MEMBERS

Dr Edward Madigan

Director

Edward is Senior Lecturer in Public History at Royal Holloway. His research combines cultural and military history and he’s particularly interested in the British and Irish experience and memory of the First World War and post-war paramilitary violence. He sits on the editorial board of the 1914-1918 Online Encyclopaedia and the executive committee of the International Society for First World War Studies.

Edward has always been fascinated by the sometimes-surprising ways in which communities and individuals have responded to the experience of war in the twentieth century. His first book, Faith Under Fire (2011), attempted to shed light on the elusive question of the religious faith of soldiers in wartime by exploring the fortunes of the Anglican army chaplains who served on the Western Front during the First World War. He has since written on a range of themes relating to the First World War and the Irish Revolution and co-edited three volumes of essays on the British, Irish and wider European experience and memory of war between 1914 and 1923.

Throughout his career as a historian, he’s also been lucky enough to have plenty of opportunities to engage with the public beyond the academy. As a historian of war and revolution, he has appeared on British, Irish and American television and worked with numerous public-facing heritage institutions. He also co-edits the Historians for History website, which has become a storehouse for commentary on public history in the 21st century.

Dr Amy Tooth Murphy

Deputy Director

Amy is Senior Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway. Her research interests include queer oral history theory and method, butch/femme identities and culture, post-war lesbian history and literature, and queer temporalities. Her current British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project, ‘Historicising Butch: Narrating Butch Lesbian Identity, 1950-Present’, is an examination of butch lived experience in the UK and US via oral history interviews.  Amy is a Trustee of the Oral History Society, a co-founder and member of the OHS’s LGBTQ Special Interest Group, and a co-founder and editor of the peer-reviewed blog, Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality. She is co-editor of a special issue of Oral History on LGBTQ lives and identities (2020), and two edited collections: New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Desire (2022), and Queering Desire: Lesbians, Gender, and Subjectivity (forthcoming, 2024).

Amy’s research interests in queer history and oral history directly inform her undergraduate and postgraduate teaching; she is very much involved in the delivery of the MA in Public History at Royal Holloway, on which she convenes innovative modules on oral history and on broadcasting public history.

Tom Furber

PhD Researcher

Tom’s first forays into public history were as a London tour guide back in 2006. He has worked at the Jewish Museum, Valence House Museum and, since 2016, at the London Archives (LA). He works on a broad portfolio of activities and projects across LA’s formal education, informal adult education and community strands of work.  

Some of the projects that he has particularly enjoyed include: supporting the research of theatre groups, and organising conferences exploring the history of learning disability; working with depositors, volunteers, project partners and researchers to deliver LGBTQ+ history events through Out Loud: London Metropolitan LGBTQ+ Archives; and being  part of the learning team for Layers of London: a HLF-funded project that brought together a collection of digitised historic maps, photos and crowd-sourced histories.

In Autumn 2023, Tom began working toward a PhD at Royal Holloway. His doctoral project explores the ways in which practices of sharing authority, co-curation and co-production can create a more inclusive engagement practice that serves the needs of communities engaged in history-making that are and have been underrepresented in formal archive collections. His supervisors for this project are Matthew Smith (RHUL), Aimee Taylor (LA Engagement and Learning Manager) and Emma Markiewicz (LA Director).  

Professor Hannah Greig

 

Hannah is Honorary Professor of Public History at Royal Holloway and a public historian with a particular interest in gender, material culture and the cultural histories of politics and state craft. She formerly worked at the University of York, where she was Reader in Early-Modern History, and at the University of Oxford. Her first book, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and she has published widely on the history of 17th and 18th century England. Prof. Greig also has fifteen years of experience as a historical consultant for film and television; her credits include Poldark, The Duchess, Bridgerton, Sanditon, and the academy-award winning The Favourite. She also co-creator and co-host of the popular History Film Club podcast with Alex von Tunzelmann.

Hannah’s additional broadcast experience includes TV and radio documentaries; live interviews; EPK and other behind-the-scenes content for films and streaming platforms.

She is a cheerful keynote speaker and panellist and has spoken at numerous different venues, including The Hay Festival, The London Book Fair and film festivals.

Ian Lacey

PhD Researcher

Ian is a doctoral researcher at Royal Holloway. His project is entitled ‘Europe by train, 1972–1996: The experiences of young Interrailers from the UK’ and is supervised by Amy Tooth Murphy and Edward Madigan.

By conducting a series of approximately forty oral history interviews, Ian will create an archive of audio recordings and transcripts. He will then draw on these to examine and shed light on the experiences of travellers from across the nations and regions of the UK who took an Interrail trip during the first twenty five years of the scheme. He has partnered with the Museum of Youth Culture, and once the doctoral research is complete, the Museum has agreed to accept the recordings and transcripts into their archive and curate an exhibition.

The idea for this Interrail research arose from the assignments for the oral history module on the MA in Public History at Royal Holloway. Ian discovered that, despite an estimated half a million UK backpackers taking an Interrail trip between 1972 and 1996, little has been written about this extraordinary cultural phenomenon. He graduated from the MA programme with a distinction in 2021.

Prior to returning to academia, Ian worked in the heritage tourism sector for fifteen years, including two years with the National Trust and ten years as Marketing Manager at the Houses of Parliament, promoting tours and visits at Westminster.

Dr Matthew Smith

 

Matthew is a Senior Lecturer in Public Humanities and Director of External Engagement for the School of Humanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. Matthew began his public history career as the Curator of Egham Museum, securing funding to launch a series of projects which explored topics including Magna Carta, the impact of modern wars on Egham, and the internationally significant Bronze Age history of Runnymede. 

Matthew then returned to Royal Holloway, where he had completed his PhD, to devise and launch Royal Holloway's £1m Citizens: 800 years in the making project. This public and schools engagement project explored the history of rights and representation from Magna Carta to the suffragettes and beyond. Its partners included the UK Parliament, People's History Museum, The National Archives and 15 museums across the South East. 

More recently Matthew has secured funding for the £1.5m Inclusive Histories project, working with teachers, the AQA exam board and seven museum and archive partners to collaboratively research and co-produce educational resources for schools that support the more inclusive teaching of AQA's Power and the People GCSE specification. 

Amy Swainston

PhD Researcher

Amy is a doctoral student at Royal Holloway. Supported by the National Archives and UK Parliamentary Archives, her project is working towards the 2028 centenary of the landmark Equal Franchise Act, which gave all women the vote. It combines archival research on the efforts of the wide range of women involved in campaigning for equal suffrage with the design, delivery, and evaluation of a public programme of commemorative activity. The completed programme will include a collaboratively produced online exhibition, blogs, podcasts, and an events series.

After completing her MA in Public History at Royal Holloway in 2019, Amy was awarded the Public History prize and began working as Elmbridge Museum’s Exhibitions & Interpretation Officer. In this role, she manages a varied programme of outreach projects which engage audiences with local history and collections. These include collaborative exhibitions with schools and community groups, oral history projects, online exhibitions, talks and reminiscence workshops. Most prominently, Amy helped to develop the Museum’s new website in 2021. She also played a leading role in the redevelopment of the Surrey Diggers Trail, collaborating with the Citizens 800 Project to produce a new trail site and overseeing the creation and installation of a suite of outdoor interpretation boards.

Amy is a keen writer and public speaker and is passionate about bridging the gap between academia and public audiences by making fresh historical research accessible to all.