ODNB Advisory Board
The general editor of the Oxford DNB is supported by an advisory board, formed to ensure that the dictionary has access to a broad range of high-level academic expertise and experience across all areas. The advisory board provides valuable input into future editorial strategy and content planning. In addition, individual members provide advice on articles, content, and new developments in their respective areas of expertise. Meet the board.
Hakim Adi
Hakim Adi is an award-winning historian and the first historian of African heritage to become a professor of history in Britain. He was instrumental in the founding of the History Matters initiative in 2014 and is also the founder and consultant historian of the Young Historians Project. He has appeared in many documentary films, on TV and on radio, and has written widely on the history of Africa and the African diaspora, including three history books for children. His publications have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. His latest publication, Africa and Caribbean People in Britain: A History (2023), was shortlisted for the Wolfson history prize in 2023. In 2024, he was awarded the African Studies Association (UK) ‘Outstanding Africanist’ award.
Tim Barringer
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. He has published widely on the art of Britain and its empire, on American landscape painting and on art and music. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1998, revised 2012) Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005) and John Constable (forthcoming 2025). He has co-edited six collections of essays and co-curated international loan exhibitions including American Sublime, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde and Victorian Radicals. His writings on art and music have appeared in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960, The Edwardian Sense, and Vaughan Williams in Context.
David Clark
David Clark is the managing director of the academic division at Oxford University Press. Before joining OUP in 2018, he was the senior vice-president for health and medical sciences at Elsevier which he joined in 1996 as publisher for social and behavioural sciences and where, in subsequent roles, he led three divisions as the publisher of physical sciences, life science, and social science. Before joining Elsevier, he worked at the Treasury and the publisher Edward Elgar.
David Edgerton
David Edgerton FBA is Hans Rausing professor of the history of science and technology and professor of modern British history at King’s College London. After teaching at the University of Manchester, he became the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College London in 1993, where he became a professor in 1998. He joined King’s in 2002. He was a Leverhulme Trust major research fellow in 2006-09 and gave the 2009 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar prize lecture at the Royal Society. His books include Warfare State: Britain 1920–1970 (2005) and The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (2006).
Marianne Elliott
Marianne Elliott FBA is emeritus professor at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool. She was director of the institute from 1997 to 2014 and held the first Blair chair of Irish studies, from 2007 to 2014. Previously, she was Andrew Geddes and John Rankin professor of modern history. She co-wrote the 1993 report of the independent Opsahl Commission on Northern Ireland, 'A Citizens' Inquiry'. She was appointed OBE for services to Irish studies and the peace process in 2000 and received the Irish presidential distinguished service award in 2017. Among many acclaimed books, perhaps her best known is the biography, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (1991).
Kate Flint
Kate Flint is provost professor of art history and English at the University of Southern California. Previously, she taught at Bristol and Oxford universities before moving to Rutgers (New Brunswick), in 2001 and the University of Southern California in 2011. Her areas of specialisation include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural, visual, and literary history in England and the United States; the history of photography; transatlantic studies; and environmental history and criticism. Her books include The Victorians and The Visual Imagination (2000) and The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (1993), both of which were awarded the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay prize.
Howard Hotson
Howard Hotson is professor of early modern intellectual history at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Before joining St Anne’s in 2005 he held research fellowships at various institutes and universities in Germany, the US, and the UK, and taught at the University of Aberdeen. His research initially focused on the gradually expanding reform movements of central Europe during the post-Reformation period. More recently he has been drawn to the application of digital technology to teaching and research. He directs the collaborative research project, ‘Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters, 1550–1750’, which has created Early Modern Letters Online; and is one of the architects of the Cabinet project in Oxford, which is developing digital infrastructure for teaching with objects and images.
Alvin Jackson
Alvin Jackson FBA FRSE HonMRIA is Sir Richard Lodge professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, where he has served as head of the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, and dean of research and deputy head of the College of Humanities and Social Science. His research examines modern Irish, Scottish, and British history, particularly the political relationship between Ireland and Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written eight books—among them United Kingdoms: Multinational Union States in Europe and Beyond, 1800–1925 (2023) and The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707–2007 (2012). He has also edited the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (2014). In addition, he has written more than fifty articles and essays on different historical themes.
H. Kumarasingham
H. Kumarasingham is reader in politics and history at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests cover the modern history and politics of the United Kingdom, the late British empire, and the Commonwealth. Before joining Edinburgh he held positions at the universities of Cambridge, London, Sydney, and Munich. His publications include A Political Legacy of the British Empire: Power and the Parliamentary System in Postcolonial India and Sri Lanka (2013) and Viceregalism: The Crown as Head of State in Political Crises in the Postwar Commonwealth (2020), and he co-edited The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom (2 vols, 2023). He served until 2022 as co-editor of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Malcolm Longair
Malcolm Longair FRS is Jacksonian professor emeritus of natural philosophy at the University of Cambridge, former director of development at the Cavendish Laboratory, and emeritus professorial fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Since 2016 he has also been editor-in-chief of the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. He was the astronomer royal for Scotland, director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, and regius professor of astronomy at the University of Edinburgh from 1980 to 1990, before returning to Cambridge (where he had previously studied and taught). He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1997 to 2005. He was made a CBE in 2000. His publications include Theoretical Concepts in Physics (1984, third edition, 2020); The Cosmic Century: A History of Astrophysics and Cosmology (2006); Galaxy Formation (1998, third edition, 2023); High Energy Astrophysics (1980, third edition, 2011); and Quantum Concepts in Physics (2013).
Hilary Marland
Hilary Marland is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the social history of medicine and health and practices of medicine in modern Britain, including her most recent research on the mental health of prisoners and postnatal mental illness in twentieth-century Britain. She is the author, with Catherine Cox, of Disorder Contained: Mental Breakdown and the Modern Prison in England and Ireland, 1840-1900, Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874–1920 (2013) and Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (2004), and editor of The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (1993) and, with Catherine Cox, Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World (2013).
Rhiannon Mathias
Rhiannon Mathias is honorary research fellow and director of the International Conferences on Women's Work in Music at Bangor University. Her research examines twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, women and music, musical analysis, and Welsh music and opera. The second edition of her book, Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens, was published in 2016. She was the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music (2022) and serves as the editor-in-chief of the Cambridge University Press ‘Elements’ series on Women in Music (2020-25). An Edison fellow at the British Library, she is also a trustee of the Canolfan Gerdd William Mathias in Caernarfon and is the Canolfan’s flute tutor.
Kathryn Murphy
Kathryn Murphy is associate professor and fellow and tutor in English literature at Oriel College, Oxford. Her doctoral thesis was on Aristotle and seventeenth-century literature, and she spent three years as a junior research fellow at Jesus College, College, Oxford, before moving to Oriel in 2010. She has written for both scholarly and popular audiences on such topics as literature and philosophy in the seventeenth century; the genre of the essay, from Montaigne to the present; letters and alphabets, written, printed, engraved, baked, stitched, heard, and imagined; the production of images as ways of thinking or representing knowledge; and the relationship between poetic form, rhetorical figure, and theological and philosophical ideas.
Susheila Nasta
Susheila Nasta is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary literatures at Queen Mary University of London and professor of modern literature at the Open University. A writer, critic, and literary activist, in 1984 she founded Wasafiri, Britain’s first magazine to platform literary voices from Britain’s Black British, South Asian, and diasporic communities, which she led until 2019. In 1991 she produced the first critical anthology of Black women’s writing in Britain, Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Her 2002 monograph, Home Truths, was the first book to map a tradition of South Asian fiction in Britain. Recent works include The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (2019) and Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now, a collection of essays by creative writers on writing and politics (2019). She was made an MBE in 2011 and in 2019 received the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson medal and became Honorary Fellow of the English Association.
Photo credit to Sharren Wallace
Lucy Peltz
Lucy Peltz is joint head of curatorial at the National Portrait Gallery, and since 2001 has been senior curator of eighteenth-century collections at the gallery. She has curated several exhibitions and contributed to their accompanying books, including Love Stories: Art, Passion & Tragedy (2021–2023), Simon Schama’s Face of Britain (2015–2016), Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance (2009–2010), and Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings (2008). She is a specialist in eighteenth-century British portraiture and writes on print culture and collecting in the period. Her monograph, Facing the Text: Portraiture, Print Culture, and Society, 1769–1840, was published in 2017.
Huw Pryce
Huw Pryce is emeritus professor of Welsh history at Bangor University, having joined the staff in 1981 and become professor in 2005. He is also an honorary professor at Cardiff University, the co-editor of Welsh History Review, and one of the editors of the series ‘Studies in Celtic History’ (for Boydell) and ‘Rethinking the History of Wales’ (for University of Wales Press). He has published extensively on the history of medieval Wales, including an edition of the documents issued by native Welsh rulers between 1120 and 1283, and on Welsh historiography, the subject of his most recent book, Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (2022).
Alexandra Walsham
Alexandra Walsham FBA is professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She has published extensively on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and Ireland, and her books include Providence in Early Modern England (1999), Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (2006), The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (2011), and Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations (2023). She edited Past and Present for a decade, serves on the academic publishing committee of Cambridge University Press, and is currently president of the Historical Association (2023–2026).
John Watts
John Watts is professor of later medieval history at Oxford and a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Before joining Corpus he lectured at the University of Aberystwyth, having previously been a junior research fellow at Merton College, Oxford. His research examines the nature and workings of power in the later middle ages, looking particularly at what might be called political structures—institutions, practices, ideas, and languages—and their influence on individuals and groups. He is the author and editor of several books and edited collections, including The Making of Polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (2009), Government and Political Life in England and France, c.1300–c.1500, with Chris Fletcher and Jean-Philippe Genet (2015), and Renaissance College? Corpus Christi College, Oxford in Context, c.1450–1650 (2019). His latest book, The Wars of the Roses: a Medieval Civil War, will be out in 2025.
William Whyte
William Whyte is professor of social and architectural history at Oxford and a fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. His books include Oxford Jackson: architecture, education, status, and style, 1835–1924 (2006), Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities (2015), and Unlocking the Church: The Lost Secrets of Victorian Sacred Space (2017). A trustee of English Heritage, he chairs the London Blue Plaques panel and is a member of the Westminster Abbey Fabric Commission. He is also chair of the Oxford Preservation Trust, the Oxford Historical Society, and the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire.
