BOOKS
MY BABY BOX
Current - Synopsis
A portrait of Queen Victoria’s baby. Statistics on the fertility of educated women. Tokens left at the Foundling Hospital. Sunken headstones in a suburban cemetery. Tiny 4,000 year-old beads. A hippo amulet. The bones of a newly born child…
These are some of the things in My Baby Box, a memoir about my double loss. The loss after a diagnosis of infertility and the loss after the death of my unexpected baby.
It is also about my double love. The love found through adopting a child and then having a second baby who lived. It is about trying to become a mother through fertility treatment, approval from committees, getting to full-term pregnancy and giving birth safely, as well as what I have learnt about the historical context of what I went through. It is my account of trying to become a mother in early twenty-first century Britain and how I came to understand what happened to me through the things belonging to those who had been there before me, whether in Victorian Wigan or Ancient Egypt.
ARCHAEOLOGY OF RACE. THE EUGENIC IDEAS OF FRANCIS GALTON AND FLINDERS PETRIE
2013
Is archaeology founded on prejudice? It explores the application of racial theory to interpret the past in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. It investigates how material culture from ancient Egypt and Greece was used to validate the construction of racial hierarchies. Specifically focusing on Francis Galton's ideas around inheritance and race, it explores how the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie applied these in his work in Egypt and in his political beliefs.
Archaeology of Race draws on archives and objects from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the Galton collection at UCL. These collections are used to explore anti-Semitism, skull collecting, New Race theory and physiognomy. These collections give insight into the relationship between Galton and Petrie and place their ideas in historical context.
Download the Introduction here.
FROM THE HARPY TOMB TO THE WONDERS OF EPHESUS: BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 1840-1880
2008
From the Harpy Tomb explores the fascinating stories behind the collection of antiquities from the Ottoman Empire between 1840 and 1880. The men who led these collecting expeditions published journals detailing their adventures as well as their archaeological labours, and this did much to feed Victorian interest in archaeology and the Orient.
It was not easy to remove the often monumental, heavy, yet precious and fragile antiquities from the excavations in Lycia, Halicarnassus, Carthage, Cyrene and Ephesus where they were found, the task requiring all the technical innovation and brilliance of the period, as well as diplomatic and military support. The book concentrates on the invention of the modern idea of the adventuring archaeologist, the personal stories of the archaeologists, their feelings about the antiquities they discovered and the lands in which they discovered them.
Download the Introduction here.