Josh Allen (Research Development Officer): Buzz Goodbody (1946-1977), radical theatre director (primarily at the Royal Shakespeare Company), and had revolutionised the staging of early modern drama (and loads more) by her mid-20s.
Dr Laura Beers (Senior Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow): Ellen Wilkinson (1891-1947), Labour Party politician and former Minister of Education. You can learn more about Ellen Wilkinson in Dr Beers book ‘Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson, Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist‘.
Dr Jakub Beneš (Lecturer in Modern European History, 1800-1950): Marie Majerová (1882-1967), working class author, socialist activist, and Czech nationalist.
Prof Leslie Brubaker (Professor of Byzantine Art): Nettie Stevens (1861-1912), geneticist who discovered that sex is determined by X&Y chromosomes. Her findings were publicly dismissed by Thomas Morgan shortly before her death. Morgan later published Nettie’s findings but did not acknowledge her role in its discovery.
Dr Courtney Campbell (Lecturer in Latin American History): Sojourner Truth, who escaped slavery with an infant, sued for the freedom of her son (and won), and became a vocal abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Also Olga Benário Prestes, a Jewish German woman who came to Brazil as Luis Carlos Prester’s bodyguard, helped organise the largest Communist uprising in the country, was caught, deported pregnant to Germany, gave birth in prison, and perished in an extermination camp. Other women I admire include Professor Ana Lúcia Arújo (Howard University), Professor Jane Landers of Vanderbilt University, Professor Solange Rocha of the Universidade Federal da Paraíba, and Dr Mona Hanna-Attashi, who revealed lead poisoning in Flint.
Kate Campbell (School Academic Administration and Quality Assurance Support): Helen Keller (1880-1968), the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts. She was an advocate for people with disabilities, and an inspiration to the deaf community. She helped found the American Civil Liberties Union and was a suffragette, pacifist, radical socialist and birth control supporter.
Dr Rachel Canty (School Operations Manager): Julian of Norwich (1342-c.1416), authoress and spiritual visionary. Probably the first woman to write a book in English which has survived.
Dr Nathan Cardon (Lecturer in United States History): anonymous woman. It’s hard to imagine today, but riding a bicycle was once a revolutionary act for women. The bicycle was one tool first wave feminists used to assert their newly won independence in public space. However, in Jim Crow Atlanta public space was highly regulated and monitored by whites who often violently policed an increasingly stringent colour-line. This anonymous woman, then, was doubly brave; not only did she transgress the gender barriers of the late-19th century, she was crossing the colour-line and in doing so demonstrated the strength, determination, and humanity of African American women across the South and the nation. On International Women’s Day 2018, I choose to celebrate the anonymous women who took small but significant stands against patriarchy.
Dr Michell Chresfield (Lecturer in United States History): Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960). Celebrated primarily for her creative literary endeavours and vibrant personality as one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s work as an anthropologist tends to be overshadowed by her work as a novelist, journalist and playwright. The first African American to chronicle African American folklore and voodoo, Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard in the 1920s, where she was the only black student, and the only one known to have graduated from this institution (in 1928). Hurston’s contribution to anthropology was not merely in her superior ability to provide vivid imagery of Black culture, but also in her pioneering efforts toward theorising the African diaspora and her methodological innovations.
Dr Lorenzo Costaguta (Teaching Fellow in US History): Florence Kelley (1859-1932), social and political reformer, first President of the National Consumer League, support of women’s, African Americans’ and children’s rights.
Dr Tom Cutterham (Lecturer in United States History): Angelica Schuyler Church (1756-1814). Angelica Schuyler was depicted in an 1852 painting by Emmanuel Leutz helping her mother burn the family wheatfields in upstate New York before the arrival of the approaching British forces in 1777. That same year, Angelica married John Church, a London-born merchant, and began a series of trans-Atlantic adventures that took her from the edge of Britain’s empire, to the heart of the 18th century’s Age of Revolutions.
Dr Elaine Fulton (Reader in History Teaching and Head of Department of History): Ellen Fulton (1938-2017). Ellen sat no exams herself and was rightly sceptical of too much book-learnin’. But she loved to learn about the past, to learn about people, and to tell as story: the perfect historian and forever an inspiration.
Dr David Gange (Senior Lecturer in History): Annie MacSween, founder of Comunn Eachdraidh Nis: the first archive and historical society in the movement for community histories that now has over 50 centres throughout Gaelic-speaking regions.
Dr Tara Hamling (Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History): Mary Hornby and Mary Baker, entrepreneurs and pioneers of the heritage industry in ‘Shakespeare’s Stratford’. These were two ‘ordinary women’ in 19th century Stratford-upon-Avon who happened to live in old houses associated with William Shakespeare.
Prof Karen Harvey (Professor of Cultural History): Mary Toft, ‘the Impostress Rabbit-breeder of 1726’. Mary was a labouring woman whose rabbit-birth hoax triggered a transformation in reproductive knowledge. Read more about her in Prof Harvey’s article for Past and Present, available here.
Dr Simon Jackson (Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History): Eva Habib, Arab American, factory worker, immigrant.
Sarah Kenny (Teaching Fellow in Modern British History): The ‘Women of Steel’, who were recently commemorated with the unveiling of a statue in Sheffield, marking their service and work during the First and Second World Wars.
Tamzin Knox (School Academic Administration and Quality Assurance Manager): Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000). As well as being a Hollywood film star, Hedy Lamarr was a self-taught inventor. During World War II she, along with her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, created a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. In 2014 she was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Her work with spread spectrum technology led to the development of GPS, bluetooth and WiFi.
Prof Sabine Lee (Professor in Modern History): Maryam Mirzakhani (1977-2017), the first woman (and to date only woman ever) to win a Field Medal. For the ‘uninitiated’, the Fields Medal, established in 1936, is often described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. She was not only the first woman to have been awarded this prestigious prize, she was also the first Iranian to receive it. In that sense she was a trailblazer on several levels. The prize is awarded not only for past achievements but also as a recognition of potential and future promise. In Maryam’s case, the future promise was cut short, as, tragically, she died in 2017 at the age of only 40.
Dr Christopher Markiewicz (Lecturer in Ottoman History): Huda al-Sha’rawi (1879-1947), a leader of the Egyptian independence movement (1919) and founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union. Also Jahanara Begum (1614-1681), Mughal princess, advisor to emperors, Sufi writer, and charitable patron.
Dr Mo Moulton (Lecturer in the History of Race and Empire): Dorothy Thompson (1923-2011), Historian of class, gender, and radical activism, she worked in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham in 1968.
Dr Jennifer Palmer (Student Experience Officer): Harriet Boyd Hawes (1871-1945), archaeologist. She was the first woman to direct a major field project in Greece and the first person to excavate an Early Bronze Age Minoan town site (Gournia) (when she had first asked to take part in fieldwork she was encouraged to be a librarian instead). She was also the first woman to deliver a lecture at the Archaeological Institute of America. In addition, she tended to wounded soldiers in 3 different conflicts, including World War I.
Dr Adrian Powney (Welfare Tutor): Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729), a prodigious composer and performer who refused to bow to social norms and sacrifice her career.
Dr James Pugh (Lecturer in Modern History): Ann Shulgin (1931-), author, researcher, psychedelic therapist. ‘You contain a universe inside yourself. There’s no end to it – your conscious, your subconscious. There is no limit to what’s inside you. We are very much connected. There’s no end to it.’
Prof Gavin Schaffer (Professor of British History): Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946), a life-long campaigner for women’s rights, who is remembered with varying degrees of affection by historians of suffrage. But she was also Britain’s leading campaigner for refugee rights during the Second World War, working tirelessly, without much support from anyone, to persuade the British government to allow the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazism.
Dr Margaret Small (Lecturer in Europe and the Wider World): Eva Germaine Rimington Taylor (1879-1966), distinguished geographer and the first woman to occupy a chair of geography in the UK. Read her obituary here.
Dr Kate Sykes (Lecturer in Anglo-Saxon History): Eileen Power (1889-1941), economic and social historian. Most of her work focused on medieval Europe, but she also edited and translated a wide range of documents covering trade and exploration in the early modern period. She was an ardent socialist, internationalist, and a member of the Academic Freedom Committee which helped academics to flee Nazi Germany. She was also famously stylish: her biographer records that whenever she had an article accepted for publication, she would travel to Paris to buy a new hat.
Samantha Taylor (History Taught Programmes Admin Team): Murasaki Shikibu (978-1016), Japanese novelist, poet, and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court during the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji and The Diary of Lady Murasaki, a volume of poetry. Heian women were traditionally excluded from learning Chinese, the written language of government, but Murasaki showed a precocious aptitude for the Chinese classics and managed to acquire fluency. Within a decade of her completion of The Tale of Genji (written in Japanese), it was distributed throughout the provinces; within a century it was recognised as a classic of Japanese literature, and was translated into English in 1933. Scholars continue to recognise the importance of her work, which reflects Heian court society at its peak.
Dr Zoë Thomas (Lecturer in the History of 19th Century Britain and the Wider World): Gwen John (1876-1939), Welsh painter.
Dr Daniel Whittingham (Lecturer in the History of Warfare and Conflict): Sabiha Gokcen (1913-2001), Turkish Aviator and first woman to be a combat pilot.
Dr Jonathan Willis (Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History): Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Although I work primarily on cultural and religious history, and not on high politics, it’s not possible to work on the English reformation without having to pay serious attention to Elizabeth I, seen below in the ‘Armada Portrait’ of 1588. Her Settlement of 1559 – and, contrary to what previous generations of historians thought, it seems very much to have been her settlement – created the essential framework for the Protestant Church in England for decades (indeed centuries) to come. At times stubborn, at times indecisive, she presided over a country wracked by religious division and beset by hostile international forces. Despite this, she was the consummate survivor, and cultivated an image of almost cosmic proportions. She continues to captivate the public imagination, and to draw people to more serious and critical historical enquiry of the 16th century.
Dr Simon Yarrow (Senior Lecturer in Medieval History): Raewyn Connell (1944-), sociologist of gender and southern theory. Connell was born Robert William Connell on 3 January 1944. She is a culturally and historically minded sociologist who produced pioneering work on the study of masculinities, working with boys’ groups in urban Australia, and coining the phrase ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Her work on gender and more recently on the theory of the Global South, has established her as a leading intellectual working in the New Left tradition.
You can see pictures of all the women on Flickr.