Emma Turnbull

Knowledge Exchange Fellow

emma.turnbull@history.ox.ac.uk

I am a Knowledge Exchange Fellow, a D.Phil candidate in History at Balliol College, and a Retained Lecturer in History at Jesus College.

My doctoral research focuses on anti-popery, foreign policy and print culture in early Stuart England and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

During my D.Phil I collaborated with The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) on a Story Intervention project at Ham House (2015-16), providing Ham with an innovative, research-driven interpretation of a key portrait in its collection – a John Hoskins miniature of Catherine Murray (c. 1638).

I am now investigating women’s experiences of political and religious agency during periods of conflict, with a particular focus of the English Civil War of the 1640s and 1650s.

See page on TORCH Website

Anti-popery and anti-Catholicism
Women’s experiences of the British Civil Wars
News, print and political agency

My research has been chiefly on the political, religious and intellectual history of England in the first half of the seventeenth century. I am currently finishing a D.Phil on anti-popery in early Stuart England. It explores the relationship between anti-papal ideas and the tensions surrounding Stuart foreign policy, especially relations with Europe’s major Catholic powers. My work seeks to highlight how the binary constructs of anti-papal thought were actually being put to complex, malleable and even irenical political uses in this period.

I am also embarking on a new knowledge exchange project, ‘Women and War: Female Activism during the English Civil War’, in partnership with The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) and The National Trust. The project seeks to innovate the ways that the Trust communicates the powerful stories of women’s activism at a few key Civil War and seventeenth-century properties. I will be applying my knowledge of seventeenth-century religious and political tensions, as well as Civil War historiography, to National Trust collections in order to enrich the historical content offered to visitors as well as provide new public audiences for my research.

http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/women-and-war

I am actively involved in projects that are seeking to engage new public audiences with historical research.

My Knowledge Exchange Fellowship project, entitled ‘Women and War: Female Activism during the English Civil War’, aims to transform public understanding of women’s experiences of civil war conflict through powerful historical storytelling.

http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/women-and-war

I am also a contributor to The AngloFiles, an online magazine run by The Royal Oak Foundation. I have blogged about the fascinating seventeenth-century politics that can be uncovered at Ham House. This piece emerged from a knowledge exchange project that I was part of between Ham House and Oxford researchers in 2015-16.

http://www.royal-oak.org/2016/10/14/portraits-petitions-and-property-seventeenth-century-politics-at-ham-house/