Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR)

Profile

My research interests lie in the two areas: the history of safety and accidents, and the history of mobility.

In the first of these areas, I focus on safety education – the use of the media to try to persuade people to change their behaviour – introduced into Britain just before the First World War. I am interested in the methods that were used (including innovative and highly visual techniques such as posters, films, booklets and messages printed on cigarette cards and the like) and the messages contained within safety education (often discussing personal responsibility for accident prevention). I am also interested in how people have experienced accidents.

In the second area, I explore how people have experienced mobility in the past, looking at nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, and particularly on the impact of railway travel.

Qualifications

• PhD Railway Studies (Department of History, University of York, 2007)
• MA Railway Studies (Department of History, University of York, 2003)
• BA (Hons) History (University of Exeter, 2000)

Research Clusters

• Social and Cultural History

Discipline Areas

• History

Research CV

Current Research Projects

I am currently completing my AHRC Early Career Fellowship, which contributes to my larger research interests. These explore how safety has been culturally and socially constructed. I interrogate the meanings of ‘safety’ through the lens of safety education, which used a diverse range of media such as posters, booklets, cigarette cards, board games, medals, films, and more, to try to persuade people to change their behaviour and act safely. This work includes a large range of academic, professional and public engagement activities and outputs.

I am also preparing a monograph for publication, provisionally entitled The Birth of Modern Safety. Preventing Worker Accidents on Britain’s Railways, 1871-1948.

Journal Articles

• ‘Taxing design? Design and readers in British tax forms before 1914’, Design Issues, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2011), 84-97.
• ‘Nineteenth-Century Timetables and the History of Reading’, Book History, Vol. 12 (2009), 156-85.
• ‘Designing Time: The Design and Use of Nineteenth-Century Transport Timetables’, Journal of Design History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2009), 91-113.
• ‘Organizing Work: Company Magazines and the Discipline of Safety’, Management and Organizational History, Vol. 3, No. 3-4 (August/ November 2008), 217-37.
• ‘Administration, Technology & Workplace Safety in the early Twentieth Century’, Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte (Yearbook of European Administrative History), Vol. 20 (2008), 95-117.

Book Chapters

• ‘Designing and gathering information: perspectives on nineteenth-century forms’ in T. Weller (ed.), Information History in the Modern World (Palgrave, 2010), 57-88. Co-authored with P. Dobraszczyk and P. Stiff.
•  ‘Mapping the Way? Maps, Gender, Emotion’, in G. Letherby & G. Reynolds (eds.), Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions (Ashgate, 2009), 33-44.

Other Publications (selected)

•  forthcoming Review of V. Long, The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factor. The Politics of Industrial Health in Britain, 1914-60, Social History of Medicine.
• forthcoming Review of C. Mills, Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914, Business History Review.
• ‘“No Good Reason for the Government to Interfere”: Business, the State and Railway Employee Safety in Britain, c.1900-39’, Business and Economic History Online, Vol. 4 (2006).
• ‘Reinvention, Renewal or Repetition? The Great Western Railway and Occupational Safety on Britain’s Railways, c.1900-c.1920’, Business and Economic History Online, Vol. 3 (2005).
• Review of M. Aldrich, Death Rode the Rails. American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828-1965, Journal of Transport History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (March 2007), 151-52.
• ‘Making History’, Safety Express (September/October 2011). Written for the occupational safety publication of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents.
• ‘Safety first! Preventing Accidents in Twentieth-Century Britain’, BBC History Magazine (August 2011).
• ‘When did Safety become “Safety First”?’, Safety Management (February 2011). An introduction to the history of safety education for members of the British Safety Council.

Grants Received

• Economic History Society, Initiatives & Conferences Fund (£2,000). 2011.
• AHRC, Early Career Fellowship (£60,780). 2010.
• Economic History Society, Initiatives & Conference Fund (£1,000). 2009.