Contributors

Elizabeth Craig-Atkins (e.craig-atkins@sheffield.ac.uk) is Senior Lecturer in Human Osteology at the University of Sheffield where her research investigates human skeletal remains from Christian burial grounds in England to consider questions concerning health, lifestyle and identity. Recent projects have focused on the archaeology of children and childhood and on the funerary manipulation and management of human remains during the medieval period. She has published papers in the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past's monograph series and the American Journal of Biological Anthropology on the motivations behind differential funerary treatment of perinates and infants in early medieval cemeteries, integrating funerary and skeletal data with isotopic analysis of diet and physiological status.

Anna M. Davies-Barrett (a.daviesbarrett@leicester.ac.uk) is an osteoarchaeologist with a specialism in respiratory disease and its relationship to environmental, social and economic changes in the past. She is currently the research associate in palaeopathology on the Tobacco, Health and History project, investigating changes in the prevalence of disease in relation to the introduction of tobacco to Europe. Previously, she worked as a lecturer in human osteoarchaeology and later prehistory at Cardiff University and as a bioarchaeologist at the British Museum. Publications of her research into past prevalence rates of respiratory disease and the impact of aridification and increasing urbanism can be found in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and the International Journal of Paleopathology.

Jocelyn Davis is an archaeologist working for Avon Archaeology Ltd and has an MA in Osteoarchaeology from the University of Southampton and an MA in History from the University of Bristol.

Heidi Dawson-Hobbis (heidi.dawson-hobbis@winchester.ac.uk) is a Senior Lecturer in Biological Anthropology at the University of Winchester and an honorary research associate at the University of Bristol. Her PhD research focused on the associations between health and burial status of medieval children which formed the basis for her book entitled Unearthing Medieval Children: Health Status and Burial Practice in Southern England (BAR Publishing British Series 593, 2014).

Mary E. Fissell (mfissell@jhu.edu) is Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also co-edits the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Her scholarly work explores how ordinary people in early modern England understood health, healing and the natural world. Vernacular Bodies (Oxford University Press, 2004) explored how everyday ideas about making babies mediated large-scale social, political and religious change. Her current work continues to examine vernacular knowledge – ideas about the natural world that ordinary people used, made, shaped and practised. She connects the histories of gender, the body and sexuality with those of popular culture and cheap print in the Atlantic world in a project about an extraordinary medical book called Aristotle’s Masterpiece. First published in 1684, it was still for sale in sleazy London sex shops in the 1930s, having somehow retained its currency for over two centuries.

Robert Hartle has twenty years’ experience in commercial archaeology, including sixteen years with Museum of London Archaeology, where he worked till 2023. He is a historical archaeologist, whose research interests include early modern burial practices, co-author of numerous articles and author of the book The New Churchyard: From Moorfields Marsh to Bethlem Burial Ground, Brokers Row and Liverpool Street (Museum of London Archaeology, 2017).

Karen Harvey (k.l.harvey@bham.ac.uk) is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on the history of gender, masculinity, sexuality, the home and material culture. Her books include Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004), The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) and the edited collection History and Material Culture, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2018). The Imposteress Rabbit-Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Sarah A. Inskip (s.inskip@leicester.ac.uk) is a bioarchaeologist with a specialism in the interdisciplinary analysis of human skeletal remains. At present she is a UKRI/AHRC funded Future Leaders Fellow and is PI of the Tobacco, Health and History Project at the University of Leicester. The aim of this project is to assess how the arrival and commodification of Tobacco in Western Europe had an impact on health and disease patterns from the sixteenth to nineteenth century, and how this relates to modern-day health trends. Previously, she was a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge on the After the Plague Project, and was a lecturer in Bioarchaeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Matthew McCormack (matthew.mccormack@northampton.ac.uk) is Professor of History at the University of Northampton. He works on masculinity, politics and war in eighteenth-century Britain. His publications include The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester University Press, 2005), Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688–1928 (Routledge, 2019). His current research is on men's footwear, on which he published ‘Boots, material culture and Georgian masculinities’ (Social History 42(4) (2017)).

Sophie L. Newman (sophie.newman@ed.ac.uk) is a Teaching Fellow in Human Osteoarchaeology in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Durham University in 2016, and has previously worked for York Osteoarchaeology Ltd, the University of Sheffield and the University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research interests include the bioarchaeology of children, eighteenth/nineteenth-century health, vitamin D deficiency and the impact of social inequality on health. Her more recent research has focused on the biological and social impact of the ageing process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has co-authored peer-reviewed journal articles in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology and Bioarchaeology International, and has contributed to edited volumes Beauchesne and Agarwal Children and Childhood in Bioarchaeology (University Press of Florida, 2018) and Kendall and Kendall The Family in Past Perspective (Taylor and Francis, 2021).

David M. Turner (d.m.turner@swansea.ac.uk) is Professor of History at Swansea University. He has published widely in the field of disability history, including the books Social Histories of Disability and Deformity (edited with Kevin Stagg; Routledge, 2006) and Disability in Eighteenth-Century England (Routledge, 2012), which won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication prize. His recent work, supported by Wellcome Trust funding, has focused on disability in the British coal industry. His latest book, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment and British Coalmining, written with Daniel Blackie, was published by Manchester University Press in 2018.