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Staff Profile

Dr Laura Tisdall

NU Academic Track Fellow (NUAcT)

Background

I am a historian of childhood, adolescence and chronological age in twentieth- and twenty-first century Britain and the United States. 

I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2015. I then taught first at the University of Oxford and then at Durham University before commencing a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in May 2018 at Queen Mary University of London. I started at Newcastle as a NUAcT Fellow in January 2020.

Research

I am a historian of twentieth- and twenty-first century Britain and the United States, and am particularly interested in age, education, self-narratives and oral history, memory and selfhood, and gender and sexuality.


My first research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, focused largely on primary and secondary education in England and Wales between c.1918 and c.1979, exploring how concepts of childhood changed within schools in this period, and how this shaped teachers' relationships with their students. This resulted in my monograph, A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester University Press, 2020). I have also worked on 'extraordinary' children in British science fiction and horror in the 1950s and 1960s, and on children in care in inter-war England.


My postdoctoral research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. I am currently writing a book based on this research, provisionally entitled We Have Come To Be Destroyed: Growing Up In Cold War Britain, which is under contract with Yale University Press London (c.2026). This book offers one of the first histories of modern adulthood through the eyes of children and young people, thinking about how chronological age shaped ideas about citizenship, democracy and the welfare state, and who should hold power in society. It argues that, in Britain, we are still grappling with new ideas about childhood, adolescence and adulthood that emerged in the mid 1950s. By foregrounding sources that were directly written or spoken by young people under 21, We Have Come To Be Destroyed rewrites familiar histories of Cold War Britain, challenging big historical narratives like ‘the permissive shift’ and the rise of neoliberalism. I am also co-editing a book (with Dr Maria Cannon), Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z, which is forthcoming with the RHS’s New Historical Perspectives series (November 2024). 


During the remainder of my NUAcT Fellowship, I am researching the histories of chronically and terminally ill children in both Britain and the US since 1945, focusing on case studies of children with muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. This project will consider both children's own experiences, and how they were conceptualised and treated by the medical profession. Ultimately, it will explore how terminally ill children formed a kind of 'test case' for adult concepts of childhood. Modern childhood was often understood as future-oriented, valuable only as a staging-point on the route to adulthood. But what happened when children had no adult future to look forward to?


In 2012-13, I received an AHRC student-led Collaborative Skills Development Grant for my project, Talking History, to collaborate with Rambling Heart theatre company delivering oral history and storytelling training to graduate students and early career researchers in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In May and June 2017, I received funding from Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund to run follow-up workshops with children and adolescents in Bath. In the future, I intend to continue public engagement work with young people, and frequently speak at local schools and youth groups.


At Newcastle, I co-convene the Life Cycles, Bodies, Health and Disease research strand, and run the HCA Academic Writing Group. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2020.


My website is https://drlauratisdall.wordpress.com and I am on Twitter as @TisdallLaura.

Teaching

I convene the third-year BA Special Subject HIS3346 The Rising Generation: Youth, Age and Protest in Cold War Britain.


I also contribute to the first-year modules HIS1100 Evidence and Argument, HIS1101 Sources and Methods and HIS1105 What Is History For?, the second-year BA Connected Histories module HIS2322 Diversities of Sexuality and Gender in History, and the MA History module SHS8127 The Patient in History.


I supervise BA and MA dissertations and have supervised or am supervising the following PhDs:


Heather Mann (2016-20): 'A Global Holocaust Education? The Battle Between Global and National Memory in British and French Education from 1980 to the Present Day', external co-supervisor at the University of Oxford.


Louis Bonnett (2020-): ‘The Natural Habitat of Youth? The Relationship Between Childhoods and the Environment in North-East England, 1985-2010’, external second supervisor at Northumbria University.


Lucy Walsh (2021-): ‘The Treatment and Experience of Children with Cancer in Britain since c. 1945’, NUAcT-funded, lead supervisor.


Jianhao Xu (2023-): 'Shaping Feelings: Emotional History and Left-Wing Children's Fiction in the Anti-Japanese War', second supervisor.


I was awarded Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in January 2017.

Publications