24', Agricultural History Review, 57, II (2009) pp. 257-74
'Agricultural labour and the contested nature of women's work in interwar England and Wales', Historical Journal 52, 1 (March 2009), pp. 109-30
With Alun Howkins, 'Adaptable and sustainable? Male farm service and the agricultural labour force in midland and southern England, c.1850- 1925', Economic History Review 61, 2 (May 2008), pp. 467-95
'Hay, hops and harvest: women's employment in agriculture in nineteenth-century Sussex', in ed., Goose, N., Women's work in industrial England, c.1700-1900: regional and local perspectives (Hertford, 2007), pp. 76-96
'Women's productive roles in nineteenth-century rural England: field, farm and family', Proceedings of the Colloque Franco-Britannique du Mans (Le Rennes, 2005).
'…subjects deserving of the highest praise: farmers' wives and the farm economy in England, c.1700-1850', Agricultural History Review, 51, 1 (2003), pp. 23-39 (Golden Jubilee Prize Essay, proxime accessit)
'The rural labour market in the early nineteenth century: women's and children's employment, family income, and the 1834 Poor Law Report', Economic History Review, LV, 2 (2002), pp. 299-323
'The employment of women and children in agriculture: a reassessment of agricultural gangs in nineteenth-century Norfolk', Agricultural History Review, 49, 1 (2001), pp. 41-55
Impact
Guest curator, 'Land Ladies: Women and Farming in England, 1900-1950', Museum of English Rural Life (Jan-April 2011)
Historical consultant, 'The Land Girls: Cinderellas of the Soil', Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, (Oct 2009-March 2010)
Historical consultant, 'War Horse', New London Theatre (seminars for new cast members in 2010 and 2011)
Media work: Radio (Open Country, Radio 4, 2009); TV (Mud, Sweat and Tractors: The Story of Agriculture, BBC4, 2009; The Victorian Farm, BBC2, 2009)
