Long Eighteenth Century GroupDr Sasha Handley
PhD, MA, BA
Senior Lecturer in History
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Contact details: School of Arts & Social Sciences Northumbria University Lipman Building, room 327 Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST phone: +44 (0) 191 227 3463 fax: +44 (0) 191 227 3696 sasha.handley@northumbria.ac.uk |
Biography
Before joining Northumbria in 2009, Sasha joined the University of Manchester as a Teaching Fellow in Early Modern European History in 2006 before going on to secure a three-year Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester from 2007. Prior to this, Sasha completed her PhD ‘Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’ at the University of Warwick in 2005. In 2004-5 she held a Scouloudi Fellowship from the Institute of Historical Research and this followed the award of a Doctoral Fellowship from the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick in 2004.
Qualifications
PhD History, University of Warwick, 2005
MA Early Modern Religious and Social History, University of Warwick, 2001
BA (Hons) European History, University of Warwick, 1998
Teaching Interests
Sasha teaches on a wide range of survey and specialist modules in medieval and early modern European history stretching from 1200-1800. She has taught historical skills modules at the universities of Nottingham and Manchester and has developed new modules in line with her research interests in cultural history, death and the supernatural world in early modern Europe, and the history of everyday life.
Research Interests
Sasha's research focuses on the social and cultural history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain. Her first monograph Visions of an Unseen World (Pickering & Chatto, 2007) traced the circulation and significance of ghost beliefs and ghost stories in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English culture. By examining shifting attitudes towards ghosts and the preternatural world in the context of religious and social change, the work sheds new light upon attitudes towards the sacred and the nature of lived religion. This work also contributes to ongoing attempts to redraw the historical boundaries between religion and superstition in Enlightenment Britain.
Sasha's current research comprises a cultural history of sleep in Britain c.1660-1800, for which she was awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship in 2011. The shifting cultural meanings that shaped this daily activity are traced through its social practice and material context in a wide variety of personal testimonies, household inventories, medical and philosophical treatises and conduct books. The project explores the impact of important transformations in medical and psychological conceptions of sleep in Enlightenment Britain, alongside the changing religious context of sleep. In August 2011 Sasha conducted a series of guided tours at the National Trust’s Ham House in Richmond, Surrey. The tours, entitled ‘Forty Winks: Sleeping Habits through the Ages’, introduced visitors to the beds, bedchambers and sleeping habits of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale and their household in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Awards and Fellowships link for further information).
In 2011 Sasha reached the final stages of the inaugural New Generation Thinkers Competition launched by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find the next generation of public intellectuals. Please click here for details. She was shortlisted as one of 57 finalists from over 1100 applications and attended a day-long BBC-led workshop that introduced academic participants to programme-making.
Sasha is also developing a collaborative research project with Dr Joanne Bailey (Oxford Brookes) and Dr Angela McShane (Victoria & Albert Museum) relating to Beds and the Domestic Landscape of early modern England.
Sasha's current book project is entitled Bedroom Stories in Early Modern England.
Research Students
Sasha has supervised a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations at the universities of Warwick, Manchester and Northumbria covering religious, social and cultural themes in early modern history. She welcomes enquiries from students wishing to pursue postgraduate work in these areas. In addition, Sasha is the Programme Leader for Northumbria’s exciting MRes degree. Her postgraduate teaching explores the interactions between History and Literature, and she also offers postgraduate training in historical skills, methodologies and critical theory. Current and recent postgraduate projects supervised include:
- Maria Cannon (PhD): ‘Parenting and Family Relationships: changing roles of the family in England c.1450-1600’
- Louisa Atkinson (MRes): ‘Reforming the Whore in early modern London, 1690-1738’
- Catherine Doherty (MRes): ‘Hidden from History: the marginalisation of male witches in early modern England’
Affiliations and Memberships
Fellow, Royal Historical Society
Executive Committee, Social History Society; in 2010 Sasha became a convenor of the ‘Life-cycles and Life-styles’ strand at the Social History Society’s annual conference
Summer seminarian, Making Publics: media, markets & association in early modern Europe 1500-1700
Awards and Fellowships
2011: AHRC Early Career Fellowship, University of Northumbria
2009: Research Fellowship, McGill University, Canada
2007-9: Simon Research Fellowship, University of Manchester
2004-5: Scouloudi Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research
Publications
Books:
Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007).
Chapters and Articles:
‘From the sacral to the moral: sleeping practices, household worship and confessional cultures in late seventeenth-century England’, Cultural and Social History (forthcoming 2012)
‘Sleepwalking, Subjectivity and the Nervous Body in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies (forthcoming 2011)
‘Apparitions and Anglicanism in 1750s Warwickshire’, in P. Clarke & A.M. Claydon (eds) The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, Studies in Church History, Volume 45 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009).
‘Ghosts, Gossip and Gender in Early Modern Canterbury’, in S. Blazan (ed.) Ghosts, stories, histories: ghost stories and alternative histories (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
‘Reclaiming Ghosts in 1690s England’ in J. Gregory and K. Cooper (eds) Signs, wonders, miracles: representations of divine power in the life of the Church, Studies in Church History, Volume 41 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005).
Sasha has reviewed books and manuscripts for the Seventeenth Century Journal, History Workshop Journal, Cultural & Social History (Journal of the Social History Society), and the Journal of the Printing Historical Society.
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