Dr Siân Pooley

Tutor in Modern British History

Magdalen College

01865 (6)10345

sian.pooley@magd.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests

Social and subjective experience in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain
Children, childhood and the life course
Relationships between individuals, families and social policies

My research explores the social and cultural history of nineteeth- and twentieth-century Britain. I am especially interested in family, intimacy and fertility; childhood, youth and education; and community, citizenship and social policy in modern Britain.

My research is centred on the question of how social change and continuity happened in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. I study the past through the experiences and social relationships that mattered to children, men and women, and my research focuses currently on two main areas.

My doctoral research, and the publications that emerged from this, explore questions of social change and diversity through a study of parenthood during the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fertility decline, when couples halved the size of their families. This interest in how men and women were altered by the experience of forming relationships with their children grew into working collaboratively on a co-edited forthcoming book on the the intergenerational transmission of parenthood.

My second research area examines children's lives and subjectivities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, especially as revealed by texts that were created by people when young. I am currently writing on the letters, drawings, poems and stories composed by children and published by the popular press in the seventy years before the Second World War. I also work on a collaborative research project on how experiences of adversity in childhood shaped the lives of people who grew up in twentieth-century Britain.

For further details of my collaborative research project on Childhood Adversity and Lifetime Resilience, see: torch.ox.ac.uk/childhood

See page on Magdalen College website

Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War

Sian Pooley,‘“Leagues of Love” and “Column Comrades”: Children’s Responses to War in late-Victorian and Edwardian England’, in L. Paul, R.R. Johnston, and E. Short (eds), Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War (London: Routledge, 2016),

Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years.

I would like to hear from potential DPhil students or any potential Masters students looking at Nineteenth and twentieth century British social and cultural history

I currently teach:

Prelims	FHS	Masters
History of the British Isles VI: 1815-1924	History of the British Isles VI: 1815-1924	MSt in British and European History post-1500: Theories and Methods
History of the British Isles VII: From 1900	History of the British Isles VII: From 1900
Approaches to History	Special Subject: Becoming a citizen, 1860-1902
Optional Subject: The New Women in Britain and Ireland, c. 1880-1920	Disciplines in History

Dr Siân Pooley

Featured Publication

Sian Pooley,‘“Leagues of Love” and “Column Comrades”: Children’s Responses to War in late-Victorian and Edwardian England’, in L. Paul, R.R. Johnston, and E. Short (eds), Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War (London: Routledge, 2016),

Current DPhil Students

Teaching

Publications