REWP Staff Profile

Helen is Head of the Department of History at the University of Exeter. She is a prizewinning Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has published widely on the history of Britain and its global interconnections in trade and communications in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the origins of popular print culture and the development of the mass media.

Her recent project, Orphans of Empire: the Fate of London’s Foundlings (Oxford University Press, 2019), analyses the social impact of one of the largest philanthropic ventures of premodern times, the London Foundling Hospital, which took in 18,000 orphaned and abandoned infants, providing an unprecedented experiment in welfare provision on a national scale funded by charitable donation.