Dr Siân Pooley

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