People

Professor Steven King 

Professor Steven King (Principal Investigator) has worked extensively on questions of power, agency and practice under the Old Poor Law. In particular he has been concerned with our understandings of and explanations for spatial variation in the intent of the poor law. In this project he moves on, with the rest of the team, to look at the question of how poor people understood and navigated the New Poor Law system to which they were notionally subject. A book of poetry inspired by this accumulated work – On the Poor – is published in April 2018.

Dr Paul Carter

Dr Paul Carter (Co-Investigator) is employed at The National Archives as a principal records specialist and works across the modern domestic collections. He has worked extensively on the records created under the New Poor Law, particularly those created or collected by the central poor law authorities. He has also worked at the universities of Leicester, Northampton and Nottingham, researching or teaching within themes across modern social British history.

Natalie Carter

Natalie Carter (Research Associate) has previously worked at The National Archives at Kew, and for the British Association for Local History. Her work has focused on records of the New Poor Law, particularly those held by the central poor law authorities in record series MH 12 from which this project draws its key source material. She has previously worked on two large scale archival projects overseeing the cataloguing and digitisation of a large number of MH 12 records from across England and Wales.

Dr Peter Jones

Dr Peter Jones (Research Associate) has worked extensively on Old Poor Law pauper letters, as well as other demotic sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has previously been a research associate at the Universities of Southampton, Durham and Birmingham, and was Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University between 2008 and 2011.